The creation of three new ministries from a hitherto single ministry of Information and Culture by the Tinubu government shows the seriousness of the government in unpacking the governance structure to pay focused attention to some areas that have been unduly neglected and therefore performed sub-optimally. In the old ministry of Information and Culture, the culture and tourism arms were like an appendage when it came to government attention and most of the ministers behaved that way: being all over the place attending to the information management aspects of their job schedules and distancing themselves from the cultural and tourism programmes and projects of even government departments and agencies. The institutional and governance oversights they were supposed to maintain on those culture and tourism agencies were abysmal. Most of the agencies had no functional governing boards and where such existed, the chief executives crippled them , thereby leading to poor governance in the sector resulting into lack of real achievements, lack of productivity and lack of government participation in the growth of the sectors.
The expectation now from the unpacking of the former behemoth ministry is that the information and national orientation aspects will go full stream without the “baggage “of the culture and tourism sectors. The culture sector has now been empowered like it was under the OBJ regime with a stand alone ministry that achieved many cultural milestones for the sector such as the introduction of the Abuja Carnival and the others renaissance witnessed during that era. The new ministry to oversee culture has been extended to focus more on the arts and the creative economy encompassing vibrant private sector-driven areas such as music, film, fashion design, theatre, cultural cottage industries, literature etc. The creative economy today is called the orange economy to foreground its immense potentials for generating jobs, wealth and income for the teeming youthful population. The wealth generating and income diversification levers of the creative economy are not in the hands of government ministries or agencies. The government departments are there to support the active players in the field with policies and strategic alliances that will boost the deliverables of the creative economy. The ministry should not allow its agencies to compete with the field which is often what you see happening. For the new stand alone ministry of tourism, it is a call for a strict focus on the revival of the 2006 tourism development master plan with its updating to fit into the digital economy and its implementation to improve wealth generation in our tourism industry. The creation of that ministry is also a call for the diversification of the way we do tourism in Nigeria. Our tourism is often culture- driven. This is the time to focus on pure tourism business of developing our tourist sites, improving infrastructures connected to tourism and marketing the immensity of the eco-tourism sites and monuments in Nigeria to domestic and foreign tourists.
Above all, the new ministries and associated agencies should not work in silos, they must engage in strategic partnership among themselves to deliver for the government, the practitioners, the cultural producers and the people of Nigeria the growth, satisfaction and wealth inherent in the cultural, creative and tourist economies.