Nigeria’s Culture and Tourism Sector receives tremendous boost over the last two years says Edem Duke

The effort of the Federal Ministry of Tourism, Culture and National Orientation at developing the sector in order that it may compete favourably with its counterparts in other parts of the world, thereby contributing to increased foreign earnings, promote national and international integration, has been successful so far in the last two years of the transformation administration of President Goodluck Jonathan.

This assertion was made by the Minister for Tourism, Culture and National Orientation, Chief Edem Duke at the ongoing Ministerial Platform organized by the Federal Ministry of Information, where Ministers of the federation has been giving the score card of their Ministry in the last two years.

The Minister said, there are some numbers of programmes and projects embarked upon, whose performance has been very impressive, amongst which were the development of cultural industries in the six geo-political zones of the country, with twelve of such projects completed and commissioned.

Duke also reported that the Ministry has successfully organized national creativity week with the specific objective of identifying and harnessing the hidden talents of youths from tertiary, secondary, primary as well as youths outside the school system. He said, his Ministry has also held the annual Abuja national carnival involving the 36 States and FCT where eight foreign countries participated while about eleven countries are being expected at the next edition of the event.

The Minister said his Ministry has also successfully conducted the rebranding of ten Nigerian missions within the last two years in South Korea, Russia, Algeria, Poland, France, Cuba, Turkey, Mali, Venezula and Spain. Besides, he said, the Ministry as part of her efforts at facilitating bilateral agreement with other countries has successfully organized an interactive technical meeting of culture experts on strategic implementation of cultural agreement between Nigeria and friendly countries of the world.

Other achievements which the Minister itemized were its collaboration with the Bayelsa State government to establish an underwater imaging and the research centre in Yenagoa for the purpose of building capacity of youths in underwater archaeology. The Minister hinted as well that his Ministry in collaboration with Cross River State government is establishing a Slave Route Resource Centre in Calabar.