By Wale Ojo-Lanre, Esq.
Mr President,
I come before you not as a critic, not as a partisan, and not as a spectator, but as a Nigerian who has spent his entire professional life studying, documenting, advocating, and believing in the unrealised promise of this country’s tourism economy.
I speak with humility, experience, and deep patriotic concern.
I am earnestly pleading and begging you, President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to lift tourism out of the shackles in which it has been bound for decades and grant it the freedom of strategic autonomy it desperately needs to serve Nigeria.
For over twenty-five years, I covered Nigeria’s tourism sector as a journalist with the Nigerian Tribune, attending major tourism fairs and exhibitions across the world, studying global best practices, and comparing Nigeria with nations far less endowed but far more organised.
I further equipped myself academically and professionally—obtaining international certification in Green Growth and Travelism from Hasselt University in Belgium, undergoing specialised MICE training in Frankfurt, Germany, experiencing all eight National Parks in Nigeria, and travelling across more than eighty-six countries. This journey has given me a rare, comparative understanding of how tourism works as an economic system and why it fails where structure is denied.
From this vantage point, Mr President, I say this with absolute conviction: no nation on earth is more blessed with tourism potential than Nigeria. There is no state in this federation where God has not deposited tourism assets—natural, cultural, religious, historical, geographic, or experiential. There is no known tourism typology Nigeria does not possess in abundance: beach tourism, ecotourism, sports tourism, religious tourism, medical tourism, heritage tourism, leisure tourism, creative tourism, and even dark tourism. Our problem has never been assets. Our problem has been structure, political will, and institutional clarity.
Tourism has remained shackled because Nigeria has refused to recognise it as a multidisciplinary economic sector. Instead, it has been persistently treated as an appendage of arts and culture—ceremonial, decorative, and peripheral. Tourism is not a festival. Tourism is not a dance troupe. Tourism is not pageantry. Tourism is a system that interfaces directly with aviation, transport, security, environment, infrastructure, health, trade, investment, sports, religion, and international mobility. No nation in the world has successfully developed tourism by burying it inside a super-ministry overwhelmed by unrelated mandates.
Mr President, when you created a standalone Ministry of Tourism in 2023, you made history. You corrected a decades-long structural injustice. For the first time, tourism had a seat at the cabinet table. For the first time, it had visibility, focus, and direction. Under Mrs Lola Ade-John, even within a short span of fourteen months and with limited resources, tourism began to breathe again. Nigeria returned to global tourism conversations. Policy momentum was restored. Stakeholder confidence revived.
Then, suddenly, the ministry was submerged again into the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy. From that moment, progress stalled. Visibility faded. Authority diluted. Tourism once again became an afterthought. Mr President, this was not reform; it was regression. It was not consolidation; it was suffocation.
Tourism globally is not driven by culture alone. Arts and culture represent no more than twenty percent of the tourism value chain. The remaining eighty percent lies in geography, ecotourism, beaches, leisure infrastructure, MICE, sports events, religious gatherings, medical travel, education mobility, and environmental assets. These sectors require technical planning, spatial zoning, capital mobilisation, security coordination, and inter-ministerial execution that a culture-centric ministry cannot realistically provide.
Nigeria has over forty-eight documented waterfalls, yet no national waterfall development programme. We have over seven hundred and fifty kilometres of Atlantic coastline, yet no coastal tourism master plan, no cruise tourism framework, no marina policy, no beach zoning regime. We have stadiums across the federation, globally celebrated athletes, and massive youth energy, yet no national sports tourism strategy. We are one of the most religious nations on earth, hosting millions of pilgrims annually, yet religious tourism remains informal, unstructured, and unaccounted for. These are not failures of imagination. They are failures of institutional focus.
Mr President, there is also a painful contradiction that must be stated plainly. In the current fiscal year, over ten billion naira was earmarked for a Tourism Ministry that no longer exists as a standalone institution. This exposes policy incoherence and diluted accountability. Tourism funds now circulate within a merged bureaucracy already overwhelmed with arts, culture, creative economy, and curative heritage responsibilities. A minister with too much to chew will inevitably neglect tourism—not out of ill will, but because structure makes neglect unavoidable.
Around the world, countries with fewer assets than Nigeria outperform us consistently because they understand one truth: tourism requires autonomy. Morocco, Kenya, Rwanda, Egypt, South Africa—each treats tourism as a strategic economic sector with cabinet-level authority. Nigeria’s underperformance is not mysterious. It is structural.
Mr President, tourism in Nigeria is not weak. It is overwhelmed. It is shackled. It is suffocating under a structure that does not fit its economic nature. And this brings me to my final words, which I speak not with pride, but with tears.
Mr President, I am on my knees.
I am begging you.
On behalf of millions of Nigerians whose livelihoods depend on tourism yet unborn, on behalf of communities sitting on waterfalls, beaches, forests, monuments, and sacred sites without hope, on behalf of a nation searching desperately for non-oil economic pathways—I plead with you to unshackle tourism.
Lift tourism out of the cage.
Restore its standalone ministry.
Give it voice, authority, and focus.
Do not let tourism remain a poor orphan—rich in assets, poor in attention, and absent from national development logic. History will remember you not only as the President who reformed the economy, but as the leader who finally allowed Nigeria’s tourism destiny to breathe.
Mr President, I beg you.
…..Wale Ojo-Lanre,a Barrister – At – Law is the Director General Ekiti State Bureau of Tourism Development.