There’s a nocturnal bird by name nightingale. It has a biological family of about 348 species and divided into 51 genera.
The most popular one, and I love its sonorous voice, is the male Rofous nightingale (luscinia megarhynclos), which won a YouTube video presence singing various songs, without any drumming support. It is indeed amazing, but I wonder why the bird so sings at night, when men are dead asleep.
No man, except he be awake, can sleepwalk through serious issues, music or songs being one of them. In Nigeria, night parties once used to be “a touristic product” until insecurity, banditry, armed robbery, kidnapping and the worst of socioeconomic dislocations became our creed.
Remember ye the owanmbes of the 1970s, Victor Olaiya’s Sisi sonorous romantic song? Ebenezer Obey, Sunny Ade, Orlando Owoh’s evergreen songs? This week, Felabration is on course, bringing back the memorable “African Lady” and, across the East, Owerri, decimated now by bloodletting, used to be capital of highlife music, with the Oriental brothers, Rex Lawson in the Garden City of Port Harcourt, with other creative trumpet generals all disging out songs cutting across tongues and diverse cultures of Nigeria.
Those were the nightingales of our time, the trailblazers of national unification through cultural music, and we grew up awake but not dead asleep to listen to them.
Come November, Nigeria will host a United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) event in Lagos. Prior to the approval to host the event, Nigeria, led by Minister of Information, Mr. Lai Mohammed, had deployed its famous nightingale voice, drawing from an embellished statistical data, the tourism jobs and sundry benefits hosting the tourism party would bring our distrusted nation, if UNWTO would come to see Nigeria.
During President Muhammadu Buhari’s visit to Spain about three months ago or thereabouts, our beautiful nightingale in Information and Culture ensured that our President visited the UNWTO headquarters and gave assurances of great hosting of the tourism world body and its member states.
In all those engagements, Nigeria did not table nor tender any document requesting for assistance in security, private sector entrepreneurs, rethinking tourism support or collaboration. All we did was to merely invite UNWTO to come witness an unveiling of a mere event centre, a national theatre, whitewashed and renamed “an entertainment city.”
Now, let me share with you what other serious African tourism nations table before UNWTO. These are the true nightingales of African tourism, futuristic, strategic and systematic, leveraging on global tourism opportunities and socioeconomic collaboration to develop their private sector tourism economy.
Hamat Bar is Gambia’s Minister of Tourism. He was among the first tourism nightingales in Africa to knock on the doors of UNWTO after the pandemic to request robust engagement and assistance for Africa’s ultural tourism rebound. He knew Africa region, not only Gambia, which ranked above Nigeria on foreign visitors choice list, deserved some technical oxygenation and begged the Polish ambassador head of UNWTO to come help Africa.
Eldevina Materula is Minister of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Mozambique. She tabled before Zureb Pololikashili, United Nation World Tourism Organisation secretary general, strategic outlines on innovation, education and investment opportunities in her home country, and sought UNWTO’s bilateral support to Rethink Tourism in Mozambique.
There were many others, African tourism nightingales, who sang in the daytime, requesting for support, understanding and commitment from the tourism world body to help their private sector entrepreneurs to rebound and re-engage after the pandemic thunderbolt.
What did Nigeria do? Where is our Rethinking strategies and why do we love to sing to deaf ears in the night? In fact, we sing nothing meaningful or special!
Let us critically come to security. Apart from the COVID-19 pandemic, insecurity is one major socioeconomic and environmental dislocation that has brought us to our knees. Even the civil war of the late 1960s and early 70s did not have such profound negative impacts on us.
Do you know that while other countries, possibly bedeviled by this anti-tourism economic monster, contacted UNWTO to share their pains, seeking solutions, Nigeria’s tourism minders were busy showcasing flowing agbadas and kaftan? Some slept at the recent UNWTO meeting in Arusha, Tanzania.
Pained and disturbed by rising insecurity bedeviling the world and negatively impacting on global travel, particularly in Africa, UNWTO, in collaboration with the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) and the West African Economic and Monetary Union inaugurated a white paper on safety and security in the tourism sector.
Elcia Grandcourt, UNWTO Africa regional director, who was in Nigeria about three weeks ago to merely inspect lodging and recreation facilities to be used to host UNWTO officials and member states, was at the behest of that strategic effort and, sadly, Nigeria, troubled by insurgency, was nowhere near making any input to the security white paper.
UNWTO member states, worried by the impact of security to their tourism end posts, lobbied to submit the impact assessment reports to the Elcia Grandcourt-inspired security white paper, knowing the effort may attract global security solution architecture to their country and also help other countries to find security bearings. That is strategic tourism thinking and not the rush to open an old event centre to which our ministry of Information, so “misinformingly” wish to put on stage.
Member states of UNWTO,so concerned about the impact of insecurity on their destination tourism economy were Kenya, Morocco, Senegal, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Portugal, Tunisia, Philippines, Mexico and Colombia.
These countries shared and contributed to best practices generated to ensure security and safety of foreign visitors and even domestic tourists in their countries. What did we share with the world on this all important check list on the tourism environment?