Tourism: Lagos Chamber boss charges media, others on sector

The Director General, Lagos Chamber Of Commerce & Industry, Mr. Muda Yusuf has expressed optimism over the state of tourism and hospitality industry in Nigeria, urging that for tourism and hospitality industries to thrive there have to be stronger collaboration between the media and the tourism and hospitality industry.

Speaking, on Tuesday, at the Hoteliers’ Association Of Nigeria South-West Zone 2017, South West Hotel Conference held at the Administrative Staff College, Badagry, Lagos, with theme:

‘Emerging Marketing Trends in Tourism and Hospitality sector of the Nigerian economy, noted that perception matters, and pointed out that the media has a lot of roles to play in shaping the perception of tourists either the domestic tourist or international tourist.

He said,”It is perception that defines the brand of an institution of a country and industry; and the media has a lot of role to play in shaping the perception of tourist either the domestic tourist or international tourists.

Every country has it s challenges, but it is not a good thing that the only thing that made headlines are the bad things. You puck up a newspaper, the headlines are most often very negative, you switch on television the headlines are very often bad things”.

He said, “All those things adversely affect the growth of tourism and hospitality industry. We need to do a lot in the area of branding and the media has a big role to play on this”.

Yusu said, We have hospitality and tourism group, but we need to get them to be more active just as I was also telling them they need to be more visible,

they need to more active to bring up issues affecting the industry because the louder you are the more attention you get. So, they should also be visible to push the industry forward.

On the creative industry, he said that,” They have made a lot of progress but the progress they cannot ascribe it to the support they are getting.

The progress is at large extent , the kind of support they expect from government , I’m not sure they are getting it as yet.

The problems of shooting, piracy, facilities, even those on the fashion industry sometimes they face the challenge of bringing the right kind of fabrics because of some import policies; and there are lot of potential in that area.

The progress you are seeing are more from the internal energy and internal resources from those who are players in the industry, but we need some external support from the government”.

On CBN’s monetary policy, he said,” This is a major issue and we should continue to engage the government on that at some point someone will listen and things will change.

The forex policy today is different from what it was as at one or two years before today, there has been a shift; at some point they said bank should stop collecting forex from anybody.

Interest rate today is too high, especially on long time investments like all these hospitality businesses, agriculture, solid minerals, construction companies or property, unless you have very solid equity capital and how many people get equity capital.

So, the banking system is not supporting any investment because of high cost of funds; and because of short tenure of the funds and these things we need to get the monetary policy authorities to do”.

According to him,”The tourism banks will not solve the problem, but what that could solve the is a systemic issues because that is also affecting tourism.

It is also affecting other industries; and let’s recognize it as a problem of the economy that needed to be tackled.