The Ogun Government on Thursday in Abeokuta trained 100 tourism officers on capacity building, international best practices and promotion of culture and tourism.
In her address at the one-day workshop, the state Commissioner for Culture and Tourism, Mrs Adijat Adeleye-Oladapo, noted that it was important to inculcate more skills in the officers for more effective performance.
Adeleye-Oladapo explained that the training was meant to improve the officers’ productivity and equip them with necessary skills, knowledge, values and competency for effective service delivery.
She added that skills and knowledge acquired by the tourism officers of the ministry would help them to build on their professional competence and also make them more valuable.
According to her, any organisation that does not believe in capacity building is already planning toward extinction.
The ministry, she said, had started the expansion of the scope of tourism in the state with the aim of bringing in more investments through Public-Private Partnership.
“Wherever you find yourself, there is a need to upgrade yourself in order to conform with today’s reality and with international best practices.
“Some of them are tourism officers, while some of them are cultural officers.
“Surely, a lot of things have changed since the time they left schools. We are now in a digitalised world. So, there is a need to upgrade and continue to upgrade them through this type of training.
“This training is very important and timely as it presents the opportunity to impact the knowledge and necessary information to the officers for optimal performance.
“Whatever they are learning here today will rub-off on their work and that will increase their performances at work, and by extension increase our revenue generation drive in the ministry,” she said.
A resource person at the workshop, Charles Ukomadu, called for more funding of the tourism sector, saying the sector had potential to generate more revenue for the state and Nigeria as a whole.
Ukomadu, a tourism consultant and the Special Adviser to the Institute for Tourism Professionals of Nigeria (ITPN), South-West Zone, said, if properly funded, tourism could sustain the country’s economy.
The trained tourism officers were drawn from the state Ministry of Culture and Tourism. NAN
