Kiwanda’s trial-and-error tourism promotion demeans women.

DEMEANING TOURISM

Tourism Minister, Godfrey Kiwanda is in the media not for tourism that he should promote, rather, for his demeaning style of promoting tourism which commodifies and objectifies women – or, to be specific, curvy women.

There is a gross miscalculation in this whole tourism promotion project. The NRM regime seems to have adopted a trial-and-error modus operandi in doing business.  This partly explains the high frequency of botched up business deals with contractors and investors. Trial-and-error seem to be the standard operating procedure of this regime for transacting business.

However, we must also note that the general attitude of any government official in doing business is driven by the desire to exploit - strike fake deals, fake interventions, and make fake decisions to secure kickbacks, bribes, and political favours for personal aggrandizement.

Hon. Kiwanda’s dilemma, therefore, cannot be delinked from the general social and political environment in which he operates. The Museveni regime survives on an elaborate structure of exploitation entrenched through a mesh of greedy, well situated and protected cadreship. Hon. Godfrey Kiwanda may not be an ignorant person to fail to understand basic concepts of commodification and objectification of women that have ignited public outrage. 

When you commercialize women’s bodies, in a country where Ethics Minister has outlawed tight clothing including miniskirts, then you are being contradictory, and least, condescending – borderline lawbreaking. To expose curves, women must wear tight dresses, which could land them in jail for erotic-raising body manifestation, as per Lokodo’s Law.

Hon. Kiwanda’s belligerence and outlandish mannerism may not reflect an innate inability to comprehend the complexities of modern tourism. His dilemma comes from his rational function within the elaborate structure of regime’s exploitation machinery – to create avenues for further exploitation. This time, the avenue happens to be the curvy bodies of our women, most of whom appeared to have motherhood fats.

While the curvy pageantry serves another purpose, its fails miserably to promote tourism.  The obsession with women’s bodies is one such late infatuation that the corrupted NRM officials wish to cash in on.  The danger in a tourism promotion triggered by perversion on one end and greed for exploitation on the other, may extend to the display of curvaceous trunk-like limbs of certain breed of privileged women, justified that they appear below the rims of the decency skirt; the gluteal endowments of our women and, the display of small and largely neglected Albino, Batwa or nodding disease children of Northern Uganda for tourism attraction. Tourism is the source object for exploitation, and anything they can land on. 

I read Mr. Museveni’s defence of Hon. Kiwanda’s inexcusably lascivious curvy pageantry. It reveals the source of this perversion driven greed, and a sense that Museveni has lost control in this industry. The perils of leaders who over stay in power is that they need to be replenished with modern logic, theories and emerging trends in modern tourism – what motivates and attracts tourism world-over, and how do successful tourism destinations constantly reinvent, sustainably?

Museveni should have known that beauty pageantry is an industrial complex sustainable on its own and independent of tourism. Those skinny women serve particular interests in a complex sex and perversion industry well entrenched in the European and North American capitalism.

In sum, tourism in Uganda should focus on valuing what we have and can create or produce. For instance, our investment in tourism has not expanded beyond the source of the Nile, few national parks and the Equator. We are not investing and modernizing our natural and national endowments – our cultures, history, institutions, environment, peoples, and creative imaginations. 

The beauty and value of our women matters in as far as their achievements as equals in society, in their role of promoting those elements for a vibrant tourism industry - not their curvy bodies. This trial-and-error modus operandi demeans women and cheats society of decency.

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