Tajudeen Akande, a chartered accountant is President of the Lagos Country Club as well as Director of Africa Regional Board, Pannel Kerr Forster (PKF) a consortium of chartered accountants. In this interview with Daniel Adeleye, he speaks on the nation’s tourism potential amongst other related issues. Excerpts:
What is your appraisal of the hospitality industry in Nigeria and do you think it has fared better?
Of course, the simple and straight forward answer is no. Hospitality industry is a broad industry that comprises hotel accommodation, tourism, transportation and all that. It’s a huge business with several potentials like oil and gas industry where there are so many derivative businesses that bring huge money. When you have tourists for instance, they need to lodge in hotels, they also need recreational facilities like clubs where they can unwind, they’ll need to visit museums, and theatre and people will sell souvenirs, art works and all that. So it’s a huge industry that can generate a lot of revenue. But of course, it has not delivered that because of the environment. Certain things that could have made the industry efficient such as transportation, good roads, security are missing. I cannot remember how many cities in the world that I’ve been to for conferences and seminars. I normally like to arrive a day before the programme starts and leave one or two days after. The first thing I do when I arrive is to know the place where I am and you see all these buses conveying you around and show you the grandeur of the cities. But if you bring visitors here, due to bad roads, they may be on the same spot for hours in a traffic gridlock. If all the corporate organisations here are to host meetings and conferences you can imagine what will go into those who conduct such thing. I once had a Russian visitor about 15years ago who came lodging at Eko Hotel. When he was going back, he bought art works worth $2000. So tourism is not achieving its potential in Nigeria. The hotels here have the most expensive room rate you can find. When you Google it, average standard hotel here in 3-4 star not to talk of 5-star hotels cost about $200-300 dollars a night. Why, because you need to pay for 24 hours electricity and run primarily on generator which adds to the cost. Now have you noticed that every major hotel person can come and sleep now, you have to put some barriers of 500m away, bomb disposals and all that? If I can’t have free movement, what do you think is in the psyche of a visitor, the place is not safe! So sometimes when you are in a place and people think they are assuring you of safety by building and conducting thorough security checks and all that, the message you’re passing to the visitor is he’s not safe. Those things are having adverse effect on the industry; the standard of service delivery in the hospitality industry has to be perfect. What’s the training, the orientation and disposition of the personnel? Quality personnel and trainings are affecting the hospitality industry too. But the important thing is, it’s not attractive to investors because what will make them to run profitably are not there.
So what do you think needs to be done in this regards to make tourism develop to a level that it can become a foreign exchange earner as obtained in countries like South Africa, Kenya and all that?
Take Kenya for instance, the revenue from tourism is almost the kind of revenue we are expecting from oil in Nigeria. South Africa, apart from gold it’s tourism. Cape Town is basically a tourist city. Even in Zimbabwe before problem started there, is tourism. What of Kigali in Rwanda? Turkey is tourism. What has been built in Dubai up to the stage today is tourism. Now what’s holding us back is security and electricity. The security situation in Nairobi is bad as ours. Lagos is better as far as I’m concerned. The way we have Boko Haram that operates in the north east, they also have Al shabaab and all that. They’ve been living with that problem long ago before the break out of Boko Haram and all that here. But they developed tourism and reinvested it because it’s a major economic activity for them. The same European that rejects coming to Nigeria goes there. What is the issue of terrorism here comparing to Turkey? And if you check the booking list of major tourist agents, you’ll see how many people who have booked for Turkey up till 2020 on holiday. The thing here is even when you come out from airport, the way touts and street urchins zoom at you is embarrassing. Even me that was born, bred and grew up here, I feel harassed. But in other climes even in Accra here, when you come from their airports you’ll see orderliness that we don’t have here. To have a thriving hospitality and tourism sector in Nigeria, there must be law and order, guaranteed security, uninterrupted power supply and good transportation. Every activity is timed, if people come for holiday in Lagos for instance, you should be able to do a day trip to places like Abeokuta, Oyo, Ife and so on, to see things of interests. But can we guarantee that? All these are not more than a day by train in other countries. In other places that people visit, what they are going there to see is, the palace, mansion, gardens, cinemas, central parks with the same trees and flowers that we have here. Why can’t people go to Abuja on a tourist visit to Aso rock villa, Zuma rock, National Assembly complex like they do in Washington and all that? But today, you can’t even do it in Abuja; the roads are all congested and littered with beggars.
Do you want to tell us how much a well-organised hospitality and tourism sector would have been contributing to Nigeria’s annual GDP?
I’m an accountant so I won’t just guess a figure. But I know it would have been huge because there are so many advantages attached to the industry. For instance, there is no one coming for tourism that will not have up to at least $1000 in his pocket and they will finish that money on buying things. So from that statistics, let’s say we have three million visitors in a year spending average of a thousand dollar apart from hotel accommodation. They cherish all those things we consider silly, they buy them. So apart from hotel accommodation and airlines, just spending money on those little things. A thousand dollars multiplied by three million, we are talking about $3billion here and add that to the county’s GDP. Even restaurants owners will benefit from them. I hosted a meeting last August, I didn’t know when two of my visitors sneaked out. I was shocked second day when they told me they were taken to the University of Suya on Allen Avenue. So you can imagine ‘Aboki’ selling suya will also make money. Out of curiosity they will drink sachet water. So the economic benefit is huge.
What are the challenges you have to confront as the President of this prestigious club?
Yes and funny enough, I will say the very first challenge is time. Because we are there for a limited period and we have so many things to do. From the first day, we understood that we were racing against time. There is also a challenge of prioritisation. I am a management person and I know when you’re competing needs and you have a number of projects and activities. So you need to prioritise in terms of what is urgency and to decide on those things itself is a challenge. We are in a diverse environment in terms of generations and profile of membership of the club. What the people of sixties, seventies and above consider as important and immediate needs may be slightly different from those of fifties and below. It’s a family club as I’ve said and the family in it is when you’re a member, your spouse and children are also members. The children are junior members. So there’s that generational that you need to build bridge across those generations. You need to prioritise what’s going to be beneficial to the old, the young, and the not too young. Of course, in every business activity, finance is always a major constraint. Our revenue comes from subscriptions from members, joining fee from those who aspire to be members, levies, and revenue generated from sales of foods and beverages. Now there had been constraints in all those sources of revenue because of economic downturn and there is a limit to which we can increase subscriptions. Even when it’s not increased, the numbers of people who are able to meet up with obligation of paying their subscriptions are reducing by the day. Then you can say we need revenue generating commercial activities which is about the food and beverages we sell and all that. But the philosophy of the club is, everything should come at a discount to the members when they are in the club. In which case there’s a limit to the margin we can put on what we sell. Now the dilemma is you have personnel to pay, you have expenses on electricity, diesel to power generator and all that. So when the revenue is declining, expenditure profile is rising. Therefore we now have to go for donations and sponsorship. And to get sponsorship you need to enhance your brand reputation and feasibility, and that takes us back to the infrastructural renewal projects. We believe for us to approach serious corporate bodies that could support us with money, we need to show them what we have on ground in terms of facility and the executive management.
You’re accountant managing your own account firm, how do you combine that with running another big organisation like Lagos Country Club. What motivates you?
Effective time management is the key. You have already known how many hours in a day, one has to be much organised and set a goal for himself. So you have to do time management couple with listening to your body. When you need to slow down, you need to be realistic to slow down. That’s how I cope.
What motivates me is service. On the register of Lagos Country Club, we have about fifteen-thousand members. But on a typical day you have 600 people who will use the club. So somebody must organise and manage our relationship and all that. Even if you employ people to run it, somebody must supervise them because one’s ownership and management is differs. The owner must have oversight on the managers. So it’s about service. You have a vision about what ought to be and as at that time, at every point in time there would have been what it is as against what it ought to be. So that’s my own motivation.
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