Cartagena's success in attracting modern tourism to an old city
What you need to know:
- Unlike Kenya, however, the security personnel in Colombia are much more focused with glaring passion for their job in their eyes.
- The high-rise apartments that make up the city's skyline are some of the most beautiful architectural designs I have seen. The old city is ring-fenced with stone fortresses and towering walls of up to 20 metres thick.
- The anti-corruption agency in Kenya will forever fail in its mandate until the public gets access to data in and around the issues they investigate.
Hovering over Bogota, Colombia, in a jet somehow feels special. We are in transit to Cartagena, a coastal City in the Caribbean for a conference dubbed the Data Festival.
Below, you see a mountain range that traversesBolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. Many greenhouses can be seen on any flat parts of the range, particularly in Colombia.
The vegetation is lush green. An afternoon drizzle confirms that this is a tropical rain forest region. Some of the great tributaries of the Amazon and the Orinoco rivers start here. Bogota is a mountain-top city in the Andean region of South America.
The scintillating beauty and calmness of the people is deceptive, because the country is in conflict. The conflict started in 1964 but has persisted over the years. More than 220,000 lives have been lost. The government is fighting a crime syndicate paramilitary and left wing guerrillas, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN).
WhilstFARC and other guerrilla movements claim to be fighting for the rights of the poor in Colombia to protect them from government violence and to provide social justice through communism like their neighbours to the east, Venezuela, the Colombian government claims to be fighting for order and stability, and seeking to protect the rights and interests of its citizens.
So everyone is fighting for the citizens, or so they claim, but it is the citizens who are dying. All the parties engaged in the conflict have been criticised for numerous human rights violations.
Just last week, the guerrillas killed 11 military personnel in remote parts of Cauca State.Both guerrillas and paramilitary groups have been accused of engaging in drug trafficking and terrorism.
Meanwhile, some of the urban and peri-urban areas are peaceful. Heavy investment in the agricultural sector is visible everywhere. Much of the country's exports come from oil (45 per cent), and a growing manufacturing sector (12 per cent). The country has the largest shipbuilding industry outside of Asia.
These factors combined explain why the economy is growing at the rate of more than 10 per cent. With a population of 49 million and a literacy rate of 94 per cent, the country is a high middle-income country with neatly kept cities.
Majority (60 per cent) of the people are of combined European and Native American descent or Mestizo, followed by people of mixed African and European descent and a small black (5 per cent) population concentrated along the Pacific coast in the valleys of Magdalena and Cauca. More than 95 per cent of the population is Catholic.
Whilst political ideology and crime is a threat to stability in Colombia, in Kenya, religious ideology and crime are our main challenges. Unlike Kenya, however, the security personnel in Colombia are much more focused with glaring passion for their job in their eyes. At the airport, they are thorough in their work, with several redundancies to cover any errors.
GLORIFYING TERRORISTS
Compare that with the lacklustre performance of our security guards as they casually frisk you at the entrance of a mall. Our security lapses are unacceptable. We compromise our security everywhere. At Nyayo House, which houses our registration system, several parallel systems exist and it doesn't require an expert investigator to know the levels at which we have compromised our security through registering questionable foreigners.
With a per capita income of close to $15,000 and unemployment rate of nine per cent, Colombia is doing well largely because it has ensured security for law-abiding citizens and ignored the criminals. They don't talk about guerrillas in their media. They refer to these rebel groups as drug dealers.
When we allow media coverage of terrorist with names they have given to themselves, we glorify them in a way. A better strategy is to give these lawless misfits a blackout and perhaps refer to them in names of our own choice such as miscreants, terrorists, deranged fanatics, spoilers of Islam, killers and murderers.
Both print and electronic media in Colombia dedicates much of the space and airtime to positive development. It is the only country in Latin America that has excelled in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), having ensured affordability of both software and hardware by removing all taxes.
According to Transparency International (TI),Colombia has made progress in the rule of law in the past 10 years. However, the country still faces several structural corruption challenges: the collusion of the public and private sectors, clientelism and policy capture by organised crime, lack of state control and weak service delivery in remote areas of the country, and the inefficiency of the criminal justice system.
STIFLING OPPORTUNITY
Moreover, although the swift development of extractive industries in the country has boosted the economy, the lack of adequate regulation and accountability mechanisms is a cause for concern, particularly as the first symptoms of the “resource curse” effect might have started to show.
Whether the country continues improving its governance performance will depend on its capacity to enforce its robust legal framework and implement its strategic commitments against corruption.
Although these comments from TI may sound like they were extracted from Kenya, Colombian youth have more hope than Kenyans. Most of them get meaningful employment after years of school. The country has created opportunities like the labour-intensive shipbuilding industry and other manufacturing activities. Tourism is booming in non-conflict areas like Cartagena.
Perhaps a great lesson for us that we can develop tourist products on Lake Victoria and other lakes if Mombasa remains insecure. There is sense in starting to build small ships on the lake for not just transportation but for leisure as a strategy for developing a sustainable tourist product. I have longed to see Migingo and I am sure many Kenyans want to do the same but there are no means of getting there yet many of our youth lie idle.
We could seek the assistance of South Korea and Colombia and develop this industry. It is self-evident that we have not exploited opportunities that we have in the country to create wealth. When we stifle the emergence of opportunities, we nurture conflict and corruption. To unlock our thinking, the data that we came to celebrate in Cartagena may be our saviour.
A crowd on the beach watches the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series at Cartagena, Colombia. Tourism is booming in non-conflict areas like Cartagena.
AFP PHOTO| HO | RED BULL | DEAN TREML
Cartagena's beautiful sandy beaches are so clean as to make Mombasa beaches green with envy. The high-rise apartments that make up the city's skyline are some of the most beautiful architectural designs I have seen. The old city is ring-fenced with stone fortresses and towering walls of up to 20 metres thick.
This 16th century wall was built in 1533 to protect the Spanish from pirates of the Caribbean. Inside the walls are some of the oldest Spanish architectural designs in Latin America. It is here where our Data Festival took place. It is here where we learnt of new innovations in the data space.
Data will help us make better decisions and solve some of the serious problems we experience today. It will also play a critical role in building better governance systems that can hold our leaders to account, as well as enable us to account for those who fall through the cracks of the statistical net.
We can build institutions such as anti corruption agencies but, without data, we shall not achieve much. For example, we gather data through statutory wealth declaration but we fail to use them for audit purposes and effectively deal with corruption.
If all of the contracting data is open and accessible to the public, the public would be able to hold the government to account. Unfortunately, most of this information remains inaccessible, with Kenya being behind in both data protection and freedom of information laws. Justice, especially on corruption allegations, can only be seen to be done if the public had the data to differentiate that which is a which-hunt and which is not.
MATATUS OF COLOMBIA
Several countries have adopted Open Contracting as a strategy to mitigate against corruption and enhanced transparency. Open Data will greatly aid the public participation envisaged in constitution. There is power in liberalising data, especially public data. For example, if procurement data is in public domain, people will have more trust in public spending. There will also be reduced corruption in the public sector, since corruption thrives in secretive environments.
The anti-corruption war cannot be won if governments have monopoly of data. There is need to institute what is referred to as Data Revolution, whereby data is accessible to all citizens to scrutinise in whatever manner. The anti-corruption agency in Kenya will forever fail in its mandate until the public gets access to data in and around the issues they investigate.
It is hopeless to say that corruption fights back when there is no data at all. The public will never know who is telling the truth, hence trust will be eroded. And as Francis Fukuyama has strongly argued in his book, Trust:Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, countries that enjoy high trust are more stable and developed.
I cannot finish this article without telling of my experience in a chiva (Colombian matatu). It is a rickety contraption of steel and wood with an engine that resembles that of a truck. Inside it are squeezed benches, huge speakers for loud music, and a handle with cup holders for tequila (the Caribbean chan’gaa).
Our worst matatu driver would give way for these contraptions at the first sight. After all, someone on board probably has more tequila than blood in their body. They are driven at menacingly high speeds with blaring music. The chiva are perhaps the best tourism attractions in Cartagena.
The writer is an Associate Professor at the University of Nairobi's School of Business.Twitter: @bantigito
