The National Council for Arts and Culture (NCAC) has pledged to donate face masks and sanitizers as part of its contribution to the fight against COVID-19.
The premier culture agency would roll out both medical and conventional face masks made from local adire and ankara fabrics embossed with NCAC logo to check imitation and also to showcase home grown solutions to demand for the kits.
Likewise, sanitizers exclusively made from local natural resources would also be part of the intervention.
Director General of NCAC, Otunba Segun Runsewe, disclosed that the measures are part of a well thought out intervention that would help bridge the gap in the demand and need to ensure no one finds excuse to breach the COVID-19 protocols.
“We shall be targeting the culture tourism community, the media, the security agencies at the frontline of the battle to the successful and full compliance of the lockdown and also the medical professionals. We cannot just sit down and expect help from outside the country all the time. We should respond to this challenge by looking inwards and creatively discover certain benefits in our cultural endowment, support the process of indigenous response to all health challenges not just COVID-19 19 pandemic.
“Ours is not only to support government directives that Nigerians should wear face masks in public places, but to develop a determined basic cultural socioeconomic baseline to the effective use and engagement of local fabrics and natural resources to which Nigeria is well blessed,” Runsewe said.
NCAC under Runsewe has made the use of local fabrics, arts and crafts as the fulcrum of a new and emerging cultural economy.