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Tony Osauzo, Benin
The Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, has endorsed a suggestion at a town hall meeting in Benin City that National Theatre, Lagos, should be named after the legendary musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
Prof. Osinbajo, however, added that said such decision is not in his purview to take.
According to him, the late Afrobeat maestro deserves such national honour from government even after his death both as a Nigerian and father of Nigerian modern music.
“Well I don’t see any reason, why not? The only problem of course is that it is not in my place to decide what national monument of such named after any individual. But I must say that I agree with you that Fela is as deserving as any to have such a preferred monument named after him,” he said.
Speaking on the need to have Nigeria music dot com as requested by a member of the audience, Osinbajo said “truth of the matter is that if you look at all the examples given, they are all private driven,” stressing that in order to sustain any of these things, they must have a pure public motive.
“Government is the poorest businessman you will ever find and that is why I certainly do not support the idea of government investing in those things,” the Vice President said, adding that what government can do is to “see if we can get funding for private sector individual who want to invest.
“For example there are two very good initiatives for funding creativity in Nigeria. One is the Bank of Industry. The Bank of Industry has put together a fund for cultural organization and we think that, that will be one that will be able to satisfy some of these ideas. The other is the Master Card Foundation who have also indicated that they will be very happy to invest in creativity and entertainment generally. So I think that the kind of thing that government can do is to see how we can invest by way of funding and then encourage investment in some of these and I think we can certainly do so through some of the funding initiatives that I have mentioned,” he said.
