This is 2023. Eight years, counting down from 2015. To us in Culture and Tourism, it has been a period of the most absurd, ineptitude and crass neglect of the sector, unarguably a goldmine, lacking in polished and visionary leadership.
Even though we are thought to be grateful for all things, one of those “things” which appears emetic to me is the absence of accountability and respect for our collective expectations and yearnings for a profitable and sustainable cultural tourism landscape.
I worry in particular about legislations and culture tourism legislative practices and bearings. I weep at the various dislocations and open windows to deliberate thieving going on in government tourism circles, which weak and poor legislations and legal acts on tourism and culture helped enthrone.
Between 2015 and this year, there are no records of oversight functions and activities tailored towards exposing unethical management of cultural tourism assets and services, neither were there any town hall meetings by our elected representatives to brief stakeholders on the health of the industry.
Hands in glove, souls together in very corrupt tendencies, our National Assembly committees on Culture and Tourism at the two chambers have failed us.
Both houses have become chambers and synagogues of compromised signatories to our tourism failings, funds misappropriation and misapplication. They can’t look at themselves in the mirror because they indulge the perpetrators.
The leadership of both committees, instead of helping the industry deflate egos of failed and sleepy tourism agencies heads, rather helped to inflate and influence their ballooning egos to philistine challenge.
Like the agencies they are mandated to oversee and hold accountable, our legislative committees, in eight years, hold the most shameful and demeaning record of shying away from performing their duties, but rather take pleasure in rubber-stamping obsolete and deviant tourism policies, oiling deliberate neglect of the sector by agencies heads, engendering wasteful and heartless funds releases on pedestrian fancies in the name of tourism.
How can serious legislators, acclaimed lovers of Nigerian rural poor and communities, watch, listen and approve funds to agencies such as Centre for Black and African Civilization, Gallery of Arts, National Theatre, and whitewashed Film and Censors Board for eight years without any qualms about their poor showing?
What can we make out of funds for a Ministry of Culture that spent its time looking for opportunities to invite foreigners to a tea party, when the industry it claimed to drive remained motionless and breathless?
Now, that merry-making and awards have been elevated to a national pastime by the ministry and some its moribound agencies, can the NASS committees tell us why and how these deceptive conundrums will help us come out of tourism woods?
Maybe eight years appears like eight minutes in the thinking of these our representatives on cultural tourism; one simply cannot understand the thought processes of these ‘Honourable gentlemen.’
Senator Rochas Okorocha and Representative Ogbeide Ihama are no pushovers in the Ninth Assembly. Okorocha, a former governor, global influencer on education and philanthropist, fears no foe and has scored many firsts across human liveability indices, but on cultural tourism legislations and oversight it beggers refreshing transformations and legislative inputs that can sustain the industry.
Engineer Omoregie Ogbeide Ihama, a civil engineer, a two-term representative from Oredo in Edo State, holds a record as two-term House committee boss on Culture and Tourism.
As a civil engineer, with an eye for detail, Ihama has failed to provide us with details of how tourism funds and projects were executed across the country. He is handsome, gregarious but has failed to win the minds of industry stakeholders on all fronts of cultural tourism legislative engagements and deliveries.
He speaks for us, yet speaks for no one. I have seen him in cultural attire, proudly cultural yet disappointedly an influencer of our cultural tourism shame and failings.
Ogbeide Ihama is young but has no records of influencing cultural tourism projects and interventions that are beneficial to the youths and rural communities in particular.
In eight years, imagine, eight solid years, none of the two committees have any record of reaching out to the leadership of the organised private sector. No record of public hearings, even if it were of the most cultural tourism mundane.
The committees are hands in gloves in the impoverishment of the sector and its struggling stakeholders. While they wine and dine at the express expenses and felicitations of the corrupt agencies, the private sector groan and grope in pains and darkness.
We may thank God these committees will come to an end during the tenure of this administration. What is worrisome is the eight years lost to poor legislative practices and mandates.
That we woke up to see cultural tourism agencies celebrating and wasting public funds on mindless and pedestrian awards beats me. For crying out loud, how has Centre for Black and African Civilization, as an agency, affected the growth of the industry? Who oversees the laughable tourism posturing of NTDC? What is Gallery of Arts, when it’s evident that corruption is its other name? How has an event destination such as National Theatre, publicly domcilied as a project of private sector Bankers’ Committee, navigated government resources to fiddle an absured festival?
The ruinous and very damaging shenanigans going in all our agencies under the Ministry of Information and Culture should have been brought to an end.
Am happy most these fellows would go down in history as wasters of our cultural tourism opportunities and we can see that history of Nigeria cultural tourism trajectory, will not be kind to them.
What we need in this sector and our nation, are sincere partners, men and women who love our industry, willing to bring about changes to which our children yet unborn can be proud. Our legislators have failed us, failed our tourism dreams and expectations, and above all, helped to make our country a laughing stock in the affairs of comity of tourism nations.
It’s sad to have rich festivals, hospitable people and a nation of very significant and unique cultural tourism attributes, but beg foreign nations to receive and offer us opportunities to which we blindly forsake back home.
Those who mind our cultural tourism economy are not men and women of integrity and as the elections draw near in February, we owe it a duty to hold every one of them accountable.
We cannot continue like this, to pretend we are doing well, when all we do is to deceive our people, corner resources available to create cultural tourism jobs and make unnecessary noise, pointing fingers to strange magical mirages and non-existent strides as “ achievements “.
From the House committees to all the agencies under the Ministry of Information and Culture, let those who have anything to show for eight years of Nigeria’s cultural tourism engagements, tell us what they have done.
Let no one tell us that President Muhammadu Buhari, did not help them, what we want to see and hear, is / are what you have brought to the table of Nigeria’s growth and development.
If your agency, won’t tell us, we shall tell Nigerians how you either did well or failed us a nation. We shall open a black book and will not hesitate to write your name therein.
Welcome to 2023, the year of cultural tourism judgement!.