Why online auctioning of hunting blocks is off

Dar/Arusha. The government decided to shelve its planned March 5, 2020 electronic auctioning of vacant hunting blocks due to market instability, the Natural Resources and Tourism ministry, said at the weekend.

Deputy minister Constantine Kanyasu told The Citizen that the auction was suspended after several concerns were raised by both  public and private sector players.

The government placed its 26 hunting blocks on an online auctioning platform in June last year (2019) to mark a major transition in game hunting for sport.

However, only seven were sold.

During its second online auctioning in November last year, the government had put 24 blocks up for bidding - but only two were sold.

It was against such a background that the third auction was set, seeking to find operators for a total of 29 blocks on March 5, 2020.

“We have suspended the third electronic auctioning of hunting blocks due to several reasons. In the first auction, we managed to sell only seven blocks while in the third, the number of bidders went down further. This trend is not good,” he said.

He said the government has also received complaints from various stakeholders, hence the need to bring them [the complaints] on board before a new round of auctioning is conducted.

The complaints were primarily based on high prices for the blocks and on the blocks’ timeframe.

The government was investigating the complaints to arrive at the right one that will yield a win-win situation for both parties, said Mr Kanyasu.

The bidders complained that some since some of the blocks would expire in 2021, they needed assurance that they would continue with their activities there past 2021.

“These are their main complaints but we will meet with all stakeholders on March 14th, 2020 [Saturday this week] so we can discuss all the issues and arrive at an amicable decision,” he said.

Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority (Tawa) deputy commissioner for tourism and business services Iman Nkuwi told The Citizen’s sister paper Mwananchi recently that the government has made several improvements on a number of issues that companies were not happy with which resulted into poor performance of past auctions.

“Those days, the rule was that when a company bids during the auction, it had to pay $5,000 as fee for a class one block. It had to pay the amount as fee for every block that it bids.

However, we have changed this and that the company is only required to pay once,” he said. A second class block requires one to pay $2,000 as bidding fee. The same amount allows one to bid for several blocks without being compelled to pay more.

He said the issue pertaining to the price for the block was being worked on by the ministry.

“Besides, the period for one to own the block has been raised from ten to 15 years.

According to report from Tawa, tourist hunting season takes place from July to December of each year.

Thus the number of ‘hunter-gatherers’ increased from 434 in 2018/19 to 519 in 2019/20.

“The increase was due to meeting between stakeholders and the government through hunting packages, fees and other related business areas in order to make the Tanzania industry more attractive which resulted in changes to trophy hunting regulations,” Mr Nkuwi told The Citizen at the weekend.