Abisoye Fagade: We’re Creating Structures 

to Standardise Tourism Industry

Director General of the National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism, Dr. Abisoye Fagade, says ongoing reforms are not targeting operators, instead they are aimed at professionalising Nigeria’s tourism and hospitality industry. Charles Ajunwa brings excerpts:

After your recent engagement with stakeholders in Abuja, the institute inaugurated a committee to develop a national framework for the recognition, collaboration and governance of professional bodies in the tourism, hospitality and travel sectors. Was it done to witch-hunt?

No. There’s nothing anybody would do, as long as it’s regulation, they would think it’s witch-hunting. Today, people still think that EFCC was set up to witch-hunt, and people also believe that the police is witch-hunting too. As long as you are executing the regulation, they will still feel it’s witch-hunting. You see, today our industry needs that structure to survive. Associations are not the ones that are being witch-hunted. We are creating institutes from those associations that can hold structures for tourism. We now said to ourselves, we have created this structure, stakeholders go and create what you think can work, as a fallout of the stakeholders’ engagement that we had. Let’s prune down. Do you know the funny thing? We realised that most of these associations that we are talking about are not even registered under Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). Some are registered as NGOs. Many are not even active on CAC portal. How long are we going to do this? I checked the 17 associations, only 6 or 7 are active. If we don’t get counted, we can’t justify the way we are being treated. We need to show the government what we are bringing to the table as a sector. What we are doing right now is a starting point. They called you to come and participate, you said no, you’re not participating. I should stop and wait till you are ready for me to work. I’m a federal government agency, I’m not an association. It’s them that should be playing catch-up, not me playing catch-up. Every sector in this country is driven by private sector. In aviation, government has no single commercial airline. It’s driven by private sector, and the regulations there stand. Telecommunication in Nigeria is driven majorly by private sector. So don’t let anybody deceive you. There must be regulation that must be followed. When there is overlap between NTDA and NIHOTOUR, we can collaborate. We have agreed to collaborate. So what we have done with this committee is for them to establish a structure that can work, that will pay both the association and the agency.  We need to take out all the quacks in our industry. The only reason why we are not having people coming back is because of our poor services. We have to elevate the standard of tourism in Nigeria. Those standards mean that every hotel or institution must train their staff twice a year. They must send their staff for training. Who is overlooking those things? How can you know if somebody is not well-trained if he is not on your register? How can you report bad service or poor service if it’s not on your register? Then how do you create a clear career path for our industry when we are not registered? People cannot wake up in the morning and say, I want to be a bartender. Most of the time, it’s always happening because they don’t have a job and they will serve for a long time. So, we are creating a structure that will help the industry scale up. Right now, we have allowed the worst of us to rule over the best of us in tourism. That cannot continue. We need to create that structure for us to be able to standardise the industry. One year is almost gone, what have we done? They think they can hold the whole sector to ransom. It’s not going to happen under my leadership. 

Don’t you think there’s need for dialogue to resolve these differences? 

Well, it’s as simple as we’ll keep doing what we need to do. I have a job to do, and I have a mandate to deliver. If you are open to engagement, we’ll engage you. I can tell you that nobody has written to me. I’ve been seeing everybody that wants to see me and

I’ve been making clarifications. We have gone beyond the stage of us going cap in hand to create a structure. At the point we are now, it is important for all of us to come together and rub minds. It’s my responsibility as Director General to make sure that the NIHOTOUR Act is implemented. For example, a director in my office who has served for 26 years wrote a letter and somebody said, ‘why is your DG not even signing it?’ Before you can rise to the level of director, you must have put in 26 years of your life. But if they see a letter from FRS state director, they start to shake. Because we don’t respect the sector that we are working in, there can never be respect for all of us. What am saying in essence is, there’s always need to dialogue. We’ll keep talking and we’ll keep acting. NIHOTOUR will not stop negotiating. Also, NIHOTOUR will not stop acting. We have to act on our Act and we need to implement it. Some of us have not even read this Act, all they are after is hear-say. They should read the Act and see how they can use it to better their businesses and create structures that work. So, we are creating  structure that will create more opportunity to invest in tourism. 

You’re almost two years in office, can you tell us your achievements? 

Well, my number one achievement, is that tourism now has a register. Whether we have 76 people on it or 35 people on it, the fact remains that we have a register and every other person that is not on that register is quack. 

What is the implication of the register? 

The implication of the register is that the Act mandated us to keep register of everybody

in that sector after two years of this Act and my predecessor worked on it. I came in and met the Act. Almost one year, four months after, we now have a register. Second, NIHOTOUR now has taken its rightful place in the industry. Before now, you get a fellowship from some associations, we now have national honour. 

If you are a senior member of National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism, that supersedes any other one that you have anywhere. In the last one and a half years, I would say that the influence of NIHOTOUR is getting bigger. It didn’t stop our training. Our training is moving together and it  has grown. Before now, we train about 1,000. In the last two years, we’ve trained about 3,000 across Nigeria. From about nine states that I met, we are now in 30 states, still no budgets.

We’re able to harmonise all our training, created new structures. Towards the end of the year, we will be creating a tourism academy. This is what we need for this  industry to grow. The industry will never grow if you don’t create the right standards.Thirdly, we now have a tribunal that everybody can go to. People that have genuine reasons don’t need to go to courts. That’s what the Act has done for us. A hotel staff can sue his or her boss if something goes wrong. Now, no expatriates can come and switch companies without NIHOTOUR being  informed. They can’t just come and buy a company and change ownership and say they’re coming with their people and leave out all the former staff. Nigerian workers now are protected because of that tribunal. NIHOTOUR is positioned to execute its regulatory role as an agency. 

What kind of tourism industry do you envision? 

I’m looking at an ecosystem where there will be a lot of preservation. We have not learned how to preserve what we have. We keep destroying what we have to create new things that we don’t even maintain. It’s a culture. I’m looking at a tourism that will have well-trained personnel who understand how important the natural ecosystem is. If I ask people to label a tree that has been more than 10 years in this area, nobody will be able to give that information. We have in our bushes, trees that are over 300 years. But in China, they will label such trees and people will write good stories about them. I’ll tell you stories about that. These can’t be guesswork; they are through information dissemination and the only thing that can make that happen is the structure being put in place. We have to force ourselves to train. So that’s the kind of tourism I envisage, where people can come and they get value for their money. What’s the value for their money? It’s in service.