Nigeria Eyes Billion Dollar Revenue From Tourism

Stakeholders in the Nigerian tourism and hospitality industry have said that the sector could earn billions of dollars for the country per annum.

This is even as the country makes plan to attract over one million international tourists in the year to beat the record in 2008.

Acting Director General of the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), Paul Angya, represented by Abiola Komolafe, Director, Standard Directorate, at the inauguration of the National Mirror Committee on Tourism and related activities in Lagos, said Nigeria was ready to take her share of the global trillion dollars tourism investments.

“As Nigeria diversifies its economy from oil, tourism and its related activities can be one of the game changers for foreign exchange earnings, job creation, infrastructure development and business,” he said.

Angya said there has been tremendous increase in the numbers of international tourists globally from 166 million in 1970 to 1,035 billion in 2012, with attendant earnings.

He said, “the 2012 visitors spent $1 trillion on travel (excluding international passenger transportation expenses valued at $213 billion). Directly and indirectly, their spending accounted for 9 per cent of the world’s GDP and 6 per cent of its exports.”

He stated that for tourism-dependent countries and destinations, tourism’s share of GDP can exceed twice the world average, adding that presently international receipts exceed $1 billion per year in some 90 nations.

Angya, however, explained that though tourism is acknowledged as an important sector that drives the socio-economic development and growth of nations, only developing countries actively pursued tourism exports as a key development strategy.

The SON acting DG said World Economic Forum (WEF) report in 2015 showed that West African countries are among the least in global tourism.

He said poor performance in Africa could be adduced to limited accessibility in terms of airline traffic, shortages of hotels and other lodgings, skilled staff, inadequate service and production standards, security concerns, political frailty, health threats (Ebola, malaria) and terrorism.