The Director – General, Nigeria Tourism Development Corporation, Dr Sally Mbanefo has called journalists in Nigeria to embrace development reporting in sensitizing the world about the tourism potentialities of the nation.
Mrs Mbanefo said this while interacting with a crop of travel journalists who converged on the corporation stand at Eko Hotels and Suites Lagos venue of the Akwaaba Africa Travel Market as she said “Nigerians journalist are the windows of dissemination of the reality of events in Nigeria. The onus of telling the world of the tourism potentialities in Nigeria lie squarely on your shoulders. No one can tell our story better than us. We should not allow an outsider to be reporting events in Nigeria from outside with claim of authenticity’.
She pointed out “Some of the foreign news media operating in Nigeria have turned themselves to disseminators of falsehood and dispellers of black rumours capable of distracting the attention of tourists and investors from Nigeria”
Mrs Mbanefo called on Nigerian journalists not to “join the foreign media in their consistent and persistent evil scheme of only orchestrating the bad news of Nigeria while glossing over the positive and development news which spring out every day as if their countries are not the bastion of evil and horribly criminal news”
She pointed out “development journalism behoves you all to allow altruism , patriotism , development and love of the society to rule your sense of news judgement and reportage .”
Mrs Mbanefo commended some members of the travel and tourism journalists “I must however confess that despite all these a section of the Nigerian travel and tourism writers have remained resolute, patriotic, abided by the ethics of their profession and refused to be hooked by the spell of destroying their father’s land by telling the world the good things about Nigeria”
She also revealed that the British Airways, (BA) has shown readiness to officially partner with the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC) on the 2017 IT-Berlin in Germany, the largest world travel market in Europe.
Mbanefo disclosed that she and the BA Regional Director, Mr Demola Sanya, along with the airline’s foreign directors and officials were working on the modalities to make the partnership achieve the rationale behind it, which according to her, is to take the gospel of the Nigerian Tourism industry to the whole world via IT-Berlin.
The NTDC boss who commended Arik Air for being a faithful travel partner of the Corporation for the World Travel Market (WTM) in London, expressed satisfaction on the interest of BA in the promotion of the Nigerian tourism by partnering with NTDC for future events.
She also revealed the readiness of Namibia to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with NTDC. The intending MOU with Namibia, according to her, will help in promoting the Nigerian Tourism sector.