By Emma Arubi

DeltaLeisure Resorts is a multi-billion naira project covering tourism, entertainment, relaxation, education and amusement, and being put together by Sarner PFM in Delta State. It is intended to be West Africa’s first world class theme park and resorts located at two points. The headquarters is at the Oleri village opposite DSC, Ovwian –Aladja and the second site is at Ogwashi-Uku. The managing director of the construction firm, Princess Abiodun Oyefusi, in this interview, tells the story of what the project is set out to achieve.

Excerpts:

The project SARNER PFM is the African arm of Sarner International. What Sarner does is that we build theme parks like museum, visitors attraction around the world, the likes of Austin Towers, the new Doctor Whoin England, the Lost Paradise in Egypt, and Ocean Park in Hong Kong. This is the first West African water theme park. A theme park is like Disneyworld where you have all the big ride. You have entertainment, casinos, hotel and everything.

It is an all encompassing theme park. People go there on holidays for entertainment, to have fun and unwind. Basically, it is a tourist attraction that generates a lot of money for tourism and income for government.

How did Delta State get involved?

This is not actually a Delta State project. Although we are in partnership, this is an all private investment. There is not a single penny of Delta State government in it. They provided us the land and the infrastructure and they have really, really supported us because they believe in the employment opportunities that this project is going to generate for the state. We are talking about over 6,000 people being employed when this project starts operation, and it is projected to attract a minimum of five million visitors every year.

Nigeria has a population of over 150 million people. When we build this theme park, the internal tourism, which is the people within the country, is normally taken at the percentage of the population. So if you take ten percent of the population of Nigeria, we should be talking about 50 million.

So we cut down the scale to five million and that is ten percent of the whole South-south region. That is what we are projecting but this is the empowerment of what tourism of this sort of project does to the population and also employment opportunities.

For how long has this project been on ground and when is the completion target?

We have just started; we did the flag-off in May but we have been planning and chasing paper work since 2008 and you know government bureaucracy and all that. It is projected to be completed in December 2013. We shall officially open in April 2014.

What is the cost implication?

Ocean Park in Hong Kong cost 5.5 billion dollars to build. The new Disney in Shangai, China is going to cost 2 billion dollars just for one ride by the sea. This project is estimated to cost 250 million dollars. It is going to have a five-star hotel because this whole project is going to be world rated.

We are working with the World Tourism Organisation, all the different bodies that rate parks are coming to rate this park. There is a three-star hotel that is almost five hundred rooms, there is a five-star that is 250 rooms, there will be casinos, and there will be museums and a water fall also.

Where do you get the rocks that will be used to build the water falls?

That is the magic, that is the beauty of this sort of park. You just watch it as it unfolds.

You said Delta State government provided the land. How do you rate the state government as regards youths empowerment taking this your project into consideration?

I think Delta State government is really re-focusing its agenda on trying to help the youths because they have realized that without empowering the youths, the future is just down the drain and the youths will keep having the same problem. When the youths have nothing to do, they are practically jobless and you are indirectly building a culture of begging, crime and violence.

So the governor is trying to reposition the state. There is so much government can do in the empowerment of the youths because there is so much employment the government can generate. Employment has to come from the private sector as well. We have to create the avenue that will encourage the foreign investors to want to come to Nigeria, not just Delta State because they are the ones that will pick up the majority of the employment in any economy.

We are building in partnership with the state government a bridge across the river for us to access the river and the bridge is 70 percent completed. The bridge started in November last year and we have almost finished it. We employed over 200 youths for the building of the bridge alone. We have cleared most of the land and got over 400 people employed.

What is your relationship with the communities where these projects are on-going ?

In Sarner, we do not give community money because it does nothing but creates problems. We give them physical things that empower them and enable the people to benefit. For example, we only started in May and we started the bridge in November.

In Oleri, they have not had light for donkey years and they have this other community which they fight with always, that is the Obuobo community. And now that we know, we say let them have light. Giving them light is costing us N5 million.

We also settled the differences between the two communities. We paid for the transformer so that the communities can live in peace. They have been really good, we have worked with them and majority of our workers are from the three communities surrounding us.

There was a health clinic, we do not know who built it, it was an empty building that was abandoned there. We furnished it and it is functioning now. There are two staff and two midwives that we employed and we are bringing in a pharmacist. We provide free drugs in the clinic that is meant to be like a first aid centre for the community and our staff. .

Apart from the free land that the state government has provided, what other things have they contributed concerning this project?

Like I said, they are building the bridge to have access to the land. They have offered us a lot of support in terms of infrastructure, community relations and security. They believe in the project, especially the commissioner for culture and tourism because of where he is coming from.

He sort of grabbed the vision instantly and ran with it and because he has seen how much this project will bring to the state in terms of income. For instance, Malaysia’s biggest second income earner is tourism. Namibia first biggest foreign earner is tourism.

If you harvest it very well, there are huge potentials. And tourism is not just your cultural shows; there is a lot of things involved. We have a lot of fantastic places that international tourists would want to come and see that we have not maintained, we have not kept, we do not build around it to generate income.

Talking about the Ogwashi-Uku project, how far has that one gone?

The Ogwashi-Uku Park is actually a wildlife park. It is an open zoo where you are going to find the first five biggest animals. You can drive through and see the animals in their natural habitation. We have fenced the place and this is where we come into partnership with Namibia and Kenya.