The Honourable Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed has said that the Federal Government, under President Muhammadu Buhari, is set to change the fortunes of the culture and tourism sector in Nigeria, and that one major step in this direction is the convening of a Culture and Tourism Summit for stakeholders, billed to take place in Calabar, the capital city of Cross River State.
Lai Mohammed, who stated this Thursday, 18 February, 2016, in his office at the Federal Secretariat Complex, Abuja-FCT, while inaugurating a committee to plan and organise the Summit, noted that culture is critical to the development of tourism, as culture drives tourism, and that it is the symbiotic existence of the two that can bring about sustainable development of the sector.
According to him, the Summit aims at sensitizing states to the abundant culture and tourism potentials they have and how they could effectively tap them to enhance their internally generated revenue, stressing that it is when local tourism thrives that such states could make appreciable earnings from national and international tourism in government’s resolve to diversify the nation’s economy.
Some of the states that to partner the Ministry for the summit, due to their culture and tourism potentials, will likely include, Akwa Ibom, Anambra, Bauchi, Benue, Borno, Edo, Lagos, Kaduna, Kano, Kebbi, Ogun, Osun, Taraba and the FCT, while Membership of the Committee is drawn from the Ministry and some chief executives of the Federal Cultural Parastatals.
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