Rwanda police continues to shine as tour vans remain contentious

I have had the luxury of enjoying a ride in those tour vans that tourists use as they experience the famed African Safari. These cars are usually modified 4x4s of the Land Rover of Toyota Land Cruiser make. The modification is done by motor vehicle fabrication companies in Nairobi, Arusha or Dar es Salaam and costs an arm and a leg. The last tour van I sat in had four power sockets, retractable roof and even a refrigerator to keep our drinks cold! It had more seats, ample leg room and made driving on rough roads feel like a video game experience. This car had Rwandan registration plates and the driver assured me how he often takes tourists to visit game parks in Uganda. For Kenya and Tanzania this situation is more complicated. Kenya and Tanzania are the biggest tourism destinations in East Africa but they also continue to have a bitter rivalry that those outside find hard to understand. In simple terms the location of Kenya’s main airport, Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) and Tanzania’s main tourism belt (Serengeti, Kilimanjaro, Ngorongoro) are to blame for all the bickering. To access Tanzania’s main tourism belt, most travellers from the west prefer to use JKIA thanks to the many flight options it offers as an aviation hub. The tourists then just take a tour van ride across the border and voila! However this has remained contentious even after an agreement was signed between the two countries in 1985. The agreement barred Kenyan registered vans from accessing Tanzania’s game parks and Tanzania’s game parks were also not to be accessed by Tanzanian registered tour vans. The agreement was not explicitly clear on airports and so Tanzanian vans would pick tourists from JKIA while it made no sense for Kenyan vans to drive all the way to Dar es Salaam airport to pick tourists headed to Kenya and after all who would seriously fly into Dar and not JKIA if they were to visit the Tsavo or Masaai Mara? To cut the long story short, the Kenyans have now chased away the Tanzanian registered vans from their airport. A three week suspension of the ban elapsed when the Tanzanians failed to organise a meeting to resolve the dispute. It is not also easy to ignore the fact that Kenya’s tourism receipts have been hard hit by the insecurity in the country and at the coast in particular. So while East Africa continues to dream of marketing itself as a single and diverse tourism belt, Kenya and Tanzania will continue to fight for the big piece of meat while others enjoy their rice on this tourism plate. Interestingly the wildebeests will still ignore the colonial borders the same way the mountain gorillas are not interested in knowing the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Still with cars, Rwanda National Police recently acquired a special kind of car for its operations. Unlike the tour vans that I enjoy travelling in, let me state clearly that I have no desire whatsoever to hitch a ride in these new police cars at all. The new cars are the custom built police pickup trucks now used to transport suspects. In the past, suspects would be pushed below the back seats of the police pickup trucks for an odious and demeaning ride to the police station. The new trucks however have two sections one for men the other for women and offers suspects a more dignified ride. I have heard some people jokingly say they would love to ride in the ‘frigo’ as some already refer to the car to cure their curiosity. The suspects’ vehicle has not caught my eye as much as the constant reports of the Rwandan police performing exceptionally even though it is what we expect from them. I am know gradually getting used to seeing on my Twitter feed, tweets about how Rwanda Police handed over money that was stolen in Uganda to its owners after the thieves were tracked and nabbed in Rwanda. Even car thieves in the region are learning that driving the car to Rwanda is a bad idea. I don’t want to go into names but in the region we know they countries where when you say you were robbed and you are going to report to the police, your colleagues think you are launching a stand-up comedy career. May the men and women in blue keep up the good work.

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Rwanda police continues to shine as tour vans remain contentious