By Frank Meke.
This month, the government of President Ahmed Tinubu will be one year old in office. While the President is intentional about returning the country to winning ways economically, some of his appointees in the ministries and agencies are literally on a fancy ride.
In our culture and tourism trade, the appointees are far away from the mark of the presidential directives on project deliverables but rather interested in creating their own fiefdoms.
For a government that is supposedly at war with poverty and corruption, it is strange to see and hear appointees talking to nobody in particular…it is even fearful and worrisome to behold the presence of power drunken masters, intoxicated beyond measure with the glitz of public office to which they do not hold a generational inheritance license.
In the Culture Sector, Hannatu Musa Musawa’s appointee for the National Institute for Cultural Orientation ( NICO) is a sure replica of a Frankenstein being.
One Otunba Biodun Ajiboye is the new white lion at NICO, and he is doing a nice job, the type our notable politicians do when they are mistakenly saddled with national assignments beyond their grasp.
No doubt, we know how appointments are made in Nigeria, our only Otunba Biodun Ajiboye must have been imposed on Musawa as Executive Secretary of National Institute of Cultural Orientation ( NICO), a position he is struggling to find his feet.
Even before his formal engagement, he went about ranting all the place and hurriedly assumed office as if his breath depended on it without official handover notes from his predecessor.
As if that was not enough, the Generalissimo of NICO organized for himself a convoy manned by selected security personnel at his militaristic command, opening and closing doors with ” designed salutes” for the new field marshal of NICO.
Our new NICO “general” also forgot that he is merely first among equal, and against the run of play in the civil service ecosystem, “General” Ajiboye has ordered that his directors must book appointments before accessing ‘Oga’ at the top.
If the new field marshal at NICO is not panting for absolute power, which corrupts white lions, he is out there on a mountain top shouting to be heard as an advertising dinosaur.
Unfortunately, the game at NICO is about oppressive power, as against a vote for cultural orientation deliveries and awareness. One major gain at NICO before Generalsimo Otunba Biodun Ajiboye took over is the accreditation of NICO certification by Nassarawa State University. Its cultural school now collaborates with the university to upgrade cultural studies certification.
The quest to also capture our youths and young persons in schools across the country through cultural clubs and mentoring rubrics in our various languages and dances flourished the mandate of NICO. To Ajiboye, it does not matter!
There was also strategic collaboration with top academics in our universities, with focal intent to interrogate noticeable cultural attitudinal failings and marshalling out orientation baselines. Our new ‘Oga’ is afraid to robustly engage the gowns to address cultural malaise that are competing with the gains of our cultural diversity.
The list of progressive projects at NICO was so impressive until Hannatu Musa Musawa brought in Ajibola to dismember it. Although Ajiboye wants us to take him seriously , he pretended not to know that nico under his predecessor succoured two more cultural elements inscribed by Unesco across the country.
Now, two weeks ago, our field marshall, after asserting his absolute presence and power as the undisputed maximum ruler at NICO, thundered from his exalted office that Nigeria’s cultural economy is worth about twenty billion dollars , Cent for Cent against oil.
The President General of NICO has not finished ooo. He announced his plans to organize the Orisa festival and, with it, bring about 500 million traditional religious aficionados from all over the world to Nigeria. In fact, he swore that he would compel about one million people to come to Nigeria for his Orisa festival, and his pedigree for such a project is left to his infertile imagination
Ajiboye certainly forgot his call is about mapping out cultural education awareness and orientation for Nigerians but he clearly does not care as he is set to confront and teach his colleague at National Council for Arts and Culture in whose domain festivals, Arts and crafts economy is captured, how to do his job.
Predictively, the NICO all-knowing premium noise maker will soon fall out with his madam youth corper minister in a classico public show of the blind leading the blind cultural challenge.
By May ending, we shall see if this government is serious about weeding out the dead woods in culture and tourism or would leave them to destroy the system. As it is in Culture, so also it is in Tourism. Abeg, who will bail us out of this unfortunate situation?
