Violent Attacks in Kenya Are Scaring Off the Tourists : Africa: Publicity abroad on security problems in game parks hurts the industry. Recession also is a factor.

Authorities were congratulating themselves recently over the success of an effort designed to preserve one of Kenya’s greatest assets, its vast herds of elephants.

But even as they helped fend off a move at an international conference to reopen the global ivory trade, at home they faced a related, and possibly deeper, problem: Even if Kenya’s elephants are protected, will any tourists come to the country to see them?

Shaken by a surge in violent attacks on tourists in the country’s remote game parks and beach resorts as well as by other problems, the tourist industry here has fallen into a deep slump.

On the Indian Ocean coast, where resorts in their peak season for European visitors should have 95% or more of beds taken, hotels are reporting occupancy rates below 50%. At one well-known 160-room hotel, a recent visitor counted seven other guests.

For the quarter that began Dec. 1, tourist authorities say the number of visitors is down by 50% or more from last year. And the figures for 1991 reflected a 30% drop from the year before because of Gulf War-related travel jitters. If the slump continues through 1992, that means total tourist visits, which peaked in 1990 at about 700,000, will have dropped to slightly over 250,000, the lowest figure in more than 10 years.

Tour operators, lodge managers and travel agents here say their industry has not been under such strain in decades; the current downturn is the first since the 1986 release of the movie “Out of Africa,” which was filmed in Kenya and based on the colonial memoirs of Isak Dinesen.

The impact of a tourist slump on the Kenyan economy cannot be overstated.

“When tourism suffers, the whole economy catches a cold,” says Robert Shaw, a local businessman and financial columnist who is economics adviser to the opposition party FORD (Forum for the Restoration of Democracy).

A protracted economic crisis could interfere with Kenya’s nascent political liberalization by provoking intensified civil unrest. By reducing income at the wildlife sanctuaries, the tourism drop could also undermine the funding of Kenya’s successful two-year-old initiative against wildlife poaching, the main threat to its diminished herds of elephant and rhinoceros.

Tourism here has been especially hard hit lately because several problems have come together at the same time:

* One is the recession in Europe and America, which has cut tourism worldwide but particularly affected costly, distant destinations such as Africa. The recession’s impact has been greatest at the market’s high end, including extended luxury safaris and resort stays, for which the profit margins and thus the return to the local economy have traditionally been the greatest.

* A second element is bad publicity about Kenya’s increasing security problems. These stem in part from its political instability, which has been accompanied by occasional and localized civil unrest. But there has also been an increase in attacks on tourists in the country’s isolated game reserves and coastal resorts. Since mid-November there have been at least four serious attacks on tourists, including one in which a German woman was raped and another in which a group of Britons was forced by attackers to ford a crocodile-infested river. In each case, the attackers beat some of the victims, stole all their possessions and forced them to strip to their underwear before departing with their vehicle and stranding the tourists in the wild. Such incidents have garnered extensive publicity abroad, particularly in Europe, the home of most Kenyan tourists.

* The resort industry has also been hurt by a serious water crisis on the Indian Ocean coast that has deprived many leading hotels of running water--the result of an unusually severe dry season in 1991 compounded by mismanagement at Kenya’s water utilities. Coastal resorts say they suffered many cancellations for the Christmas season when local travel agencies warned overseas agents that the hotels were without water.

Even worse for tour operators here, the pattern of tour bookings suggests that a deeper slump is on the horizon. Most visitors book their trips as long as six months in advance, meaning that the most recent wave of bad publicity about anti-government riots in Nairobi and attacks on travelers will translate into reduced bookings for the summer and fall.

The tourism crisis will put an added fiscal strain on Kenya at a time when it can least afford it. In terms of foreign-exchange earnings, tourism has been Kenya’s biggest industry for years--ahead of tea and coffee. In 1991 the tourism sector brought in $376 million in revenues and employed more than 100,000 workers.

Losses in tourism loom even larger today because other sources of government income are shrinking. Coffee and tea prices remain chronically low; perhaps more worrisome, the foreign aid on which the government depended to balance its budget is jeopardized.

Last November, major donor governments and the World Bank suspended all new aid programs for at least six months out of distaste for the repressive politics of President Daniel Arap Moi’s government and its failure to meet fiscal targets. The move froze about $350 million in outside aid.