Let me start this piece by commending Mr. Abiodun Odusanwo for creating a nest for discussing benefits, strategies and challenges of our national tourism growth and development.
Since he returned years back to Nigeria from the United Kingdom, where he played major roles, moulding young persons and their future, Odunsanwo has not lost sight of his intention to build a better Nigerian tourism space.
He floated the Institute of Tourism Professionals (ITP) and, lately, on introspection due to perceived semantics to the public queries on the body, took to change in name but not in structure.
Looking at the “new” Institute of Tourism Practitioners of Nigeria (ITPN), Mr. Odusanwo is the life president. He is the structure, funder, the godfather, and soul and blood. He is the ITPN caregiver and is astonishingly very cryptic.
This is the black spot, the intriguing aspect of ITPN, which has made its evaluation mechanism and evangelism of tourism realities gravely suspect.
At his first media meeting with the organised travel media years back, attempts to unveil what and where this educationist turned freeway tourism influencer met with a brickwall.
Odusanwo is more of a mystery man than a game-changer, easygoing, friendly but putinistic in opinion. He quietly penerated the Abuja red zones first by working assiduously through the Federation of Tourism Associations of Nigeria (FTAN), studied and adopted its zonal structure and adopted it for his dream green animal farm.
There were allegations that FTAN cooked up (not in any negative disruptive tendencies) the need to factor an inter-ministerial bridge for the industry and pushed it to the tables of national council of transportation and culture but allowed it to fallow.
In the covens of the industry, it was alleged that the ITPN godfather dusted up the document, giving it new slants beneficial to other ministerial organs and agencies, but blinded the benefits to the general good.
Since Abuja is big with institutional structures that could power tourism revival and revenue but hugely ignorant on how to deploy their contents to aid tourism growth expectations and revenue generation, it is, therefore, a place for those with preying instincts like our man from ITPN.
From the National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism to the new acts of Parliament empowering new holds for government tourism agencies, unproven and unprofiled information pointed to Odusanwo’s dream ideas. Whether he was outsmarted or not, his roles in all these alleged happenings are left in the realm of imagination. We shall hunt for any document in this regard and shall do justice in due time.
Take it or leave it, Odusanwo knows where he’s headed. As earlier stated, he alone wrote the bible of his tourism ideas and methodology, he is the evangelist and sole preacher. Others prancing around him are mere vehicles of sanctification and not his disciples.
Abiodun Odusanwo, I am sure, knows about Judas, there’s one that flaunts a flowing gown, competitive to vanity. It is a joke o.
Now, to the summit, the unveiling of a book on communiques arrived at past outings reminds me of how much we talk and talk, but no action. This accumulation of tourism transportation intelligence over the years props and sometimes hardly resonates again.
In the boardrooms ecosystem, this is labelled rightly as matters arising. Indeed, nothing in real sense has arisen from the confab of this transportation summit other than celebrations of cacophonious entrapment. Truth in tongues in cheeks.
FTAN’s Nkereweum Onung possibly steered this year’s summit towards where the world seems to be heading and that is collaboration.
Today, trade bodies and government bodies partner to change narratives and introduce measures of tourism survival. The word out there is to thrive together, and we cannot pretend we are insulated from global tourism shakings and disruptions.
In South Africa, their tourism council, in the mould of FTAN, is practically the implementation arm of most government tourism action plans, lobbying and effectively collaborating with the government and other foreign institutions to drive their tourism, even though it is not completely Uhuru for them.
Maybe it is a black man’s disease or conundrums, the fear to collaborate, is certainly our drawback and it is a factor that Odusanwo must overcome. To run this summit as sole proprietorship is to bury it in the cemetery of tourism ideas. The countdown has begun, and let those who dream to run this race alone, whether in the private or public sector, wake up and build bridges, not walls, or die unsung.