Tunde Babawale: There Is Money In Tourism

Thursday, October 13, 2016 8:08 am

Tunde Babawale

The other measure, is for government to make the anti-corruption drive total and holistic so that it is not restricted to a segment at the federal level but be extended to all sectors and all political parties because corrupt individuals are not restricted to a particular political party. Corruption does not know religion, ethnicity or political affiliation; it is an epidemic that affects the entire society regardless of your colour, race, ethnicity or political affiliation, so we must take it as such, a desperate disease that needs a desperate remedy. I also think there is a need for government to take a second look at its style of playing politics, if it needs to exhibit greater policy consistency.

Thirdly, the response rate of our government to crisis is slow, when there is a crisis one expects that certain measures should have been reeled out as emergency measures to pull the economy out of the crisis situation. There is no such thing. I expect that by now, the monetization policy introduced by the administration of Obasanjo is one that this administration should revisit such as insisting on a limited number of vehicles for convoys. This will ensure that the money we spend maintaining government vehicles and fuelling them will be drastically reduced. If a governor knows that he is going to spend his own money to fuel cars in his convoy, he is not going to go with 10 or 20 cars. These are things we need to look at.

As I said before, the Oronsanye Panel which was set up by the previous administration to restructure and rationalise government agencies and parastatals has calculated how much government will save if this restructuring is done. What has prevented this government from doing the restructuring? Fortunately, most agencies are now headed by acting heads, this is the time to do the restructuring so nobody is going to start lobbying for their agencies to be spared the hammer. All I am saying is that the atmosphere is ripe now for government to restructure the agencies and parastatals in order to cut costs and reduce the overhead expenses; we all know that like Emir Sanusi said sometimes ago, we spend close to 70 percent of our earnings on overhead; there is no way a country can survive on that.

How can we improve and tap from the tourism sector like Kenya, Israel, Greece, Italy and Saudi Arabia?

The problem with us is that successive governments have been given the blueprint contained in a document called the Tourism Master Plan but unfortunately, we have not had the courage and the time to implement the ideas contained in that document. Secondly, tourism has not been the revenue earner that it should be in Nigeria because government is not serious about tourism. For example, we have discontinued the previous efforts to make tourism the centre-piece of our strategy for diversification of the economy. We only see tourism as fanfare or festivals with very little content. We need the culture agencies to work in synergy with those in the tourism sector. That was done during our own time as Heads of Cultural Agencies.

CBAAC, which I had the privilege of presiding over, worked hand in hand with other agencies to attract diaspora Africans to our tourist sites. CBAAC not only intellectualised culture, it facilitated the attraction of tourists into Nigeria. Now that FESTAC will be 40 years in 2017, Nigeria can re-enact what it did in 1977 without necessarily single handedly funding the fiesta. We can make each nation fund its own participation and once again call attention of Black people and other races to our rich cultural heritage and UNESCO recognised world heritage sites such as the Osun Osogbo grove and the Sukur landscape in Adamawa. We have numerous ecotourism sites that require greater government attention like the Mambilla Plateau in Taraba, Idanre Hills in Ondo, Obudu Cattle Ranch in Cross River State, Zuma Rock in Niger State, Waterfalls, cold and warm springs all dotting our landscape.

Tunde Babawale

Can you identify some of the tourism sites we can tap into to boost the tourism sector in Nigeria?

There are so many tourism sites, we have for example sites that have been declared world heritage sites by the UNESCO, such as the Osun Osogbo Festival and a few others. You have the festivals like the Argungun festival, you have the New Yam festival, all of these are festivals that could attract tourists. We all saw the huge crowd that attended the Osun Osogbo Festival. We could develop that site better than it is and make it more attractive to people who would even come to invest in it but we need to develop the site first. The same thing in Calabar, if you go to the Slave History Museum, and the Old residency, the Mary Slessor graveyard, all of these, need to be repackaged. The last time I was at the graveyard about 2 years ago, it was overgrown with weeds. These are things that even people from Slessor’s home country would have come to see.

So, we have so many. I know that the Fayemi government tried to do something about the Ikogosi Warm Spring in Ekiti, Mimiko too repackaged the Idanre Hill. Let us put a lot of resources to try to develop these sites so that with time, they will become revenue earners for the country on a very consistent basis and I think we also need to put the right people in the art and tourism sectors. Part of the problems we have is that government, when it appoints people in such positions, hardly cares about track record or pedigree. There is a need to look at the pedigree and what that person has done in the sector so that you won’t have square pegs in round holes. I am sure if we do what they do in other countries, we will begin to make lots of progress.