HERITAGE properties are public facilities essential for national identity, national cohesion, employment generation, education, and cultural and religious values.
Heritage properties are important icons upon which tourism is developed, sustained and promoted across the world with the attendant social and economic benefits accruing from them.
Heritage properties have been identified as part of the attractions which constitute the diversified tourism products worldwide, as they have the capacity to generate high economic asset values, with some worth billions of dollars.
According to Ruoss and Alfarè (2013), 37 percent of the global tourism has a cultural motivation. Therefore, if properly harnessed, heritage properties are significant drivers that have the potential to develop and promote tourism, with significant impacts on environmental, social and economic life of the people.
Nigeria is blessed in heritage potentials such as historic towns and highly diversified cultural heritage embodying the people’s traditions, religions and belief systems.
There are also natural diversities which include rivers and ocean beaches, wildlife, vast tracts of natural vegetation, waterfalls, and varied climatic conditions.
Some of these heritage properties have attracted attention from within and outside the region due to the great values they convey.
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Two of these properties, the Osun Osogbo Sacred Grove and Sukur Cultural Landscape, have been inscribed on the World Heritage List owning to their outstanding universal values.
Given the enormous tourist potentials that abound in the country, Nigeria’s tourism sector is performing below expectation.
The world ranking of tourism placed Nigeria in the 116th position in 2013 and slipped further to 129 out of the 136 in 2017.
The capacity of Nigeria’s heritage properties to earn the nation substantial revenue is not in doubt, but Nigeria has not fully realised the benefits that heritage tourism has to offer, as not much of these properties have been mainstreamed and harnessed into the global tourism industry.
Therefore, it is important to effectively manage the nation’s heritage properties for national development.
- Oladele is Principal Museum Education Officer, National Museum of Unity, Ibadan.