Poster's note:  The following article is printed with permission by the author.  It was
originally featured in Travel News Kenya - April 2011 edition.




Travel News Kenya
By:  Steve Shelley


Inside Edge April 2011


Regular readers will know that if there’s one thing that bugs me - and it surely does - it’s when employees charged with bringing in business do their level best to repel potential customers. I’ve got a prime contender for you this month, which I’m offering up for the title of World’s Worst Service Provider.

When you cross the border from Kenya to Tanzania, even with all the running to and fro between customs and immigration on both sides, it barely takes 20 minutes. So why should it take the best part of an hour to get into one of Kenya’s National Parks? KWS is my nomination for abomination. Here’s what happened to us recently. You’ve probably experienced something similar yourself.

Hearing that there was a new tented camp inside Nairobi National Park, we decided to hold a different kind of client seminar there. Our message to corporate managers was that improved performance demanded doing things differently and we wanted the venue to underpin the story. But we didn’t want our fifty or so guests queuing up at the gate while KWS askaris scrutinised their passports for residence irregularities. I mean, what kind of message would that add to our corporate promotion?

If KWS wanted to attract corporate groups, we reasoned, then just like any other service provider they should be prepared to negotiate terms and conditions. We would give them a list of guests, they should give us a cost. But we forgot that KWS is, to all intents and purposes, a state-run para-military organisation. Everyone is in uniform, many carry guns and nearly everyone’s job title includes the word ‘warden’.

The first hurdle is that to get into any park - as a fee paying customer - you have to fork out a thousand bob for their new entry card, the old ‘smart’ cards having been abandoned. Now, how many companies do you know that charge you to be a customer even before you become one, if you get my meaning! And that was just for our preliminary inspection visit to the camp. Once issued, against not just a payment but copies of your passport, you then have to undergo further grilling by the gate guards whose high tech ticketing machines fail to put a welcoming smile on their suspicious visages. Gosh, even the Tanzanian customs are more welcoming than the KWS gate militia!

Each person we spoke to, begged actually, assured us that our group would be whisked through on the day. But whisking isn’t part of the KWS mind set which is rather more geared to a visual profiling of smugglers and other villains. The problem is, no-one thought to talk to anyone else, so at every turn, we had to invoke the original ‘warden’, extract him from his office and go through the whole story again. It took an hour to get through that gate.

And of course the same thing happened ‘on the day’. What a surprise!

I can honestly say that the Nairobi Tented Camp provided a wonderful venue for our lunch and presentations. Without their staff, we would certainly never have got our people in. But was there ever a whisper of support or thanks from KWS? You gotta be joking!

In any case, what kind of organisation in this day an age can get away with such overtly racist marketing? It costs a foreigner $40 to get into Nairobi Park, and a whopping $75 for a day in Nakuru to see the imported South African rhinos. Kenyan citizens are charged three hundred bob. That’s a massive 90% discount! Or, to put it the other way round, foreigners suffer a penalty of 1,000%! This is nothing less than extortion. And it’s all based on passport. Naturally such disparities offer an incentive to cheat and that’s what the smart card rigmarole is designed to thwart. But let’s not forget that it was KWS’s own staff that were the cheats against whom the original system was aimed.

At least they could be more welcoming to the people they seek to fleece!


STEVE SHELLEY = Tack Africa - Steve is a strategy and business development expert with more than 25 years mainstream management experience. He has worked on assignment for corporate clients across many sectors. Steve is a former director of PWC, author of the book 'Doing Business in Africa' and MD of TACKAfrica which provides consultancy and HR development services throughout East Africa.