Or probably will be born here.
Yes, definitely, thank you for that.
How do you envision this whole outfit, say in
the next five years to come?
The Hospital will continue because if you walk around you can
see us modernizing many facilities, so in the next five years we
anticipate to have a new paediatric centre, we have a very modern
lab, we should have modernized our Radiology services and we
are also embarking on developing a brand new Hospital at this
site which will roughly be between 350-750 beds. So that’s
where we are looking at.
That is a wonderful job happening here,
allow me to move to something different and
thank you for the introduction, you have
really given us very insightful information
about the Hospital. I would like to move now
to something different and this is Conference
Tourism in Kenya; am very glad that you are
coming from another industry so you will give
us more insights on that. What is your take
about the current Conference Tourism in the
country?
I see huge potential in terms of Conference Tourism because if
you walk out of this Hospital now and you go to any of the hotels,
you will find that what is keeping them busy is conferencing
because the need for human beings to meet and interact has
never died despite video conferencing and all that, human beings
must still meet and interact.
The whole thing about conference tourism is actually to make
Nairobi and other cities destinations for conferencing, and by
destination it not only means investing in conference facilities in
hotels, but developing end to end infrastructure so that people
can conveniently fly in and out of airports, there is ease of
transportation to venues and creating entertainment hubs, social
hubs, cultural hubs as well as shopping hubs that actually attract
people.
I have noticed nowadays when I travel, conventions and
conferencing has actually been branded as tourism, it’s not
looked at as pure business, so people go for business and then
they also see the country, so we have a lot of collaborative need to
synergize and we have not touched the tip of it.
What I think is missing is that to actually make this a better
destination, we need to re-think and have regional convention
centres, have one big one in Nairobi, so that again will make
Nairobi a destination of choice, have something in Kisumu, have
something in Mombasa, so the capacities of the hotels are not
dependent on the size of the meeting rooms which they have in
the hotel but rather how many meetings can take place in the
city.
Then the next question delegates will ask would be where do we
stay, and where you stay has got to be safe, well lit, clean, you are
able to shop, have your dinner, have your night clubs, whatever
it is that people like doing when they are not in the conference.
Presently looking at the current market in
the country, do you feel like you are on track
in achieving the untapped market?
We are really on track because I have known people who, when
they go to let’s say Kisumu and they have a conference, there is
no hotel which can accommodate them so what they are missing
is a convention centre, people want to go to Kisumu but the
limitation is where can you take five hundred people for one
meeting so I think that’s where investors need to think and
maybe collaborate on. So yes, it’s untapped in that aspect but
also remember Kenya as a destination is much more beautiful
than so many other countries in the world, however, I don’t
think we appreciate that fact ourselves.
When we were discussing you mentioned
that you’ve travelled a lot.
A little bit.
Maybe your little bit could be a lot for many
of us, I just want to get your opinion, if you
compare these other countries with Kenya
when it comes to the same discussion we are
having right now, where would you place
Kenya?
Well, I would say that Kenya still has a lot to do because in
Africa, when I think about it, you are looking at Egypt and
South Africa. South Africans have got 3 centres: in Cape Town,
Durban, and Johannesburg. As you saw recently where Obama
went, you could see the kind of set up, we can’t do such a state
of art set up here yet.
There has got to be a multi-sectoral thinking about the whole
idea. Then now we have a new kid on the block who is stealing
all the thunder, Kigali, of all places. Uganda did a little bit
of that but they did not build a convention centre, you know
they had this famous CHOGM (Common Wealth Heads Of
Governments Meeting) so they built many hotels, then after
the qqueen left the hotels were empty because there is no centre
which can drive people to Kampala.
Some new hotels coming up are actually convention centres
in their own right, so you find people having 2000 bed hotels,
basically making the hotel a destination point as it were.
I will now move to the core of our discussion,
let me call it the new kid on the block, the
Convention Centre. Tell us why that move
to set up the Convention Centre; what really