By Udeme Clement
Chief Edem Duke is the Minister for Tourism, Culture and National Orientation. In this interview,  he speaks on the recent approval of the Tourism Development Fund by President Goodluck Jonathan,  approval for a tourism resort in the Federal Capital Territory, the tourism Development Master Plan, the need for leaders of the economy to introduce tourism into their economic lexicon and the need to strengthen a synergy between the public and private sectors for tourism to thrive  and contribute tangibly to economic growth and development like what obtains in developed countries.

The president recently approved the Tourism Development Fund. Tell us how this fund will be utilised?

Mr. President has shown great support for the sector with the approval of this fund. 70 per cent of the fund will go to visual art, an aspect for the provision of tourism infrastructure, while a percentage will be set aside for the development of the tourism product and capacity building.

Unfortunately, this has been understood by mischief makers to mean that the president has put together a sizable amount for the ministry to fund programmes and projects because it does not have a large allocation from the budget. This is far from the truth.

Culture Minister, Edem Duke

The approval of this fund is in principle and is now the duty of the ministry working with the private sector stakeholders as well as the legislature to determine how the fund will be structured. The sources will be from private sector, international agencies and foundations. We will proceed to launch it with the approval of the president and get the National Assembly to give consideration to it.

In the past, there were efforts for this fund to be in place but there was a proviso stating that the fund must be contributed to by different sources in government and mandatory taxes from travellers and people who sleep in hotels. But government did not approve those ancillary sources of funding.

Now the president has been specific about the need to have a tourism development fund. But government resources cannot accommodate it and we must find ways of attracting resources to this fund other than direct government sources, which for the time are unavailable.

Talking about private sector partnership, is your sector working in line within the transformation agenda of the president?

It was challenging also to note that the transformation agenda in its original form did not have culture and tourism content as part of its core deliverables. With the consent of Mr President, I sat back in the ministry with one or two of the officials and developed Culture,Tourism and National Orientation Agenda to be embedded within the president’s transformation agenda.

Also, I proceeded to present that agenda to every head of parastatal in the sector for their inputs and the final outcome was submitted to government. Unfortunately, there are still some people who are saying that we do not have a transformation agenda as well as programme in culture and tourism.

This I believe is out of mischief and may be sponsored irritations to distract our attention. It is quite clear that we have a good transformation agenda, which focuses on building capacity, growing infrastructure, developing product, enhance growth of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), agencies and work plans. These are part of our programmes that people can access in the ministry. In effect, these were some of the preliminary considerations and challenges we faced.

On assumption of office, the challenge I met was to reposition culture and tourism as a sector that has potentials to create wealth, employment and SMEs across the country. Also when we looked at the public sector, there was widespread apathy in the sense that people had become resigned to the fact that government was not interested in culture and tourism as an economic sector.

In fact, the frustration culminated in the budget provision, which indicated that for three years running, a ceiling had been placed on the industry, which meant that we just could not exercise our potentials beyond those limits. But my joy is that the Minister of Finance has assured that she will work with us to activate private sector support.

This is imperative because we must work with the private sector for tourism to thrive in Nigeria . Ultimately, aside from the fact that we, as public servants, will end in the private sector, it is also important for us to feel the pulse of the private sector and partner with them to build capacity and together forge out a road map for culture and tourism in Nigeria .

What measures are you putting in place to reposition the sector and make it contribute to the Vision 20:2020 target?

Nigeria wants to be one of the top 20 economies in 2020. This implies that we must begin to do the things that the top 20 economies are doing today because we have just eight years to go. One of the key areas must the development of culture and tourism.

All over the world, even in the continent, you will see that the biggest economy in sub-Saharan African, which is South Africa grows more agriculture than any other country. It does more manufacturing and export than any other country in the continent.

It has a bigger ICT capacity than any other country in the continent. It has bigger health capacity than any way else in the continent but the greatest contributor to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is tourism. This is a country that was independent only in 1994.

Today, the tourism in South Africa is growing almost in a faster pace than the global growth indices. Look at Nigeria , which is the second biggest economy in sub-Saharan Africa . We have been focusing our attention only on hydro-carbon, just crude oil.

I am not even talking about gas. So, you can imagine if we were able to harness the full potentials of our oil and gas as well as culture and tourism. We are a country of over 167million with 774 local government areas, 36 states which is more like 36 countries in one, the biggest black nation in the world.