As the year unfolds with uncertainty surrounding revenue by government and tackling unemployment, the Association of Nigerian Journalists and Writers of Tourism (ANJET) has charged government at all levels and the organised private sector to pay more attention to tourism development and promotion.
The body of travel journalists, writers and bloggers in Nigeria lamented that, despite the vast potential and comparative advantage that the country has in tourism, government has continued to pay lip service to boosting the sector, not bothering to create the right policies, incentives and environment for the private sector to invest in tourism business.
Also, ANJET wants the presidential, gubernatorial and other political aspirants in the 2019 general election (none of them is focusing on tourism, except a few of them already in government) to see the need to base their economic blueprint on tourism.
ANJET stated that the nation has been suffering and missing out greatly from economic and developmental benefits derivable from the sector, given that it is a money-spinning industry and presently a leading sector that serious countries have paid attention to following the all-time record of performance over the years.
Tourism has been a huge revenue and employment source, with $7.6 trillion revenue (about 10% of global GDP) and 277 million jobs, representing one out of every 11 jobs in the world in 2014. Last year, international tourist arrivals reached the 1.4 billion mark, amounting to 6 per cent growth, ahead of 2020 projections.
African countries recorded a meagre 67 million tourists, with no one sure of the numbers that visited Nigeria because there is no verifiable statistics to that effect. Besides, at the local level, less than 10 per cent of Nigerians travelled for tourism-related activities, while many tourism outfits closed shop due to lack of patronage, and domestic airlines flew fewer passengers, resulting from exorbitant fares and operational issues associated with domestic airlines.
To stem this tide, the travel writers are calling on the federal government to put tourism at the forefront of its economic blueprint. To this end, it advocated the restoration of the culture and tourism ministry as the present arrangement of lumping tourism with the information and culture ministry has not yielded the desired results.
To achieve its purpose, the ministry should be manned by a true and tested professional with vast experience in business, who understands the metrics of tourism as a business and not a socio-cultural endeavour, as it has been the case in the past.
The ministry, they said, should be able to effectively and professionally coordinate the activities of the sector by working with the organised private sector to produce a tourism blueprint and policy for the country as well as tinker with the National Tourism Master Plan, which has remained dormant since it was reviewed last year.
Also, the tourism writers want to see the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC) come out of the closet, and not live under the shadows of the ministry, to take up its statutory responsibilities of developing, marketing and promoting Nigeria’s tourism, with focus on domestic tourism but not closing the door on the international scene as witnessed in over five years as Nigeria completely absented itself from international tourism expos and meetings where it had before made huge gains.
ANJET also wants to see NTDC take on its regulatory duty with the desired authority to stamp out the all-comers status that tourism has recently assumed in the country. Similarly, economic solutions should be brought upon the registration, grading and classification of hotels and other tourism outfits as this is very crucial to building a virile tourism industry with eyes on international best practice.
The National Institute of Hospitality and Tourism (NIHOTOUR), which has over the years been relegated to the background, ANJET said, should be more pro-active and take seriously its human capacity-building functions by engaging the various stakeholders, especially the hospitality industry, in order to ensure that the National Occupation Standard is effectively implemented.