From Owerri, agony of Nigeria’s hoteliers
By MAURICE ARCHIBONG
Thursday, December 27, 2007

•Mallam Aminu Nuhu. Photos: MAURICE ARCHIBONG

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The Yuletide and every holiday translate into the classic peak period for hospitality industry operators. Hotel owners and leisure spot proprietors usually smile to the bank following huge hauls this season, but theirs is usually hard-earned money.

It comes from a period, when services are over-stretched and facilities over-taxed. Although the practice in advanced societies is to engage some casual hands during busy seasons, hospitality industry practitioners in Nigeria shy away from doing this. They simply refuse to hire more workers in order to save cost.

As a result, many guests are dissatisfied with quality of service, leading sometimes to shouting matches from flared tempers.
While it is true that hotel proprietors are in business to make money, the client also deserves to get his money’s worth. So, a healthy balance must be struck between the investor’s profitability and quality service delivery to each guest. This is the reason the Nigeria hotel industry was chosen as focus of today’s Travels.

Nigeria boasts thousands of hotels, but while some fit the bill in every way, many simply do not deserve that name. One of the banes of the Nigerian hospitality industry is the dearth of trained hands, according to veteran hotelier Chief Livinus Ukwunna. Take the hotel business for example, "In Nigeria, inefficiency subsists, even in major hotels, including some big ones in Abuja. Most hotel workers in Nigeria are not qualified persons. Many of those with formal training are women, who are Home Economics graduates instead of Hotel and Catering Management specialists," observed Pa Ukwunna.

Pa Ukwunna, founder of one of Nigeria’s oldest private owned inns, recalls Nigerian women entered the hotel business years before their male counterparts. In deed, by the early 1960s, he was one of only two males among seven Nigerians studying hotel and catering management in the London. Pa Ukwunna could not recall the name of the other man, but remembered that his only male companion was "an Itsekiri man." Pa Ukwunna said Nigerian men simply did not like "working in a hotel, those days. So, many women were ahead of men in local hotels, whereas in London, women mostly headed restaurants," he recalled.

Pa Ukwunna is truly a veritable pioneer of the Nigerian hotel industry because he entered the hotel business as an employee in 1956. He was first employed at Mainland Hotel as an Accounts Clerk and was head of the Front Office (Reception) before leaving for London in 1961 to study Hotel and Catering Management at London Polytechnic. He spent four years in the British capital before returning in 1965.

While in London, Pa Ukwunna worked as Trainee Assistant Manager at Europa Hotel in the West London area. Although his weekly salary ranged between 12 pounds and 15 pounds, he said the money more than met his needs. As to how he coped, Pa Ukwunna reckoned he must have measured very well, for he got "three or four titles for good performance." Chief Ukwunna subsequently rose to become the first indigenous General Manager of Mainland Hotels, Lagos.

Pa Ukwunna said he was not only the first indigenous professional hotelier at Mainland Hotel but also worked at Ikoyi Hotel both in Lagos.
In recognition for his contribution to the local and international hotel industry, the Hotel and Catering Institute of Nigeria awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) honoris causa to Pa Ukwunna. That is how Chief Ukwunna, a Knight of Saint John (KSJ) and Justice of the Peace (JP), came by his title of Dr., we gathered.

Unfortunately, most hotels in Nigeria are very expensive, compared to what obtains in neighbouring countries. Travels studies show that most tourists are not looking for four or five star outfits. But even the cost of staying in a three or two star lodge in major Nigerian settlements could prove too exorbitant for the average sightseer. And this is not good for tourism growth, for a countless number of tourists are adventurers, young students or research scholars, and more often than not, are budget travellers.
Thus, where hotel bills are more affordable, tourism yields higher dividend, greater profit for entrepreneurs and more jobs for the youth, through larger turnover. This is one of the reasons tourists flock to Benin Republic, Ghana and Burkina Faso, for example.

In Cotonou (Benin Republic), Accra (Ghana) and Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire), for the equivalent of N2, 300 you are likely to get a very clean room with fan as well as convenience en suite for a night, but in the Malian capital, Bamako, things are very different: Chambre avec climatise (room with air-conditioner) comes for no less than CFA 20, 000 (N5, 200).

For a room with fan (chambre avec ventile), the tourist should be prepared to part with some CFA 12, 000 (roughly N3, 000). Anything less is likely to come with much discomfiture, such as a room without fan or living in a hotel without conveniences and having to pay CFA 50 (N12) for pisse, CFA 200 (N50) for larver and CFA 100 (N25) for W.C each time you need to wee, bathe and stool respectively at any of the public toilets which surround most motor parks in Bamako.

Although hotel tariff is lower in Nigeria than what obtains across Mali, Travels wants to draw attention to the fact that the rate of staying in hotels in Nigeria is much higher than that charged in neighbouring Benin Republic, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso: And we’re talking from experience. In the Benin economic capital, the traveller can confirm this at Pension Ibis and La Colombe in the Dan Tokpa and Akpakpa areas respectively. In Accra, a check at Pacific Hotel near Kwame Nkrumah Circle would bear us out, while the Ouagadougou fee we gave came from staying at Hotel Zamdogo, not far from the local Nigerian Embassy.

However, the local hospitality premises proprietor is not to blame for the high tariffs for staying in a hotel in Nigeria. The fault lies exclusively at the doorstep of successive governments that willy-nilly failed to appreciate the vital role of energy in tourism development, in particular, and economic growth, generally.
Although we are taking a close look at difficulties hotel owners and managers face, we want to do this using Owerri, the Imo State capital, as a model.

We’re taking Owerri as an average city and Owerri hotels’ tariffs are neither as high as those of Calabar, Lagos, Maidugri and Port Harcourt, nor as low as one pays for accommodation in Birnin Kebbi, Gusau and Katsina. Moreover, we settled on Owerri because 2007 marks the 40th anniversary of Ambassador Hotel, located along Mbaise Road in this city.

Lying in the heart of the Igbo nation, Owerri is easily accessible from not only Igbo lands but from neighbouring states such as Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River and even Middle Belt states. In fact, Owerri stands barely three hours’ drive from Calabar, whereas it takes some five hours to travel from the Cross River State capital to Obudu on the northeastern fringes of the former South Eastern State. Bordered by Anambra to the north, Abia to the east as well as Delta and Rivers to the west and south respectively, Imo State expectedly feels like home to even non-indigenes that frequently come in contact with Owerri during their trips to or from their native lands.

Created on February 3, 1976, Imo State was part of the defunct East Central State; one of the 12 states created in 1967 by the General Yakubu Gowon-led Military Government. When more states were carved out in 1991, Imo lost a considerable part of its geographical area to newly created Abia State. Imo has some other large settlements apart from Owerri: Okigwe, Oguta, Orlu, Mbaise, Uzoagba, Emekuku, Orodo and Mgbidi are Imo’s other major towns but Irete and Orogwe can’t be missed on the way to Owerri coming in from Onitsha. Owerri is strategically located at the intersection of roads linking Aba, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, and Umuahia. Given Owerri’s location, the tourist would agree it is not for nothing that car-number plates celebrate Imo State as the Eastern Heartland.

With Imo Airport located less than 25 km southeast of this city, Owerri could very easily pass for the dream holiday destination but like other Nigerian settlements, power outages pose a great problem here. Instead of streets enlivened by street lamps at night, Owerri assumes a ghoulish aura each time the lights go out. Instead of enjoying a peaceful and silent night, residents and tourists have to endure the unsettling cacophony of electricity generators and the added menace of air pollution. And this brings us to the daunting tasks operators of hospitality premises face in Nigeria.

Owerri, the Imo State capital boasts numerous hotels; many are latter-day developments, while some are antique icons of this city. According to Comrade Henry Chukwuma Ukwunna, Treasurer of Imo State Chapter of Hoteliers Association of Nigeria (HAN), there are over 50 hotels in Owerri. A roll call of notable hotels in Owerri must include Aladimma Royal Suite, All Seasons, Ambassador Hotel, Best Way Hotel, Bombolini Hotel, Disney Hotels and Resorts, Domino Hotel along Chikwere Street, East Gate Hotel, Horizontal Hotel, Hotel de Andrea, MCC Road, Imo Concorde, Imo Hotels along Assumpta Avenue, James Hotel, Lodan Hotel (MCC Road), Modotel, Newcastle Hotel, Pelly Hotel and Pinewood Hotel. Even to the traveller in transit, Owerri throws up images of captivating hotel buildings: Sparkling new lodges with memorable aesthetic appeals. But many of these inns are neither owned nor run by career hoteliers.

Politicians, the nouveaux riche and interlopers from sundry perspectives are all scrambling for a piece of the action, and consequently projecting the view that the hotel business is the new goldmine. Although a new hotel seems to be rising on Owerri landscape by the day, owners are not necessarily smiling to the bank daily. The rising number of investors in Owerri hotel industry gives the impression of a boom; unfortunately, however, many of these hotel proprietors have actually been groaning under crushing overheads for years.

Observers say "there are too many hotels in Owerri," but the response of some analysts to that would probably be, "this is just as well, for quite a number are barely managing to keep their heads above water." This could better be understood by the fact that a good number of Owerri hotels have actually gone under. Travels can authoritatively reveal that many lodges in the Imo State capital are literally struggling for their lives. Crippling tariffs, coupled with inability to secure loans, translates as tough going for the professional hotelier in Nigeria. Such is the overtaxing tedium of running a hotel in Owerri, in particular.

In fact, the overwhelming demands of operating a hotel in Owerri probably led to the caving-in of Coconut Inn, Golf Motel, Riv Bank Hotel, and West End Hotel, which stood along Wetheral Road, Okigwe Road, Mezu Lane and Lagos Street by Royce Road respectively.
There are fears that excessive taxation could also facilitate the demise of Angy Lodge (Anuruo Lane), Back to Land (Rotibi Street), Chaside Hotel (Lobo Street), Royal Hotel (Njiribako Street), Star Hotel (Douglas Road) and similar lodges, which fighting frantically to just continue hanging in.

In Owerri, and across Nigeria as a whole, countless hotel owners listed failure of the federal government to provide uninterrupted electricity as one of heaviest burdens borne by investors not only in the hospitality sector but all facets of industry in the country. At Ambassador Hotel, for example, the management burns over N12, 000 weekly on fuel to power electricity generators. Over 12 months, this boils down to N144, 000, aside another N40, 000 spent on maintenance of the plant per year, according to Comrade Ukwunna, Director of Ambassador Hotel since 2000. To worsen matters, the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) sometimes slams a N10, 000 monthly bill on Ambassador Hotels, when most times the hotel ran on private electricity.

Ukwunna however revealed that hotel proprietors in Owerri have other crosses to carry. For example, Imo State Tourism Board (ITB) once directed every hotel operator to pay a blanket fee of N20, 000 as annual membership due for registration with the local hotel owners’ association. Travels gathered that instead of compensation to hotel proprietors, for burning money on diesel to power generators in order to stay in business, Owerri Municipal Government and Imo Environmental Protection Agency once asked each hotelier to pay an annual fee of N3, 000 and N9, 000 respectively for contributing to air and noise pollution through use of generators. Thus, rather than penalize the federal authorities for incompetence, as evident in refusal or inability to provide a basic necessity as energy, local and state governments expected each hotel entrepreneur to cough out N13, 000 per year as additional cost, after spending huge sums on fuel to stay in business. Laughable!

Sadly, hotel operators in Imo have other taxes to contend with. Insiders revealed that a hotel operator could find out he or she had as many as 32 so-called taxes to pay! For example, in 2005, at a time the once vernal city of Owerri was groaning under pandemic filth, three government bodies, Owerri Municipal Council, Imo State Environmental Sanitation Board and Imo State Environmental Pollution Control were all scrambling to fleece hotel proprietors under the disguise of waste management fees. The Imo State Environmental Sanitation Board initially demanded N24, 000 per annum for collection of wastes but when that body met stiff opposition from hotel owners, it quickly cut the fee by half, to N12, 000.

Sources said each owner of an Owerri-hotel also had Shop Rates, Business Premises and Tavern License fees saddled on him/her. Ostensibly, Owerri-based hotel proprietors have been victims of multiple taxations, owing to poor coordination.
In Owerri, the hotelier also has Water Rate to contend with. In 2001, each Owerri-based hotel premises were taxed N3, 500 bi-annually as water rate. But in 2002, the local water board shot the tariff up more than 1, 000 percent.

Comrade Ukwunna again: "At some point, it was like each room was required to pay N1, 000. So, if your hotel had 100 rooms, your water rate would be N100, 000." Knowing full well that water would not be used in an unoccupied room, hotel owners asked the water board to install a meter to gauge the volume of water consumed, in order to arrive at an equitable fee. Not surprisingly, the water board developed cold feet.

Hear the rue of Ukwunna: "So, for over four years, we have something called ‘Payment-on-account.’ This is a situation, where some amount is paid; whenever Imo Water Board officials come calling, say every three months. To date, nothing has been done to normalize the situation."
This attitude is similar to that of the hopeless federal electricity agency, which knowing full well it would receive next to nothing, were bills based on electricity consumed, prefers to fraudulently issue bills based on guesstimates.

Disney Hotel and Resort, which stands around KM 4, Onitsha Road, is one of Owerri’s newest and most modern hospitality outfits. Finished with state of the art materials, elaborately furnished and quipped with various facilities including a gym, swimming pool and what have you, it was easy to swallow the boast, "This is the only resort in Owerri," thrown up by Mrs. Ogechi Ken-Oleru, Disney’s General Manager, who added that the cheapest rate for a night’s accommodation at that lodge is N4, 000. Painfully, however, for the month of November 2006 alone, Disney Hotel and Resort was slammed an energy bill of N203, 000 by the federal electricity agency NEPA alias PHCN. Such is the plight of hotel proprietors in Nigeria.

Same story in Badagry, Jos, Lagos, Sokoto and everywhere
Owerri hotel managers are not the only ones saddled with these burdens, which ordinarily should be borne ruling politicians. For an impression of how deficient public infrastructure bogs the hospitality industry in the Nigerian southwestern settlement of Badagry, we turned to Prince Ademola Dosunmu, proprietor of Hotel Ayudos. A former Nigeria Prisons Service (NPS) officer, Dosunmu lamented: "What I expected is not what I am getting. Things have been very, very terrible. We are just patching things up because since January, we have been coughing out huge sums of money, everyday, for diesel to run our electricity generators.

"And you can imagine how much we have been spending daily to fuel our large generator, which has the capacity to carry 26 air conditioners. We have an A/C, colour TV and fan in each of our 26 rooms. So, we spend a lot of money otherwise, our guests would look elsewhere."
How about water? Dosunmu again: "We have two boreholes. And in spite of all that we have to spend to make our guests happy, we still have to keep our prices moderate. You know, Badagry is not Victoria Island, so we have to keep our rates down."

Sycomore Hotel
In a related development, the management of Sycomore Hotel, another Badagry-based lodge, fired a letter to the Manager of Agbara District of the PHCN, complaining of "the epileptic nature of energy supply to our premises," after suffering frustrating power cuts including a 10-day one, which lasted from November 17 to the 27, 2006. As Sycomore Hotels management put it, "During every power outage, we are compelled to cough out huge sums to fuel private electricity generation."

Sycomore had further lamented: "We rely on private generators to run our business," and "the fuelling of these generators cost us N54, 000 (Fifty four thousand naira) daily." This means that the company lost N540, 000 to the cost of fuelling generators during that 10-day blackout. "Needless to say that such overhead could cripple a business, thus worsening the unemployment situation in the land," Sycomore management stressed.

Despite losing so much to blackout, occasioned by non-supply of power by the PHCN, an average monthly bill of N150, 000 (One hundred and fifty thousand naira) was usually heaped on Sycomore, despite frequent and irritating outages. Not surprisingly, in its letter to PHCN, the hotel stated: "You would agree that it is wrong to expect us to pay for services not provided."

In that letter of protest, Sycomore had also drawn PHCN managers’ attention to the fact that it "had since July 2005 applied for a meter, which would enable proper billing. But sadly, more than a year later, "this meter has not been installed, forcing us under a suspect "Coded Bill" system that is based on estimates determined by PHCN without input from the consumer."

Mainland Hotels
Still in Lagos, Dr. Remi Samuels, general manager of Mainland Hotels, one of Nigeria’s oldest extant hotels, agreed that tariffs charged by local hotels would have been lower, if public utilities were more reliable. Hear the rue of Dr. Samuels: "Irregular power supply and other public amenities’ defects translate to higher overhead burdens for local industries’ operators." Consequently, goods and services cost more in Nigeria because all companies rely on alternative sources of electricity, for example. Apart from procurement and running of private electricity generators, Samuels added that most of the major hotels also rely on privately drilled bore holes for water.

The general manager, however, stressed that the problem of avoidable overhead was not peculiar to hotel operators. "It is a general problem with industries in Nigeria. In fact, some factories or companies cannot trust some of their new-generation equipment to the public electricity authority, so they are on private generators round the clock."

From Jos Hill Station Hotel
From the north central city of Jos, the story is the same. Mallam Aminu Nuhu is General Manager of Hill Station Hotel. Prior to joining the staff of the now defunct Nigeria Hotels Limited (NHL) in 1990, Nuhu had studied tourism before working in Kano State’s Ministry of Commerce and Tourism. Having served as General Manager of Ikoyi Hotel, Lagos; Central Hotel, Kano; Benue Hotel, Makurdi and as Hotel Manager of Imo Concorde Hotel, Owerri in 1994 to 1995, Nuhu apparently knows the Nigerian hotel industry inside out.

Established as Catering Rest House in 1938, the lodge was renamed Hill Station in 1971, and the following year, Hill Station was brought under the management of NHL. Against barely 55 rooms in the early 1970s, Hill Station now boasts 170 rooms (including a presidential suite, two luxury suites, 104 double rooms and 20 standard rooms). The vast size calls for deft management. Unfortunately, resources are lean because the occupancy rate is not what it used to be. A candid man, Nuhu agreed that Hill Station Hotel could do with some re-engineering.

According to this hotel business specialist, the decline of our local currency, the naira, has adversely affected all medium and small-scale enterprises. As a result, local patronage of hotel and tourism industry services has dropped because Nigerians have less disposable income, nowadays. The hotel administrator thinks hospitality and tourism industry operators could do with more concessions. He observed that compared to what obtains elsewhere, Nigerian hotels suffer drawbacks in the areas of equipment and utilities arising from import restrictions. Since foreign tourists frequently patronize local hotels, the business has to be treated as an international enterprise, Nuhu intoned.

In Sokoto
The late Alhaji Ibrahim Dankani founded Sokoto Guest Inn, the second oldest lodge after Sokoto Hotel in this northwestern Nigeria city. When it opened in 1978, Sokoto Guest Inn had only two blocks of 10 rooms each. But between 1979 and 1985, six new blocks, each comprising 10 rooms, was added. This brought the total room capacity to 80. Located along Kalambaina Road, Sokoto Guest Inn or SGI, for short, would clock 30 years in November 2008, according to Mallam Ibrahim, the hotel’s current general manager, and grandson of the founder.

Like virtually every other business premises in Nigeria, SGI is also heavily dependent on private sources of electricity. The GM said, "We have two heavy-duty plants, including a 235 KVA generator, to combat rampant power outage, here. But it costs us between N80, 000 and N100, 000 per week on diesel to run these plants." Not surprisingly, this deficiency again came up, when asked to comment on the challenges of running a hotel. Ibrahim also identified difficulty in accessing loans among acute obstacles.

To worsen matters, Sokoto Guest Inn has also been operating a private borehole since 1980. "All of these cost money, leading to burdensome overhead on the entrepreneur," Ibrahim lamented.
On a more positive note, let’s tour Ambassador Hotel. As earlier mentioned, Ambassador clocks 40 years this year. But did you know that "Travels" had a chat with the founder of Ambassador Hotel? Let’s guide you through Ambassador Hotel and facilitate a meeting with its founder, Dr. Livinus Ukwunna, who is not only a veteran of the hotel business but a pioneer in his own right.

Ambassador of hotels
Chief Livinus U. O. Ukwunna founded Ambassador Hotel in 1967. Today’s Imo State capital may be awash with lodges and restaurants but when Pa Ukwunna established Ambassador Hotel 40 years ago, Owerri didn’t boast many similar outfits. Comrade Ukwunna again: "Apart from Ambassador Hotel, Owerri had Cattle Rest House, now Imo Hotels, along Assumpta Avenue."
Lying along Mbaise Road, Ambassador Hotel is not only centrally located but also strategically placed in close proximity with major access routes leading in and out of Owerri. Ambassador stands close to the local Divisional Police headquarters, Owerri Motor Park and Main Market.

Today’s main block of Ambassador Hotel is a three-storey affair, which houses 15 rooms/suites, aside a bar on the ground floor and a conference hall upstairs. Pa Ukwunna, however, recalled that the inn actually started from a five-room bungalow, which stands to this day inside the complex. "Those days, many prospective guests made reservations through telephone calls or informed us by a cable to the local post office," the senior citizen enthused.

Within a short period after its launch, Ambassador quickly evolved into a home for many an Igbo "been-to" that used the hotel as transit point between their village and which ever foreign country he/she was coming from or returning to.
When Ambassador Hotels opened for business in 1967, the tariff for a night’s stay was one shilling per room. The fee gradually climbed to three shillings, through two shillings, over the years.
When we stayed at Ambassador in late 2006, the cheapest room (single bed) cost N1, 800. There were alternatives at N3, 000 and N3, 500 for rooms with A/C and TV with single bed or double bed respectively but we settled on a suite, which came at N3, 800 per night.