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There’s something really good about the Good Book. Those who endure to the end, the Good Book says, shall obtain the prize. The price to pay, however, for the spirit of endurance is the prize of victory, liberation, peace, joy and happiness.
It also includes the gift of restoration, freedom and power of self-discovery, discipline, and trust in God, who is incomparable.
Endurance, as the prize for suffering, also opens the mind and heart to understanding, experience and wisdom. Light, as against darkness, tails endurance.
For eight years, Nigerian tourism went dead. The industry was deliberately admitted to the intensive care unit at the University of Confusion, with two legs hung up, plastered with deceit and coloureful digital metrics. It was amazing how Nigeria simply went into tourism coma.
All surgical procedures, aided by quarterly allocations across the board, provided no relief. Tourism was caught up in the abiku trajectory. It was dead. From 2015 to 2023, there was no achievement, no measurable impact, no consolatory moonlight lyrics, just pain and sorrow.
Check out the special orchestra concert from the Ministry of Culture and its Tourism Department. We have a ministry just in name only, hence the ministration of ineptitude.
The tourism department is a cell for the most absurd, difficult to define, yet a guzzler of tourism funds. Its speciality is to enthrone offerings of imbecility. It is the home of chop-and-clean-mouth, as we call street roughnecks in our country.
Eight years, Nigerian tourism travelled abroad to all UNWTO conferences and brought home no “papa oyoyo,” leaving expectant children on the dry end.
If there is one ministry that deserves national notoriety, we need not look far. It takes endurance and patience to simply stay on the side of sanity. If we carefully add up all the entire budgeted releases to all the nine agencies, under the ministry, and the near zero achievement, believe me, some people should be behind bars in places where accountability matters.
This is a ministry of kalokalo. It swallows everything and everyone in sight. It employed necromancy and held the sector in cryptic spells.
We watched how a tourism development agency transmuted into an absolute authority in just eight years. An agency funded by the government to unbundle and take the message of tourism to the grassroots and to the private sector suddenly turned hitleristic, belligerent, and toxic to a tourism community looking forward to another messiah, after Segun Runsewe left in 2013.
It’s an irony of history that some people would choose deception, play to the gallery and expect plaudits from those whom they oppressed.
Now that the long waited month of May is here, just around the corner, we can confidentially expect that those who got billions of naira annually or quarterly may as well be ready to let us know how they wasted our money.
It is not my business to go looking behind their backs to see how they messed up the industry and left it paralysed. Some of them spent their time partying and snoring. Little men on ego trips, withered trees with no fruits whatsoever.
The month of May will witness the cutting down of such worthless trees, which neither could bear good fruits nor provide shelter.
Soon, the master will come and ask them to show what they have done with the talents given to them. Oh dear, one could imagine the dramatics, the forlorn and laughable answers.
There’s the fellow at the authority who will possibly ask the master what he too has done with plenty of goods at the warehouse of the commonwealth. The guy is known to be cheeky, of mobid genre. Once asked why he could not point to any notable footprint in tourism, he pointed to his employer and requested he too furnish first his own strides on the sands of time.
Another one sings like a canary and pretends he could regulate the creative sector. The new flick, “Gangs of Lagos,” simply put him off his eight years of insipid leadership. Walahi, where these characters are sourced from, only God knows.
There’s a cinema house in Iganmu, Lagos. It used to be an iconic place but, suddenly, it was stripped of all known luxury. It didn’t begin with the caterpillars of this eight years trajectory, honestly, but got elevated to the hunting ground of vintage plates and pans originally used to decorate the place.
It enjoyed funding and, if we ask for the result sheet, please, go check it out yourself as everything is buried in the pipeline.
We have museums, Galleries of Art and a Centre for blackmarket history, sorry, civilization. To compare notes, I was at Drrapheal James Museum at Idimu, Lagos, recently, and I wondered why we open tourism IDP camps to force-fed questionable characters. They must go to learn from Dr. James how to run a museum and a centre for Black civilization.
The people at those places definitely have questions to answer. How they will pass off their poor talents deployment is left for you to guess. I will be waiting and reporting.
Fear of another failed eight years of tourism is worrisome. Can Nigerian tourism players survive it, or would the President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, bring us succour?
I will not predict but prophesy that the month of May should wipe away from our history the names of those who failed us and made us a laughing stock in the comity of tourism nations.
The spirit of the month of May is here, a time to take stock, a time to measure truth and lies, a time to call out to public space those who stole us blind, body, soul and money. There is no hiding place for our tourism failures. Eight years is a chunk of valued tourism time and Nigeria wasted it, as we are wont to say here, it was business as usual.
