Acting Director General of the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), Dr. Paul Angya, says Nigeria can make billions of dollars from tourism and hospital industry sector.
Angya said the Federal Government is determined to develop tourism as a means of growing the country’s economy, noting that Nigeria was ready to take her share of the global trillion dollars tourism investments.
He said further that stakeholders in the sector, led by SON, are set to attract over one million international tourists in the year to beat the previous record.
Angya revealed that there has been tremendous increase in the numbers of international tourists attendants globally from 166 million in 1970 to 1,035 billion in 2012.
Here’s what Angya said:
“As Nigeria diversifies its economy from oil, tourism and its related activities can be one of the game changers for foreign exchange earnings, job creation, infrastructure development and business,”
“The 2012 visitors spent $1 trillion on travel, this excludes international passenger transportation expenses valued at $213 billion.
Directly and indirectly, their spending accounted for 9 per cent of the world’s GDP and 6 per cent of its exports.”
The Acting Director-General said that though tourism is universally known as an important sector that drives the socio-economic development and growth of nations, only developing countries actively pursued tourism exports as a strategy for national development.
I don’t understand what concerns the man at SON with tourism, when he cannot clean up the aspect of the Nigerian economy given to him. There are substandard products in every square metre of Nigeria, and the DG of Standards Organization of Nigeria is telling us about tourism.
people need to get serious with their jobs first, and when they’ve handled what they are given, they can venture into suggestions for other sectors.
Meanwhile, correction: “1,035 billion in 2012”.