EDEM DUKE ON TOURISM

HIGH CHIEF EDEM DUKE, MANAGING DIRECTOR AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, THE MIRAGE HOTELS, CALABAR, CROSS RIVER STATE SPOKE WITH SOME NEWSMEN IN CALABAR, SOUTH SOUTH BUREAU CHIEF, TONY ITA ETIM WAS THERE FOR CHAMPION.

YOU ARE IN THE TOURISM INDUSTRY, WHERE DO YOU SEE THIS GROWTH IN CROSS RIVER GOING?

DUKE: Let me be audacious, and to quote some religious personalities whose names I probably would crave your indulgence not to reveal, who said that Calabar will sound like beer parlour talk. But what I am trying to drive at is that we are in a season of renaissance, the Calabar renaissance. The renewal of the Calabar, that was a front runner in the development of Nigeria. The Calabar through where missionaries, early education, early civilization, early trading came to the Southern Protectorate of Nigeria. And then it went into a period of descent. And naturally when you have obviously got to the nadir, the resultant option is an upward swing. Today that Calabar then when in pre-colonial, in colonial era the capital was taken away from. Today, Calabar has become the benchmark of what the new Nigerian city would be. Governance and responsibility by government has projected Calabar, indeed Cross River State as the new face of a desired Nigeria. And in the last administration of the former president he went to the extent, at the Federal Executive Council, to compel ministers and other governors to visit Calabar and see what is being done in Calabar as an example of what their own, the dream of a new Nigerian city, community or state should be like. I think those were prophetic, you know, remarks and initiative. Today, we continue to see Calabar not just attracting people, who see it as a destination for leisure, entertainment, recuperation or retreat. We also see it as a destination where it appears as if social infrastructure is working. Am sure we are all witnesses to the fact that no one in the past, can we say 36, 48 or five years has come to Calabar and found things critically wrong as compare to other Nigerian cities or destinations. So for me it is just a starting point, it means that the template, the thought processes that have brought it to recognition in Nigeria today must continue to be propel, improved. Government is now talking about putting in place a modern comprehensive transportation system which will look not just road transportation, water transportation, and inter city transportation together in a network that is supportive of the economic activities in the entire state.

DAILY CHAMPION: CAN YOU SAY THAT THE PARTICIPATION OF THE PEOPLE OF CROSS RIVER STATE IS EQUAL TO THAT OF THE GOVERNMENT?

DUKE: I think that that is a challenge that has to be addressed sooner than later. That challenge must be addressed sooner than later. There is need for growth to also be bottom-top. There is need for a massive programme of enlightentment and participation by the generality of the people. I understand the thrust of your question in the sense that the people, to a large extent, assume that they are bystanders in all of these. But be that as it may it is the people who are use in achieving many of these laudable objectives. But it is a small fraction of the people. My assurance, my confidence, is that the people assume that now a vision has been place before them, and it behooves of them, they like what they see. They subscribe to what they see but then there is need to articulate a programme that compel their participation, that changes their mindset, that excites them into unsupervised participation in this developmental process. And that challenge, would rest not just on the state government but especially on the local government. What you have on the previous administration in the state was that the state was actually running the local governments, now you have local government chairmen that understand the vision of the government of the day. And who are being carried along by the government of the day who has policy input in what is going on and they need to also allow this information, this participation to trickle down to their communities and the people therein. It is going to be a Marshal plan, of some sort, because unless the people voluntarily participate in all of these in the five years all of the efforts may whittle down.

DAILY CHAMPION: DO YOU SEE ORDINARY PEOPLE CONTRIBUTING TO TOURISM DEVELOPMENT OF THE STATE WITHOUT EMPOWERMENT FROM GOVERNMENT?

DUKE: Money is not everything. And Cross River State is a state that does not have enough money at its disposal but when you sit with the people, when you interface with them and i hope this word is not a political word, when you carry them along, because carrying them along is capable of so many interpretations depending on where, people will voluntarily give of their sweat. The psychological satisfaction that they are actually offering suggestions, and being taken seriously, and being handheld make them offer a little more than what we seen is available. And I have always believe that there is a lot more latent potential in Calabar, and Cross River state in its entirety which only requires for a benevolent government to identify and to utilize. People are not so much keen on how swollen their pockets are, yes we all want to have swollen pockets, but in the circumstances that we found ourselves, if I see myself as a voluntary soldier, an appreciated soldier in the task of entrenching a system, an administration, a policy of growth I will be more than… a psychological satisfaction is a lot more than the financial benefit. I am saying because people who want to make contribution but they don’t want to belong to political parties, they don’t have to belong to certain close associations; and when they see that they are edged out and left at the periphery, they keep their contributions to themselves. I think that there is a new movement, today you see the sheer number of people who are converting previously idle property, previously unprofitable assets, into hospitality facilities because a light have been shown to them but nobody has put money in their pockets. Banks are not giving anybody money, at best, they are taking as much as they can from you. These people are finding opportunities to do a lot of these things. Look out the number of entertainment, bars, restaurants, and as they call it now spots that are opening all over the place. When you look at them you realized that there isn’t huge capital invested in them but just the little sacrifice that the individual owners are able to make. And every one that opened is patronized, isn’t it strange? No matter the corner, in fact for those of you who are now living in Port Harcourt, I am sure that street corners that previously you will pass unnoticed are now a beehive of activities. It is not because government has put money into peoples’ pockets, it not that banks have put money, it is just that people have said if this is the direction let me just do my own bit, at the end of the day it pays off for them. But government can crown all of that efforts by interfacing a lot more with people, talking to the about the new initiative they want to embark upon, whether it is in terms of rural development, whether it is in terms of health care delivery, whether it is in terms of education. That way everybody will not be opening bars, people will also be thinking about ancillary businesses and enterprises that can grow around some of those other sectors of development.

DAILY CHAMPION: WHAT ADVICE CAN YOU OFFER TO SUSTAIN AND IMPROVE THE MOMENTUM IN CALABAR?

DUKE: I think, first and foremost, the government and the people must engage, they must engage in various platforms. It is unfortunate that up to date, regardless of whatever achievements we think we have made we have not had a Cross River business or economic conference, where government and the people can sit over a period of three days talking and articulating ideas about what direction to move the state. I think it is urgent. It is a challenge for not just the private sector but government. There must be that synergy for this kind of thing to happen. Because it will throw up a whole lot of, a full basket of ideas and programmes which can be beneficial to the entire state. That is number one. Number two, it is important for us to begin to strengthen community organizations, women organizations, youth organizations, for them to begin to understand their roles in their community and their government. Nobody is a repository of all knowledge, even traditional knowledge is very important in growing local economy. It is important to strengthen the growth of these kinds… in some societies in parts of the world these are the nucleus of growth. Growth emanates from some of these kinds of organizations, the age grades.
Mentoring is very important. Over the years you have big businesses that come, make quick entries, make quick money, make quick exits. And leave little or nothing behind. There is need for a deliberate policy to ensure that companies that come to do big businesses in Cross River state must adopt entrepreneurs who can continue to deliver those efforts long after they have left. For instance, you find that government award a contract for the development of maybe some acres of agricultural whatever, you have international agencies who come, you know they, work for about three months, they go. Nobody remains to advance some of those ideas. Let us assume that this was a project of six months, it has come, and it has gone. Somebody comes in and is given a project to build, maybe a typical facility, whether it is a water park , whether it is this, whether it is that. That project is completed. He is gone. The man who works with them is move to Akwa Ibom to build an airport or move to Owerri. Nobody is left behind, even if he cannot build a water park, he can build a swimming pool. There are instances where some of these things call to questions and end up with capital flight. For some it maybe a sour point but what we are saying is that they have to be local capacity. I was sharing thought with a friend of mind and I said to him that: if we have in Tinapa that have not been taken over, what stops government saying okay, this is just a hypothetical case, abcd, you guys are allocated one shop go and look for this kind of retailership and bring it to this one shop. By the time we put four times 50 people together we will be compeling indigenes of this state to spend their money whether they are going to go to China or the are going to go to Dubai, or they are going to go to South Africa, I want to come and say my group has got a franchise. These are the conditions for our investing in Tinapa and so on. One of the problems I have seen here is that we have not attracted enough foreign investment into it. A lot of the things have been done by government and the pressure of debt on government. So there are thoughts we can tinker on if we are sitting on if we are sitting in an economic fora. Whether it will be on local government basis, or on project by project basis; r it is on a statewide basis. How many times have you heard that business leaders and government, business leaders and communities have sat at a roundtable just to knock ideas together? What has been done in Tinapa there: the people who have brought the consultancy there, they have gone. And they were regarded as the eggheads at the time, when there are moving like this, there is siren. They come, they tell their own stories to those who like to hear, the cheques are signed and they are gone. The burden is left with the people whose generation will continue to remain her whether that project succeed or not.

DAILY CHAMPION: TOURISM IN NIGERIA IS SEEN AS AN ELITIST THING WHAT CAN BE DONE TO GIVE IT A MASS APPEAL?

DUKE: Let me give you an example and it grieves me when I see the state which our tourism is in today. Fourteen years ago, 15 years ago as we are sitting like this, as black people, if we were South Africans, we will not be allow to sit in any bar or restaurant in South Africa. We could not even walk the street; you cannot even go to a bar, a café to drink a beer. Can we come to term with that kind of scenario as Nigerians, it is not possible but I am saying that 15 years ago this was the situation in South Africa. Today, barely 14 years after independence, South African tourism is growing at a faster rate than the world tourism. Today tourism has overtaken solid mineral as the greatest contributor to the GDP of South Africa. Today South Africa is being seen by the rest of the Western World as the preferred Africa. Today, out of every new eight jobs in South Africa, six are in tourism. I am talking about 14 years after independence, 14 years after you were unable to sit in a bar to drink, after you were unable to walk the streets of the capital, you are able to sleep in a bed in a hotel. How do they do it? Do they have better education than us? What could have led to such a revolutionary trend that today the greatest infrastructural development in sub-Saharan Africa is there? They don’t have oil, they don’t have our size of land, they don’t have our quality of education, they don’t have our quality of people, and they don’t have our population. So can you imagine if we were to focus attention on tourism, how easy it would have been for us to multiply those achievements of South Africa easily times three into the Nigerian economy? But the stranger things that I confront everyday is that all the people who enunciate Nigerian economic policies are not able to see that potentials. They are not able to see that potential, that in every five black man that walks the face of the earth at every single time one is a Nigerian. I don’t know how else to position it and then you look at small countries like Gambia, just next door, they have absolutely nothing. In fact it is smaller than Calabar but go and see what they are turning over in terms of tourism foreign expenditure. Then you look in a different way, our manufacturing is not making much progress. Our agriculture is not making any progress. Our oil and gas is causing devastation and major crisis, crisis that rippled right into the world oil market. So which of our sector can we say that is delivering to such an extent they can blindfold us from looking at tourism. So there is need for God intervention.

DAILY CHAMPION: WHERE WOULD YOU PUT THE BLAME?

DUKE: The blame is on the shortsightedness of policy makers at the federal level.

DAILY CHAMPION: NIGERIAN CULTURE AND RELIGION MAY HAVE A NEGATIVE IMPACT ON TOURISM DEVELOPMENT?

DUKE: I disagree with you. I disagree because, you see we in Nigeria have such diverse possibilities and products that, you talking about Zamfara, Mecca is the number one tourism destination for Muslims. So what is wrong in Zamfara? If they choose to make that the Mecca, in quote, of the West African subregion. What we are trying to say is that we have such diverse and rich attributes and endowments wherever we are there is something to grow. In fact in every village in Nigeria there is a possibility of developing one tourism product. There is also the possibility of developing clusters. So if there is a Northern cluster and Kano, or Sokoto, or Zamfara is going to be the pivot of that cluster. I fit is just the Durbar, it is a tourism product. So religion is not an impediment. It is our ability to understand what we have, our limitation and our prospect and to have people who can think about how to format these into product that would attract people to come from one place to the other to spend money. If we even develop the idea of people traveling within Nigeria, you know that we don’t travel within Nigeria. Everybody is aspiring to visa to go out of Nigeria. It is so easy for us to just move from one place to the other. So there is need to reacculturise the minds of our people to see that in Nigeria, even just the domestic traveling from one state to the other is enough to stimulate the economy. It also doesn’t have to do with poor people who cannot afford hotels. Everybody doesn’t have to live in hotel. Hotels are suppose to be in different categories. In Europe, there are some hotels brand calls Formula One: it is just a bed to lay your head. It is a bed to lay your head. The important thing is that you are not sleeping in the street. There are also such options as “host family” who voluntarily you have a three bedroom flat and one of them is perpetually filled with empty cartoons or used cartoons of mineral and books and old newspapers. Doesn’t it sounds like a typical room in all our houses. A time will come when if you clean out that room it can attract a traveler that is willing to pay whether it is two thousand naira. I wish we have opportunity for me to show you some brochures from some countries, that category you would find it in some hundreds, if not in thousand. And I have my own one bedroom; I go and registered it with the Tourism Bureau. And they know that when a backpacker, tourist that are traveling on bare knuckles, they just packed everything into a bag, they don’t have any money for transport so they are hitching and hiking a ride from one place to the other. The get to that territory or they go on the internet and they say okay this one room is ten dollar, 20 dollar that is, maybe N1200 or N2400 . The man has a bed, he has water to have a bath; in the morning he wakes up, he is gone. In 30 days, assuming, okay you don’t have 100 per cent occupancy, that would have been N60,000. In 15 days, this will be some N35,000. And these are little, little things that we can do even in our rural communities. There people, who can’t go home during festive seasons because they have not built mansions but then there is a way we can address our mind and believe that we all have contribution to make in every kind of way. And I am telling you that when I see what get done in some parts of Africa and you see tourists from the Western world go to appreciate it, you know what Nigerians always say, we have this, we have this. That is what Nigerians always say but the unfortunate thing is that when our leaders go they never come back to tell the story of how we can change our destiny as long as tourism is concern.

DAILY CHAMPION: THE 2008 FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BUDGET AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR, ESPECIALLY THE TOURISM INDUSTRY?

DUKE: A lot of these have always been talks that are not match by action. The unfortunate thing about the relationship between public and private is that resources dwell in and are manage by the public sector. The unfortunate thing is that the public sector is where the resources are domiciled. They are the ones who can determine how it flows. They play public sector and want at the same time to play private sector. Another unfortunate thing which for me is always a pleasant reminder for public officers is that whether they like it or not one day every public officer will end up in the private sector. One day, every public officer will end up in the private sector and the policy that you enunciate, the deprivation that you create, the encumbrances that you place before the growth of the private sector will surely haunt you when you end up in the private sector. But the never understand this when the comfort of government office, when they are within the confine and comfort of government. They never believe that economy must be propel by the private sector. So it is a lot more of talk than action. That is why you find that a lot of private sector people struggle very, very hard to find accommodation, to find patronage from government. Because if the wait in the hope that government policy will automatically propel the private sector, they wait in vain. And this has always been the unfortunate thing about Nigerian economy.

DAILY CHAMPION: NOT MUCH HAS BEEN HEARD ABOUT THE CALABAR CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE IN RECENT TIME?

DUKE: Well, I am the Deputy President of the Chambers of Commerce. And I want to assure us that the current leadership of the Calabar Chamber of Commerce and Industries led by Chief Dr Asuquo Ekpeyong is breaking new grounds. Is breaking new grounds in reactivating the Chamber of Commerce. There have been in recent week very extensive outreach programme to try to remarket the advantages of belonging to the chamber to some big corporate organization around Cross River State. There are challenges. There are challenges because the people who are doing the mega businesses, earning the mega bucks from government businesses are not compel by government to belong to the chambers. So they can stroll in, pick big contract, execute and walk away without leaving anything behind. If you remember I was talking about collaboration, and mentoring and all of that, local content and stuff like that. Those things are not in existence. The challenge that the chamber faces now is to try to see how it can convince government to make belonging to the local chamber a condition for government patronage in any ramification. That way companies with capacity will be compel to belong to the local chamber and they will contribute to the growth of the chamber both in terms of ideas and in terms of resources. So that the local chamber itself can grow, not just its capacity but it would be able to now chart a new course for reenergizing the organized private sector, so that ultimately we grow alongside with the new vision of government and reduce the often times belaboured dependence on government for our businesses to grow. Well, the communication has been put in place and as I said earlier on there is need for a business summit: that is, government and the private sector will seat and articulate some of these ideas in order to benefit not just the private sector but to benefit government ultimately because government has got to continue shrink in size for us to grow the economy and grow the organized private sector.


DAILY CHAMPION: WHAT IS YOUR VIEW ON THE NEGLECT OF SOLID MINERALS IN PREFERNCE FOR OIL AND GAS?

DUKE: It is regrettable. The point is that the challenge that faces investors in solid minerals and in a few others is a clear cut government policy of a range of incentives for investors. And also the prospect of soft landing in event of large investment that has to go into that sector. We always know what the best thing to do will be but we lack the political will to emplace those policies which will naturally attract. The incentives are hardly commensurate with the investments that are expected in. The technology is not yet there. And every time that you find forum at which government is talking about investment opportunities you find out that the conditions for investment that are stated are actually not the ones that are applicable. We have had the experience. I have been a victim of when government have said these are our incentives but the agency of government that is suppose to facilitate those incentives is either unwilling or believed that it is too much of an advantage to an investor, and he just simply cancelled it out. I don’t want to specific now because of some obvious reason but that is what you are facing especially in solid minerals, in manufacturing. And unless we are able to take the bull by the horns. I don’t know what our apprehensions are? And what we fail to do, investments that we failed to keep here are moving to other parts of West Africa and the continent.