By Frank Meke.
Tourism Minister, Mrs lola Ade John, will embark on a physical endurance test tomorrow, Thursday, September 26th, and, on Friday, 27th, in a fanciful show of force for Nigeria tourism. Lola Ade John will lead her team to cut open the ceremonial tapes at the Abuja Radio House where the ministry and its troupe of jesters would celebrate World Tourism Day.
The World Tourism Day is celebrated annually on the 27th of September, by all members States of United Nations Tourism (UN Tourism), formerly known as the United Nations World Tourism Organisation ( unwto) with a special theme, focal to either addressing global tourism issues or highlighting its famed interventionist values and gains to economies and peoples all over the world.
This year’s theme, “Tourism and Peace”, takes a deeper insight into how the industry adjudged the largest employer of labour, helps to enthrone peaceful coexistence among nations through strategic understanding of cultural tourism diversity and values inherent in preserving people’s heritage competitiveness, powering job creation and revenue generation to develop a sustainable rural economy.
In a news report by a news medium, the Nigerian agenda to celebrate the day, which was forwarded to me, the reporter cheekily “mocked” Lola Ade John Walk for tourism as a ” new dimension,” leaving readers with options to draw their conclusions on the Walk through the city of Abuja, which was not intentioned to call for a change to the bitter but avoidable communial clashes across the country with our most border communities going to battle over land related issues or over other mundane dislocations. Auntie lola walk is not also reported to help address the near total collapse of our once secured environment by marauding kidnappers and haters of Nigerian peace.
The minister’s new wtd Walk therefore calls for a serious interrogation to what actually it’s meant to achieve since she not either flying a kite to draw attention to the possibility of a national reorientation to having a peaceful engagement by Nigeria’s diverse cultures and peoples to show temperance in any possible sociopolitical issues that may bred dislocations neither is her cat walk on the well paved Abuja roads is to go host at the Abuja city gate a creatively designed Nigerian flag that could excite the history books of the
Guinness World Record with a thoughtful message, calling on Nigerians to live in peace for the sake of cultural tourism promotion and national development.
Anyway, since the minister and her wtd planning committee are strangers to the many socioeconomic dislocations in the country, which in itself provokes a breached environment, her choice to approve and lead such adventure walk for mere test of physical health fitness, is worrisome because she did not tell us if there would be oversight by medical paramedics and ambulances in case any participant starts breathing hard for fresh air.
Knowing fully well that our government people only think about their pockets and not their health, that lola Ade John organised walk may lead to another avoidable national emergency, which may again force out our caring president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to leave his busy table on hospitals round visits to sympathise with those who should just simply in the first place gather at Apo Hills for a breath of fresh air and healthy drinks to celebrate World Tourism Day, instead of trying to show us a new dimension to how not draw attention to a failed tourism ministry.
My friend and brother in the pen business, Okorie Uguru of African Herald Magazine, called me up this morning to remind me that Nigeria ought to be celebrating 25 years of tourism but poisoned his intervention by equally reminding me( us) to list what gains we had made over those two decades and half.
I won’t write all he angrily vomited, particularly about those unelected but selected to confuse and confound our cultural tourism narratives.
So,by tomorrow and Friday, we shall stay in various corners to watch madam lola Ade John and her new Olympic hopefuls in a national tourism walk to which intent is just be seen to ” show off skirt and sport boots in the name of tourism.
The radio house talk show, I am very sure, will be the same banal meetings on Friday, to which we have seen her sustain for the past few months. Now that she is so fit to walk from the city gate to the radio house, and if you know Abuja very well, that is indeed a distance that must require both police , road safety, and national emergency services .
To walk such a distance by our lovely and beautiful minister who is just coming out of health issues scares me to no end, and I kind of wonder why her aides want her to take such a risk.
Maybe the Madam tourism UK based medical team has given her the nod to participate, but I will suggest she just go straight to the radio house, cut the tape to declare the tourism talk show open, present a nice paper with no commitment to anything serious to either on attention to the security agencies to wake up and secure Nigeria or simply dance to the drummings of her cultural troupe of tourism jesters, share drinks and say bye to another meaningless gathering for the sake of tourism and peace!.
