TOURISM IN NIGERIA - INTERVIEW WITH MR MICHAEL WILLIAMS
a very warm welcome to all our listeners around the world you're welcome to the tony to combat fernandez show a show that promotes the true life and success stories of african and caribbean achievers around the world so if there's a product or initiative you wish to share feel free to give us a call on oh seven eight eight two eight zero nine zero zero five that number once again is all 788-280-9005 take time also to visit our international blog at www.tonyfernandes.com.uk it's all about promoting the true life and success stories of african and caribbean achievers around the world and we have some amazing guests lined up every single week for the rest of the year hope you're having a wonderful wonderful february so far uh this week we're going all the way to lagos nigeria to speak to um a very profound gentleman originally from jamaica living in nigeria doing amazing things he's our head of marketing for ebony life and former managing director for the crossover states tourism guru so um it's a pleasure to meet for the very first time mr mike wilke williams uh welcome to the tony to combo fernandez show how are you feeling this morning i'm feeling well thanks tony i must tell you the maybe your bio information is not up to date and so that's my fault i left the film house group um in 2019 just before just around the beginning of the pandemic and you know like all of us took cover for a year and um since then i've been the general manager at ebony life place which is a leisure resort a luxury ledger resort in lagos which includes five screen cinema wonderful rooftop restaurant asian fusion restaurant and next to a poolside and of course the 20 room boutique hotel thank you so much for the collection uh and it also brings us to the a very very similar question because i'm sure our listeners around the world are dying to know a bit about yourself your background the things in life you're most passionate about but most importantly what made you to move to nigeria well i came to nigeria on an invitation originally so i was a member of the board of the london nottingham carnival and it was a voluntary post you know that wasn't how i made my money at my own marketing consultancy firm however um i got invited well a director got invited and i happened to be the one who what everybody thought i drew the short straw but it turned out to be the long straw i went to carnival calabar in cross river thoroughly enjoyed myself wrote a short report about my experience which is what was required by the organizers and and in that report i mentioned it's what i thought about their potential for tourism and i stayed in touch with them for a number of months with probably over a year uh whenever they were on their way to trinidad perhaps for training carnival training or something uh they would stop in london we'd have dinner i'd help them with various things and um probably about a year after that i got a call from them saying that the governor cross river was a new governor and senator imoki was looking for a tourism consultant would i consider putting in a proposal so put in a proposal i'm not sure who my competition was at the time i heard rumors and but won the bid and for another year after that i was a consultant the governor to the carnival board the carnival calabar commission and the um the tourism bureau while i was doing that i got invited to be the managing director which would have involved living in nigeria while being head of the tourism bureau i didn't fancy it at the time i thought nigeria was a tough place to live nice place to visit tough place to live but you know a few months later i was persuaded and and so i thought well let's give it a try a year or two if i don't like it i can always quit um but i ended up being there for five and a half years and lots of challenges but we did a lot of good and i thoroughly enjoyed it worked with a great number of people who did a fantastic job in crossfit at the time we were the only states in nigeria that was pursuing tourism seriously and the whole thing was started by governor donald duke um and i was in i think in 1999 at the start of the whole democratic dispensation and he did a fantastic job putting kalbar on the map senator mokay continued when he became governor so we had 16 years of a consistent government in cross river trying to build tourism and with a lot of successes people saw us both here and abroad as the place in nigeria for tourism so we're very proud of that i'm also very sad of course about what's happened since but but as you know in nigeria it's very very hard to get on broken governance because government is not consistent it goes and comes depending on various personalities that come in and out of in and out of the political space um so but you know nevertheless we we tried and uh and i think to a great extent we succeeded now you're originally from jamaica uh just like my mother yeah and for very very many years ever since the 1920s uh there have been very many jamaicans who have migrated to nigeria and created very very big legacies do you think there's something an outsider is able to see in nigeria that nigerians don't see well i think that's true of any immigrant or visitor going to any country the people who live there take a lot of things for granted and when it when you go to another country you start to see opportunities that maybe the locals don't see it's actually no different when nigerians go to america or go to the uk they see opportunities that were always there for the people who live there um but they managed to seize on those opportunities because they have that fresh perspective coming in as immigrants so i mean that's the same all over the world and nigerians in nigeria don't necessarily see the opportunities but then the lebanese the indians the chinese and the jamaicans will come in and we'll see those opportunities so that's just something that happens everywhere in the world and nigeria is no exception to that what is it about nigeria and nigerians which you like having been living there for very many years and if you were to promote nigeria to the outside world to people who hadn't visited nigeria how would you promote it well the thing that i admired most about nigerians which i suppose it's good and it's bad it's just how resilient they are you know i haven't seen a people in any country that take the challenges and all the difficulties and the hardships mostly imposed by government or brought on by government neglect but they survived all of it they managed to thrive they managed to do well you know lagos still manages to have the more millionaires than all of africa um you know nigeria manages to produce the richest man in africa um despite all of the challenges so the resilience is just amazing and they they still keep laughing uh you know most of the nigerian jokes are about the follies of the politicians and about the hardships that people are enduring so just their ability to keep smiling keep working hard that's something i really admire if i had to promote nigeria apart from obviously the the places and and all the things that you can do here but just about the people i would say that nigerians are grossly misrepresented around the world as scammers and and you know people who are dishonest and and there is an element of that here of course which gets projected um you know beyond all recognition but when you're actually here and you're doing business and you're relating with people and what you find is is this commitment to hard work and this integrity that people have deep down and um and people shouldn't be misled by a few con men um particularly those in high places um people should be misled by that you know at their heart at nigerians i think um are really hard-working people really ambitious people i'm really focused on their education and always trying to do well i mean you know when they go abroad they always end up with the ones with like 10 degrees to their name that kind of thing so yeah i would just say the people um are really nigeria's most precious asset you've spoken quite a bit about business and today we're also talking about tourism in nigeria as you know uh business and tourism go together how important is tourism in nigeria and why well the truth is it's it should be very important it isn't very important um you know oil and gas and you know maybe agriculture are seen as the things that will save the economy and nobody is really caught on to the fact that tourism would really be that glue that would bring everything together particularly when it comes to employment so oil and gas yes massive revenues but how many nigerians actually get employed by the oil and gas industry and you know it's still an industry that depends quite heavily on expatriates coming into work and of course foreign companies coming in to do a lot of the heavy lifting so you know and and when so much of that goes or actually so when that goes abroad or um you find that that money gets frittered away by the politicians then you find that something like tourism would be much better for the economy in terms of the ripples that it spreads throughout so for instance if you have a lot of visitors coming into the country who are staying in hotels who are visiting attractions who are eating out at restaurants who are stopping by the roadside to spend money the employment that results from that you know for instance if you have maybe 100 rooms in a hotel you might need up to four or 500 people employed there and when those people now need housing when they're buying their their cars their furniture and all the rest of it even we talk about agriculture you can actually do more with agriculture by supplying the tourism industry then you can do by exporting and you don't have to go through all the tariffs or the transport or the shipping you simply have instead of exporting to the uk or the us you have those uk and us consumers coming to your country and you can supply them right there so the the value chain in tourism is is tremendous and because nigeria has never really taken it seriously it's never really had the chance to see what the effect could be i've um i've had the opportunity of visiting over 35 countries and one of the things which becomes obvious in my visits is how important people take tourism and it subconsciously becomes the gateway to business should we really be taking tourism more seriously in nigeria on a state level yeah we should be um we we should be taking it seriously because most of what you're using for tourism are actually natural assets so all the attractions that we have the rain forests um you know some of the mountains uh some of the you know all the things in terms of cultural tourism um you think about you know i'm going to london very soon and one of the things i want to do is to go back and visit the british museum which i haven't visited for many years simply because i want to look at a number of artifacts from around the world including those that were stolen from nigeria and we have even more of those artifacts here they're not properly displayed there's no way that you can go and see them even if you're taking internal tourism like school children out on field trips now we haven't really put that together in terms of a national gallery a national museum of any note so we don't take it seriously at all but if we did um i think it would it would be uh it would have a amazing impact on the tourism industry um but you know i don't know who's listening but it would be fantastic but you know listening to me is all right it's okay for me to say it but for and you know cape town joburg all those places that we we believe are doing better than nigeria but lagos and abuja were the only ones that had 90 to 95 of the occupancy that they were enjoying in 2019 before the pandemic everybody else is between 40 to 60 down so just with our our business tourism you can see that resilience that's there if you actually were able to expand that part of the economy with leisure visitors then that's when you really see an impact fantastic um for the benefit of listeners who have never visited nigeria before um what tourist sports in nigeria whether it's lagos calabar are you most favorites that you recommend to them honestly there's not a lot to recommend and by that i mean there are a lot of places people should be visiting but most of them are are quite neglected and and not in the state that that you could put on par with anything else you see around the world so it's it's really only in lagos if people come to somewhere like landmark beach for example landmark beach has been developed um to a fantastic level um by landmark africa and they've done it by investing seriously in the project and they've built it in a way that i haven't seen anything else in nigeria before and it's it was a plan you know done over many years i think they're probably their 11th or 12th year right now of the project and it keeps growing um they had the plan and it's just been rolled out stage by stage step by step in a way that you see around the world but it's being done here when people send videos back from from lagos to london you know especially nigerians in the diaspora most people say that can't be lagos that can't be nigeria tell us where you really are are you in dubai or somewhere like that um and and on one hand that's a sort of complement to landmark but the other hand is a it's kind of like a backhanded insult when people can't believe there's anything that's really nicely developed um in nigeria but that shows you the general state of things um so when someone does make an effort it stands out on my mind what i'm hoping is that with the success of landmark beach where you see eight nine ten thousand people over the recent christmas holidays eight nine ten thousand people a day going there and spending their money with the vendors with with the restaurants um hiring cabanas on the beach um you know just going around and having fun from morning till late in the evening you know just tremendous impact and that's just one resort imagine if you were to be able to do that across lagos and other parts of the country that's when you start to see the impact and and bear in mind this is all mostly internal tourism and nigerians from the diaspora some expatriates that that live here and a few of the people who are here visiting our business that's without any impact of proper leisure tourism coming into the country now to explain to your viewers what that impact could be if you develop the industry take my home country of jamaica where the population is about 2.8 i think heading for 3 million people but before the pandemic they were edging just above 4.5 million visitors a year and i think if it hadn't been for the pandemic by this year they would have reached five million imagine three million people receiving five million visitors so that's like being in nigeria with 200 million people and having 300 million visitors you can't even imagine it but but if it were to happen even if you had 50 million or 100 million visitors for those 200 million people the impact on the economy would be explosive a very final note uh i'm sure our listeners around the world would want to know what current initiatives you're working on at the moment that people should know about and also finally what message do you have for all our listeners today so the project that i'm really working on now is for the last year or so i've had the privilege of being general manager at ebony life place and and that's a leisure resort in the middle of victoria island just overlooking uh the water but also with the view and to people who know lagos is just opposite echo hotel and what we're managing to do there is to cultivate a beautiful african inspired space when you come into the hotel it's 20 rooms beautifully curated with a natural art sculpture so the rooms are very beautiful and you go into the adjoining building every night place there's a wonderful rooftop restaurant that holds about 120 people um and it's one of the most popular spots in in lagos right now there's a five screen state-of-the-art luxurious cinema where you can do everything from via ips cinema where you just have maybe 12 of your best friends um with a two-course meal um movie of your choice and that sort of thing and then you could also go to the pool side and enjoy a meal there or go to the asia infusion restaurant so more and more you're starting to see in lagos um attractions like this where you can just stay all day and enjoy different things um and it's world class just like landmark ever in life place is people don't believe um that they're in lagos and so lagos we are doing that the rest of the country needs to follow um a budget could quickly get on board with conference facilities and start hosting major conferences around from around the continent and around the world and if we follow that master plan that i was just looking at it's now i think 16 years old and almost nothing has been done in that master plan but if it had if it would be done um then you could quickly see the prosperity that's here in lagos quickly spreading to other parts of the country we just need someone in central government to take it seriously not to invest in it just provide the infrastructure and the incentives the private sector just like it's doing here in lagos would happily invest their money around the country if they knew they knew there'd be some continuity for them to be able to get their profits at the end of the day williams it's so lovely to see you this morning doing amazing things in in lagos and i i hope you keep up the amazing work um and yeah keep shining all the way and god bless you thank you very much tony um good to be on your show and keep doing the good work you're doing as well thank you sir
2022-02-08 22:42
