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By Okorie Uguru
IPADA Initiative, the annual celebration of African culture, tourism and all that is good about Africa, will kick off from November 28 to December 7 at the La Campagne Tropicana Resort, Ikegun, Lagos State. It will be the first major activity to usher in the end of the year fun season in Lagos, referred to as Detty December.
Among the programmes lined up for the 2025 IPADA Initiatives include music festival, beauty pageant, carnival procession, and many more.
Speaking on the event, the founder of the IPADA Initiative, Otunba Wanle Akinboboye, explained that the initiative aims to beam the focus on the rich culture, tourist attractions, and other natural resources the African continent is endowed with, so that they can be harnessed to develop the continent. He said: “We must on a regular basis be asking ourselves a very important pertinent question: that why is the wealthiest continent in the world with 30.3 million square kilometres of area, 1.5 billion people in the continent, an additional 120 million in Brazil and the Caribbean, over 30 million in the United States of America, in the Americas uncountable, and then you have over two million lovers of Africa, why are we the wealthiest when it comes to natural resources and at the same time we are regarded as the poorest?
“We believe that if you combine all of this, and call for people to connect with the continent, with activities happening in North Africa, South, East, West, Central Africa, all coming in through Nigeria. Lagos will be the entry point to any part of Africa. We have the deepest seaport, at Lekki port…let them land in Lekki, and from there, they go to any part of Africa they want to go to. We’re the big brother, let’s start acting like one. That is the idea of IPADA Initiative.”
Akinboboye said a five year programme for the annual showpiece was already in place, and that the initiative would also involve other African countries. His words: “We have a programme laid out for the next five years, all synchronized events that will be happening on a particular year, from North Africa, South, East, West, and Central Africa. So that a John Doe from Denver, Colorado, can pick up his diary and say, oh, I’m free in February. I want to visit my motherland. Such people, they look at all the activities in Africa, and they look for which one is interesting to them, then they book.
They can book from wherever they are and plan to pay little by little till 2028, when they finally take the trip to South Africa or to Ghana, to Togo, to Lagos. When we create a collective platform like that, that is when we can take advantage of the almost two billion people of primary, secondary and extended target market audience that we have in the continent and in the diaspora.
