Khamis Kagesheki who is Tanzania’s current tourism minister and natural resources appointed just last week after the former minister Ezekiel Maige was abruptly sacked together with 5 other cabinet ministers. Khamis made his very first speech to the public yesterday in Dar es Salaam and he said that his major priority is to see that vices like poaching, illegal timber cutting and trade and poor use of natural resources is handled first before any other thing because there are so many cases of poaching and illegal sale of timber and according to the reports, these could be some of the reasons why the former minister lost his job and so this new minister has got work hard to see that he does not encounter the same fate like his predecessor.
However, it is most likely that there will be other people in the Dar es Salaams tourism and conservation circles at the senior staff level and subordinate bodies under the ministry who may soon lose their jobs too because they have been connected to the previous cases of illegal logging and allegedly illegal exports of wildlife. Maige himself had also promised to work on such vices but had failed to address the problems, he also failed to get the president to help out in this matter and vices kept growing bigger and bigger every year. Meanwhile Maige and TANAPA went ahead and blackmailed a tour company after they had a issue with a lodge and held both the driver and the clients as hostages in this matter. It is therefore very important that such an incident does not repeat itself. They will also be looking at improving the Tanga Marine National Park inland and also work on the roads to Serengeti, the railway routings, mining in the Selous, the planned power plant at Stieglers Gorge, the Lake Natron soda ash plant which all need to work on.
Hope fully the new minister will be ale to do what the previous one failed to do and see the industry flourish for the goodness of the industry itself and the people in it as well as the country at large.
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