Citizen Participation in the Lodge Sector of the Okavango Delta - Responsible Tourism: Critical Issues for Conservation and Development - page 207

development cycles and early liquidity problems. Cash-strapped citizens therefore
struggled to raise the capital needed to finance equity in the sector.
Citizen participation survey
The Botswana authorities do not collate industry-wide figures summarizing
tourism employment, procurement spend, lease incomes, etc.Tourism enterprises
do submit annual reports to the land and labour authorities. As part of a rapid
survey of citizen participation in the Ngamiland tourism sector, access was
obtained to the 2005 returns of a number of high value lodge operations in the
Okavango Delta (on condition that the individual enterprises remained anony-
mous). The survey was designed to assess the extent to which Botswana nationals
participate in the core industry of the Okavango, especially as employees. It
targeted 20 tourism operations involving 17 individual companies, employing 646
full-time employees and disbursing a total annual wage bill of P13,246 million. 1
Information was gleaned from the annual returns of the companies as well as
follow up interviews and a brief focus group discussion with operators and repre-
sentatives of local communities.
Structural arrangements
Three distinct landholding arrangements underpin the lodges surveyed in the
Ngamiland cluster. Two of the operations fall within the Moremi Game Reserve
and are held on medium-term leases from the Department of Wildlife and
National Parks via the Tawana Land Board. Another two of the operations are
situated on community-held leases and have been subleased to photographic
tourism operators. The rest of the operations sampled are held on direct lease
from the Tawana Land Board.
Employment
The 20 operations surveyed employed a total of 646 persons of which 585 were
Botswana nationals and 61 were expatriates (Figure 10.2).
The total annual wage bill at the surveyed operations amounted to P13,246
million of which citizens captured P7718 million and non-citizens P5528 million.
Citizens thus made up 90.6 per cent of the total workforce at the operations
surveyed but captured only 58.3 per cent of the total payroll. Conversely, non-
citizens, representing 9.4 per cent of total employees, earned 41.7 per cent of the
total payroll.
There was very little variation between the surveyed operations, with all the
lodges showing broadly similar trends. There was, for example, no evidence that
citizens captured a greater percentage of the payroll at the operations on commu-
nity-held leases.
Despite the significant disparity between the remuneration levels of citizens
and expatriates, it is important to note that the operations surveyed employed an