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I really don’t think Nigerians do care about the National Theatre in Iganmu, Lagos. It is like the place is irredeemable, attracting the most absurd in management and leadership.
Certainly, something has gone wrong even with its advertised planned takeover by the Bankers’ Committee, after a perceived and failed privatisation and all manner of policy jingoism before and during this administration.
I recall the oratorical sing-songs of Edem Duke, our immediate former Minister of Tourism, as he regaled us with the thousands jobs and other surreal benefits that would come our way, if his Dubai-based investors were handed the place to manage, or was it outright sale?
Edem Duke’s voice still rings in my head as if it was yesterday. It is like the voice of Jacob deceiving Isaac.
Yes, those who know the game going on at the National theatre, won’t be surprised that the former iconic place of national artistic and cultural endeavour, has become the complex of national shame and embarrassment.
It has been deliberately mismanaged, stripped naked in our own very “korokoro” eyes, and has transformed to a conduit pipe for financial sleaze.
To say that the place is in darkness like hell would be an understatement. The National Theatre is the new hole for reptiles, cockroaches and rats.
Like the cockroach, the management lives in darkness, hates light and will never believe it has nothing new to offer, to bring about change to the place but to dwell in deceit.
I sincerely can’t understand why this government, our Ministry of Culture and Tourism, would count this place as a worthy entity, a place of artistic meet and expression and deserving our budget support.
I just wonder!!!
Segmented and partitioned into various slaughter slabs and showpiece of fraudulent shenanigans, the theater we grew up to behold as the soul of our entertainment enterprise and artistic rebirth has gone from magnificent to the most profane, leaving a gap and hole in our history and culture.
There are no more Hubert Ogundes to see live, or the Baba Salas! Our children are holed up in private, unbecoming and uncensored cinemas, corrupted to no end by foreign films and entertainment genres.
Rape suddenly pervades our national life because the leadership and managers of the National Theatre are lost to ideas on how to bring back life to the place. The managers of the theatre seem happy to see the place looking dirty and filthy. They lack creativity to bring the Nigerian families and the domestic entertainment influencers together.
Our fathers, our parents long for an iconic place to tell our children the moonlight stories, a historical place where our children will meet flesh and blood our creative artists, and get motivated to keep the history and tradition of our people alive.
The leadership of the National Theatre cannot and would never stay put on their mandate, that is if they have any, and connect the young persons to be proud of the ingenuity and artistic influence of theatre greats like Jimi Solanke, Pete Edochie, Richard Mofe Damijo, Clarion Chukwura, Ogene of Africa, and many others.
Is it out of place to bring great musical minds such as Ebenezer Obey and Sunny Ade out of retirement and get the theatre blasting off the oldies that brought great moments in the Nigerian entertainment circle back to open stage? Is it impossible for the leadership of the theatre to go hunt and bring back our diverse Nigerian kitchen experience under the roof of the National Theatre outpost, thus promoting our food culture and creating jobs? Is it out place to get Ali Baba and his humour gangs to the theatre to make us laugh away our security and economic pains?
I just kind of wonder what this Professor Sunday Ododo is “dodoing” (forgive my English) with the National Theatre organizing national festivals when he is yet to lift the huge log of failure blocking his vision. It’s even sad that it will take this interrogation of the theatre for most Nigerians to know that a Professor Sunday Ododo runs the affairs of this dormant iconic entertainment centre.
Now, let me say it as it is: Of the new managers of the agencies under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Prof. Ododo is the most colourless. Though he is a good dresser and I like his signature three piece Agbada, he, however, seems lost on how to creatively rebrand the Theatre and turn it around. True!!
Though today is not about the National Institute of Hospitality and Tourism (NIHOTOUR), led by Nura Kangiwa, I should think a peer review mechanism be put in place by our Minister Lai Mohammed for leadership of the agencies under the ministry.
Of the whole lot of new managers, only Mallam Ado Yahuza, DG of the National Institute for Cultural Orientation, has shown capacity to stay focused and reinvent national discourse on the way forward to harness our cultural diversity to drive national unity.
From the north to south, west and connecting the eastern frontiers soon, Mallam Ado Yahuza has brought Nigerian cultural stakeholders to the table to discuss how we must put heads together to build a greater and better Nigeria that we can be proud of. I will advise and Prof. Ododo and his struggling peers to learn the ropes of management from Yahuza. Indeed, I should think Kangiwa should be awake now and know that he is under watch at NIHOTOUR. As for the eggheads at the Museums and Monuments, and CBAAC, your days are counting and shall soon ask for your report cards!
