By Frank Meke
There’s something really good about the Good Book. Those who endure to the end, the good book says shall obtain the prize. The price to pay, however, for the spirit of endurance is the prize of victory, liberation, peace, joy, and happiness.
It also includes the gift of restoration, freedom and power of self-discovery, discipline, and trust in God, who is incomparable.
Endurance as the prize for suffering, which also opens the mind and heart to understanding, experience, and wisdom. Light as against darkness, tails endurance.
For eight years, nigerian tourism went dead. The industry was deliberately admitted to the intensive care unit at the University of Confusion, with two legs hung up, plastered with deceit and coloureful digital metrics. It was amazing how Nigeria simply went into tourism coma and crucified.
All surgical procedures, aided by quarterly allocations across the board, provided no relieves. Tourism was caught up in the abiku trajectory. It was dead. From 2015 to 2023, there was no achievement, no measurable impact, no consolatory moonlight lyrics, just pain and sorrow.
Check out the special orchestra concert from the Ministry of Culture and its Tourism Department. We have a ministry just in name only, hence the ministration of ineptitude.
The tourism department is a cell for the most absurd, difficult to define, yet a guzzler of tourism funds. Its speciality is to enthrone offerings of imbecility. It is the home of chop and clean mouth, as we call street rough necks in our country.
Eight years, Nigeria tourism travelled abroad to all unwto conferences and brought home, no “papa oyoyo,” leaving expectant children on the dry end.
If there is one ministry that deserves national notoriety, we need not look far. It takes endurance and patience to simply stay on the side of sanity. if we carefully add up all the entire budgeted releases to all the nine agencies, under the Ministry, and the near zero achievement, believe me, some people should be behind bars in places where accountability matters.
This is a ministry of kalokalo. It swallows everything and everyone in sight. It employed necromancy and holds the sector in cryptic spells.
We watched how a tourism development agency transmuted into an absolute authority in just eight years. An agency funded by the government to unbundle and take the message of tourism gain to the grassroots and to the private sector, suddenly turned hitleristic, belligerent, and toxic to a tourism community, looking forward to another messiah, after Segun Runsewe left 2013.
Eight years, lost to the animal farmer, one man who with clanish and divisive bile, spewed hatred against practitioners. He claims superior knowledge and opinion, yet he floundered on basic timelines. This guy mentors mediocrity and rewards deception. He shares no tourism prosperity!
It is only in Nigeria tourism that such characters are allowed to minister. He brought nothing to the tourism table and is not ashamed to be an enemy of Nigeria tourism history. It is just unbelievable how some people “flavoured” and selected to leave behind the measure of developmental milestones, would rather choose to mark time at public bar.
It’s an irony of history that some people would choose self-deception, play to the gallery, and expect plaudits from those whom they oppressed.
Psychologists say fear could create motions, and as the good book explains, men seen as trees, a certain state of mind, lacking confidence and cohesion.
Now that the long waited month of MAY is here, just around the corner, we can confidentially expect that those who got three billion, four billion, two billion, five billion, and shishi million naira annually or quarterly, may as well be ready to let us know how they wasted our money.
It is not my business to go looking behind their backs on how they messed up the industry and left it paralysed. Some of them spent their time, partying and snoring. Little men, on ego trip, withered trees, with no fruits whatsoever.
The month of MAY will witness the cutting down of such worthless trees, which neither could bear good fruits or provide shelter.
Soon, the master will come and ask them to show what they have done with the talents given to them. Oh dear, one could imagine the dramatics, the forlorn, and laughable answers.
There’s the fellow at the Authority who will possibly ask the master what he too has done with plenty of goods at the warehouse of the commonwealth. The guy is known to be cheeky, of mobid genre. Once asked why he could not point to any notable footprint in tourism, he pointed to his employer and requested he too furnish first his own strides on the sand of time.
Another one sings like a canary and pretends he could regulate the creative sector. The new flick, GANG OF LAGOS, simply put him off his eight years of insipid leadership. Walahi, where these characters are sourced from, only God knows.
There’s a cinema house at iganmu lagos. It’s used to be an iconic place, but suddenly stripped of all known luxury. It didn’t begin with the caterpillars of this eight years trajectory, honestly, but got elevated to the hunting ground of vintage plates and pans originally used to decorate the place.
It enjoyed funding, and if we ask for the result sheet, please go check it out yourself as everything is buried in the pipeline.
We have Museum(s) Galleries Of Art and a Centre for Black market history, sorry, civilization. To compare notes, I was at Drrapheal James Museum at idimu, lagos, recently, and I wondered why we open tourism iDP camps to force-fed questionable characters. They must go to learn from Dr James how to run a museum and a centre for Black civilization.
The people at those places definitely have questions to answer. How they will pass off their poor talents deployment is left for you to guess. I will be waiting and reporting.
To the remaining few that have done well with their little talents ( I heard the headmaster gives a pass mark if you played along, no be ony only security people get toll gate ooo), well, your rewards awaits you soon.
Fear of another failed eight years of tourism is worrisome. Can Nigeria tourism practitioners survive it, or would the President elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, bring us succour?
I will not predict but prophesy that the month of MAY should wipe away from our history, the names of those who failed us, and make us a laughing stock in the community of tourism nations.
By the way, where is the unwto university for the training of tourism practitioners? Now that ntdc is now NTDA, has it given up on the Gastronomy festival, a fall out of the visit to unwto in February? We were told to wait for the month of MAY.
The spirit of the month of MAY is here, a time to take stock, a time to measure truth and lies, a time to call out to public space, those who stole us blind, body, soul and money. There is no hiding place for our tourism failures. Eight years, is a chunk of valued tourism time out and Nigeria, wasted it, as we are wont to say here, it was business as usual.