HARNESSING THE CREATIVE AND TOURISM RESOURCESAll
stakeholders should do more by ‘mining’ the country’s cultural and tourism endowments
With annual budgets that are substantially financed through foreign loans and essentially for recurrent expenditure, there can be no better time for critical stakeholders to take the economic diversification aspirations of the government more seriously. It was against this background that the Nigeria Entertainment and Economic Roundtable, a policy dialogue and investment summit, held last week in Abuja. Stakeholders in the entertainment industry were united that culture and tourism remain low-hanging fruits for the country’s economic growth and development.
Nigeria’s cultural and tourism endowments are unique, enormous and globally competitive. They range from material and immaterial cultural heritage to art and craft, choice tourists’ destinations, historical and cultural sites as well as ritualised cultural practices. The Abuja conversation was on how best to quickly deploy them as potent tools for economic diversification and sustainable development. The Roundtable concluded that the challenge before the federal and state governments is the ability to muster the requisite political nerve to prioritise culture and tourism as a useful economic pillar. At the end of the sessions, agreements were reached on salient issues.
One, the conversations around the industry and how to make it perform better must proceed quickly from government’s manifestly good intentions and benevolence to a robust, regular cross-fertilisation of ideas between the practitioner and the policymaker, with a view to approaching the industry’s numerous challenges from a position of shared knowledge, and with clinical precision. Two, the creative and entertainment industry is perceived, in error, to be and treated by some stakeholders as a matter domiciled in the exclusive list of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended). That perhaps explains why the sub-national entities – the 36 federating states and 774 local government areas are yet to constructively engage the federal government for mutually supportive and beneficial collaborations along the entertainment superhighway.
Three, the private sector is yet to fully tap into the abundant potential of the industry, largely because many are still unable to see the entertainment and creative sector as a veritable tool for economic growth, job creation and social inclusion. Four, despite doing incredibly well by themselves, most practitioners seem to be focusing too much on government and sitting on their fortunes when the ace cards are in their hands. Indeed, they can do much better, especially in an era where the market value of Netflix could climb to $196 billion, overtaking that of ExxonMobil which at same time stood at $166 billion.
Attended by Federal Ministry of Arts Culture Tourism and Creative Economy, Federal Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, Federal Ministry of Aviation and Aerospace Development, African Export-Import (AFREXIM) Bank, National Council for Arts and Culture, National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism and National Film and Video Censors’ Board among others, the Roundtable was conceived to be a robust platform for mutually profitable engagement between creative and tourism industry practitioners and their diverse stakeholders. On the agenda were issues of policy, regulatory framework, legal regime, growth and general industry environment – especially in the face of worsening vulnerability of crude oil prices and the imperative of jerking up internally generated revenue (IGR) of the three tiers of government.
The whole idea, according to Chuks Akamadu, Managing Director of Afrocultour Limited who organised the Roundtable, is to cultivate a culture of dialogue among stakeholders and galvanise the requisite critical mass needed to transform the industry into a modern money-spinning machine with potential to set the entire culture-tourism landscape on a path to economic prosperity. At the end, it was agreed that there is an urgent need for an inclusive industry framework for harnessing the vast creative and tourism resources for the benefit of Nigerians.
