Sunday, September 11, 2005

The CNN Advert On Nigeria

The recent and sustained advertisement of Nigeria on the Cable Network News (CNN) is one example of how not to promote a nation. Many persons have watched aghast at the rather theatrical portrayal of Nigeria, the fabled giant of Africa and now its heartbeat.

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For those who have not seen this peculiar advert, it begins innocently enough with an African theme song, some fluttering birds across a plain followed by some pleasure seekers on motorcycles and then a banquet of supposedly African delicacies. As you watch, a young woman with throbbing breasts clad in bikini walks out of a beach. But the drama is not yet over, for there appears in this cacophony of incongruence the president of this country, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, wearing heavy native attire, throwing both arms in the air and announcing in a rather gritty voice, "Welcome to Nigeria, the Heartbeat of Africa".

There are always good and bad ways of doing a thing. If the intention of the advert is to promote tourism in Nigeria, it has failed. To begin with the quality of the pictures in the advertisement leaves a lot to be desired. Any amateur camera man could have accomplished as much, for the entire production is in poor colour. Even the fruits and vegetables are off-putting. Who would like to come to Nigeria to eat faded pineapples and vegetables?

In the end the fault may not lie with the President but with his advisers. Who are the people responsible for this gaudy advert? Can they be investigated and sanctioned for insulting the Nigerian people? How much did the production and dissemination of the advert cost? By comparison, how much is the Nigerian government investing in Melbourne 2006? Nigerians have a right to know. May we draw the attention of our policy makers to the fact that one gold medal in Australia has the power of a thousand re-runs of the "heartbeat" advert. In any case where is the heartbeat in a nation that cannot win a medal of any hue in Helsinki? If we have money to spend, let us put it in sports rather than engage in a wild goose chase that pays no dividends.

The image makers of Nigeria cannot claim that they do not know of quality adverts on television. What we have showcased is arguably the worst that this country can muster. In no way does it compare in quality to the adverts we see on television on say, Malaysia or Croatia. In fact, Nigerian banks in terms of visual imagery have done much better promoting themselves on television than the federal government has done on CNN. We expect to see our president in problem-solving situations, in addressing the many issues confronting his nation.

As an African leader we expect to see him addressing different world bodies on international issues as they affect the black peoples of the world. The last place we expect to find our president is in the role of a tourist advertiser. In which other country is their president directly promoting tourism on television? Where is the minister of tourism? Even more to the point, where are the hordes of dynamic young men and women in the hospitality trade, many of whom are fully capable of speaking in thought and diction to an international audience? What we have mounted on CNN makes Nigeria look primitive. If the image makers of Nigeria do not know it, the Nigerian state, despite its politics, has advanced much farther than a banana republic.

Everyone must know by now that what boosts tourism is not slogans but performance. You cannot have tourism when individuals within the tourist state feel themselves insecure. On what moral basis therefore does one ask another to come and spend his tourist dollars in a place where security cannot be guaranteed? You cannot have tourism where there is no efficient road network linking the tourist sites. As an example, we all know of the Obudu cattle ranch, but how many people know how difficult it is to get there? Start your journey from Lagos, across the Niger at Asaba and then go on to Owerri, and Aba and Ikot Ekpene and Uyo and Calabar and then proceed to Obudu via Ikom.

Tell us whether you will recommend the journey to another. You cannot have tourism where there is no guaranteed access to water and energy. Is it not true that all good hotels in Nigeria must provide their own generators and their own boreholes? You cannot have tourism when there is mass poverty in the land. The tourist might end up giving alms or in the alternative being robbed of all he has. There are so many things that make tourism feasible and most of these things are still lacking in Nigeria. What happens for instance if a tourist sustains a serious injury or dies at Yankari Games Reserve?

Despite the shoddy advert, we know that Nigeria has a lot to offer the tourist. We have all the flora and fauna from the equatorial forest to the savannah belt to an area that skirts the Sahara desert. We have the famed mountain gorilla, the lion, the horse, the camel and the deadly African black mamba. We have many exotic birds some of which are yet to be catalogued. Nigeria is made up of diverse peoples and cultures. The tourist can feast his eyes on Nigerian costumes alone. And then there is the world of African art of which Nigeria is a major player - the Nok, the Igbo-ukwu, Benin, Ife and Abuja, the ancestor stone heads of Ikom, the Mbari of Owerri, the mystery jungle of Osogbo, the Kusugi well in Daura, the list is endless.

It is these many treasures that God has bestowed on Nigeria that we need to expose to an increasingly inquisitive world. We do not do this by putting on television an advert that greatly offends our people and we suspect other non-Nigerians as well. We should spare our president a continuing embarrassment by calling for the immediate withdrawal of the "heartbeat" advert.