World Tourism Day: Nigeria still struggles to earn tourists’ dollar

Today, the global tourism community is celebrating the World Tourism Day (WTD), a day set aside to raise awareness about the role of tourism within the international community.
The celebration is imperative because tourism contributed US$8.3 trillion to the global economy and supported 313 million jobs in 2017 from 1.322 billion people that travelled across the world for tourism last year.
Moreover, international tourist arrivals grew 6 percent in the first quarter of 2018, compared to the same period last year, and exceeding United Nations World Tourism Organisation’s (UNWTO) forecast for 2018.
However, for the 1.322 billion tourists that traveled the world in 2017, sadly, Africa attracted only 65 million of them. Nigeria hosted a little over 1 million tourists compared to Kenyan’s 1,474,671, Egypt’s 8,292,426, and South Africa’s 10.29 million foreign tourists in 2017.
Going by their sizes, Gambia and Ghana that attracted over 200,000 and roughly 1 million tourists respectively in 2017, seem to be doing better than Nigerian in tourism.
While Nigeria has failed to develop her tourism assets over the years due to the easy money from crude oil, other oil-producing countries of the world are rather using the oil money to develop enabling infrastructure for tourism in their countries.
The sad thing is that the country is calling for the enlisting of more local attractions in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites while the two enlisted sites; Sukur Kingdom and Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove are least visited.
For Nkereuwem Onung, chairman, BOT, Nigerian Association of Tour Operators, (NATOP), the 2018 celebration of WTD calls for action on sustainable tourism in Nigeria, reiteration of the need for the diversification of the economy using tourism as the lowest hanging fruit and collaboration of government and private sector in pulling along all relevant agencies to ensure focused development.
For a start, most industry stakeholders think that tourism needs a full fledge ministry to enable focused attention, concerted efforts and measurement of results as the present ministry is burdened with many responsibilities, especially the tedious task of the spokesperson of the government.
“We need a separate ministry of tourism and strategy to grow tourism appeal and offerings. We cannot continue to promote Nigeria just as a business destination while the tourism potential abound, but we need concerted efforts from government and private sector to do so. The ministry will coordinate such strategies and destination promotion through relevant agencies”, Mike Ohigwe, a tourism expert disclosed.
In same vein, Adetola Ogunbiyi, a hotelier and destination manager, noted that Nigeria seems to have missed the lessons of recession by not focusing on non-oil sectors, especially tourism, which offers easy entry.
“Like Kenya did, I thought there should have been more efforts at encouraging Nigerians to travel locally to support domestic tourism. The fact remains that if you do not patronise your own, outsiders will not. Obudu is almost dead, Argungu festival is gone, the zoos and parks are closing down, our children are seeing shopping malls as attractions, which is not supposed to be so. There should be efforts at wooing people back to local attractions”, Ogunbiyi said.
However, there are some feats to celebrate in the Nigerian tourism. According to Ikechi Uko, CEO, Akwaaba African Travel Market, tourism trends are changing with young private sector that is on fire to capture the youth market, which has exploded and growing.
“There is digitisation of travel services through Online Travel Agencies and use of Social media”, he said.
For him, the visa-on-arrival, a once celebrated feat, is working marginally now with hope of improvement in the nearest future.
As the national tourism master plan is still hanging, Uko thinks Lagos will set the pace if it pulls off its planned masterplan.
But while the world celebrate today September 27 as World Tourism Day, Lucky George, publisher of African Travel Times, urges all to remember Ignatius Atigbi, the Nigerian who proposed September 27th as World Tourism Day.
The stakeholders insist that, government at all levels should rethink, see tourism as sustainable revenue earner and work with relevant partners to ensure tourism enabling infrastructure are in place.

OBINNA EMELIKE