Uganda tourism is set to see a great boost following the commissioning of the long-awaited electric fences around the country’s national parks by President Yoweri Museveni. The advancement comes at a time where the need for electric fences around national parks has been a long overdue necessity due to the increasing national park land encroachments by different entities throughout the country and the notorious poachers who occasionally sneak into the parks and hunt down the tourism wild species.
The move to put up electrified fences is majorly to cover conservation hot spots across the country.
The construction is set to start with Uganda’s largest national park Queen Elizabeth in western Uganda having been the most affected due to the vast land and wild species it harbors.
“We are going to construct similar fences around other parks in the country and supplement them with surveillance cameras,” Museveni said at the public rally at Kyenzaza in Rubirizi district after commissioning the project.
At the function, the president also commissioned the first 10-km phase around Queen Elizabeth national park. However, it should be noted that Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA), with support from Space for Giants, a Kenya-based conservation organization, started building an electric fence around the park in November last year.
The President also cautioned the residents of Kyezanza against vandalizing the park and her property and encouraged them to protect their children against electrified fences once put in place.
The president, who pledged to have the fence constructed in his past campaigns, hailed the Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and national Antiquities and UWA for embarking on the construction works.
The locals around the designated areas where electrified fences are to be put up welcomed the idea and implored that it was of greater advantage to them and their livelihood activities such as agriculture in regard to numerous attacks from.
“This year alone, elephants have killed four people in my district,” one of the locals lamented.
The commission comes a few weeks after the president assented a law providing for compensation for affected communities living around the national parks
The Uganda Wildlife Act 2017, passed by parliament early this year, also prescribes life imprisonment or Sh20b fine or both for anyone caught killing endangered species.
The law provides for compensation where a person is killed, suffers bodily injury or suffers damages to his or her crops or livestock, by wild animals listed under the Fourth Schedule of the law.
The listed animals include elephants, lions, leopards, crocodiles, buffaloes, hyenas, hippopotami, gorillas and chimpanzees.
The law also provides for community participation in wildlife management through community wildlife Committees for each Protected Area.
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