By Fred Nwaozor
Today, September 27, the world over, is being marked as the 2017 World Tourism Day. At its third session held in Torremolinos, Spain in 1979, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly mandated its member states to observe September 27 each year as the World Tourism Day having reached a unanimous resolution.
The day was chosen to coincide with an important historic milestone in the world’s tourism sector, which is the anniversary of the adoption of the UN Tourism Statutes on September 27, 1970. The first commemoration of the World Tourism Day took place in 1980. This year’s anniversary marks the 38th edition of the laudable annual event.
The theme of this year’s celebration is ‘Sustainable Tourism: At tool for Development’. It is in line with the 2017 International Year of unustainable Tourism for Development. It is dedicated to exploring the contribution of tourism to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The last time I checked, observing a beautifully-looking environment remained one of the prime desires of every sane being. This is the reason every able-bodied man works assiduously to ensure that his/her immediate surroundings appear enticingly. Tourism as an area of life or human endeavour is a sector that has over the decades paid an optimum attention to how attractive our surroundings look. This makes the sector to be globally recognized.
Tourism is the business activity connected with provision of accommodation, entertainment, and other hospitable services for people, who are visiting a place for pleasure. In other words, a tourist can be described as a person who is traveling or visiting a certain locality for the sake of pleasure. Tourism has been proven to be an outstanding industry that can guarantee absolute relaxation for mankind, irrespective of background.
In the past, our various heritages were being used by our ancestors as a means of entertaining themselves and their guests. Presently, the tourism industry has shown that these endowments can equally be utilized as business ventures by upgrading them to international standard.
Noting the positive impact of the tourism industry the world over, it is of no need reiterating that it has contributed massively to the socio-economic development of most nations. Analysts are of the view that the industry represents about nine percent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and that it is a key revenue sector for developing and emerging economies.
Indeed, tourism plays a very vital role in building blocks of a more sustainable future for all, which is community development. Above all, it is widely acknowledged for its capacity to respond to global challenges. In view of this, there is an urgent need for Nigeria to follow suit to ensure that the world tourism industry, that helps to foster global unity and complete rest of mind, is granted a preferential treatment at all cost.
Nigeria can encourage the commendable crusade by ensuring that her countless socio-cultural resources are optimally rejuvenated. This proposed measure would not only help to encourage the world tourism industry, but would go a long way to elevate the country’s Gross National Product (GNP), thus strengthening her ongoing sagging economy. Nigeria as an independent state is made up of over two hundred and fifty ethnic groups, and each of these groups is tremendously blessed with various socio-cultural endowments.
These cultural resources, including dancing, masquerading, dressing, hunting, fishing, wrestling, and molding of sculptures, just to mention but a few, if well harnessed, would definitely help to revive the nation’s tourism sector, thereby boosting her socio-economic and political development.
The timing of the World Tourism Day is appropriate because it comes at the end of the high season in the Northern hemisphere and at the beginning of the season in the Southern hemisphere, when tourism is of topical interest to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
The UN Conference on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) held in 2012 emphasized that well-designed and appropriately managed tourism can make a significant contribution to the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development.
The then Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, further highlighted that, tourism which remains one of the world’s largest economic sectors, is specially well-placed to promote environmental sustainability, green-growth, and human struggle against climate change through its relationship with energy.
Ever since its inception, the World Tourism Day is celebrated to foster awareness among the global community on the essence of tourism and its social, cultural, political and economic value. The celebration seeks to highlight tourism potential as regards promotion of the SDGs, as well as how it addresses some of the most pressing challenges the global society is currently faced with.
So, as Nigeria joins the rest of the world to celebrate the remarkable day, we are all expected to contribute our quota toward ensuring that our respective environments or surroundings become globally recognized as attractive and human friendly localities, so that, generations yet unborn would live to remember that an attractive environment is a society we all yearn for.
The truth remains that everywhere in Nigeria bears tourism potentials, thus all that is required of the government, among other concerned stakeholders, is to swing into action headlong with the sole aim of doing the needful. Hence, it’s high time we quit retrogressive debates and discussions regarding tourism towards focusing solely on progressive ones.
Nwaozor writes from Owerri