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On May 2, 2023, Nigeria’s cultural ambassador and director-general, National Council for Arts and Culture (NCAC), Otunba Segun Runsewe, stood before industry leaders and players in the most profound seminal submission, requesting for deep and sober reflection on where and how the cultural tourism economy will pan out in years to come.
When Runsewe came to the cultural beat, his vision was to transform the Nigerian culture landscape to a cash cow, determine its sustainability and impact to the rural poor, particularly women, and upscale skills that are culturally honed to drive knowledge and education.
He also knew that Nigeria’s cultural diversity could help unite the people, process tolerance and peace and help build a deep understanding of our socioeconomic and political development.
Runsewe found Nigeria’s iconic festival, National Festival of Arts and Culture (Nafest), a veritable vehicle to pursue this agenda and objectives to the fullest realisation and impartation to a new Nigeria.
Each Nafest held under the careful watch and mentoring of Runsewe positions a cultural and historical theme, with feverish events rubbing off positively on the nation and people.
Indeed, the deliberate agenda to blend and harness the orientation of the private sector artistic community, traditional rulers, tourism trade professionals and promoters and the media through collaborations enlarged the cultural empowerment ecosystem.
Youths and students were not left behind in the repositioning of culture as the new pillar to change Nigeria’s traditional and historical narrative, a strong futuristic dream to keep our country as one indivisible nation.
On several frontiers, Runsewe has fought against cultural semantics with disruptive tendencies, particularly those with foreign influences targeting attitudinal change in our children through the strange dressing habits and deviant sex transplants.
Recently, the political and economic space also erupted with negative disruptive ethnic and religious signs, which Runsewe quickly nipped in the bud, strategically reaching to douse tensions and put the nation back on cultural sensitivity and correctiveness.
Nigeria, no doubt, could conveniently top religious tourism destination ranking and be profitable, yet the disruptive deployment of predictions as prophetic utterances rankled the sensitiveness of opinions, ditto duty-free ethnic profiling, which runs contrary to our diversity.
The ‘japa’ syndrome also negatively disrupted Nigeria’s cultural cohesion, with futuristic negative consequences for the survival of our history, language and love for our family system and marriage beliefs.
These are interesting parameters to relearn and reasses the Nigerian cultural value chain, particularly with a new government around the corner and indeed to brace up and respond to both negative and positive disruptions, which must be culturally addressed, not just by government but also by the private sector.
Honestly, the responsiveness that Runsewe brought to bear in Nigeria’s cultural tourism space through NCAC certainly put pressure on how we wish to respond to how we can help our people stay proud about who we are and how the world reacts to new thoughts on Nigerian economy and politics.
In less than five years on the culture beat, Runsewe has brought the state governors to bid to host national cultural events, fuelling strategic response by traditional rulers to intervene to birth local festivals and also encourage domestic cultural tourism.
Indeed, these positive cultural disruptions must be protected and guarded against certain thoughts and processes, just as the Chinese have done for centuries. Today, the Chinese are better profiled and known through their cultural tradition all over the world, particularly through their China Town economic promotions and their culinary exports.
Nigeria’s Nafest showcases these interesting possibilities, waiting to export our cultural advantages to a world looking for originality and innovation in Nigerian music, dance, fashion and entertainment.
Take a look at the African map, Nigeria’s cultural diversity and influence reigns supreme but it is yet to positively disrupt established trade and marketing models, which deliberately strangulate its reach and impact across borders.
My opinion: the fragmentation of Nigeria’s tourism policy (if any), where information rides over cultural tourism goals, stifles, rather than speeds up, national focal benefits on Nigeria’s culturally driven tourism engagements.
Runsewe certainly listens to the private sector and has over the years made it the NCAC’s central policy not only to collaborate with them but to provide opportunities for their effective participation in marketing the emerging culture economy.
From various interventions by stakeholders at the Abuja meeting held at Kapital Hotel, the summary is that Nigerian culture is in good hands with Runsewe, and must help reawaken other sub-sectors to the quest to win the diadem so that Nigeria can again, glory in its diversity and population.
To those who don’t like Runsewe’s positively impactful desire to do things culturally differently, I will advise they punch his picture in the corner of their rooms, but, to me and other Nigerians who take pride in his determination to be held accountable for our cultural tourism tomorrow, we pray that God honours and keeps him to see the dawn of a rich and blessed Nigerian culture.
