Hon. Bonu Saanu Solomon, the lawmaker representing Badagry Constituency 1 in the Lagos State House of Assembly who Chairs the House Committee on Tourism, Arts, and Culture,has emphasised the importance of protecting and promoting Nigerian culture . Solomon who has awarded scholarships to brainy tertiary institution students from his constituency to encourage education and development, advocated for the nurturing of young talent and encouraged Nigerians to embrace and preserve their cultural heritage. He shared his views on cultural pride, youth empowerment, and the significance of supporting young talents with Olanrewaju Adesanya. Excerpts:
What motivated you into the office?
It’s all about service, service to humanity, service to my people and how to change the society.
How far have you done that?
It’s a gradual process, it’s not easy to change the lives of people. It’s about policies and engagement and now we lobby the government to ensure that things are done for our people.
Talking about tourism, which is a money spinning venture in many countries, what are you doing to develop the sector for Lagos State?
On tourism, the first thing you have to do is infrastructure, and if you look at Lagos State, it is a tourism hub. A place like Badagry is a tourism environment. What we need to do is to put infrastructure in place. Just recently, my committee went to Badagry on oversight functions to and we were able to see all the tourism facilities and how we could develop them. That was around the middle of the year. What we need to do now is to provide the budget for next year for the State Ministry of Tourism to rejig its strategy and galvanise the repair of these tourism centres. We have the first primary school, first storey building, point of no return and others in Badagry. We have to appropriate resources for them to do it. There are other places in Lagos State that we are looking into. Just recently, we discussed with the Speaker of the House, but I would not reveal the details until we are through with it. We are going to invite the representative of the United Nations on tourism in Nigeria to speak to the Tourism Committee of the House and the State Ministry of Tourism. We have the population in Lagos State, and tourism is our own oil. I discussed with someone recently and he said that Lagos State is preferable in the area of security and that many people want to come to the state. In Lagos State, you enjoy your money without any disturbance unlike what is happening in other states, including Abuja. So, we need to harness this and generate income for the state. That is the kind of things we are looking at.
We heard of the plan to bring the youths on board on tourism, are you looking at partnering with the youths to develop tourism in the state?
When you talk about the youths, they are everywhere, but the main centre point for the youths in Lagos State today is entertainment. They are interested in entertainment such as film production and music. Some of them came around here to shoot music videos. So, we need to work with the youths and if there is anything we can do to support them, we will do it. Some of them want to grow, they look at Davido, Wizkid, and others, so we need to encourage them. The Ministry of Tourism has various forms of training programmes for them, most especially on film production. They have the likes of Mo Abudu, Peace Anyanwu, and others who are training the youths on film production, cinematography and some others like that. But to some certain levels, the youths in that field are educated. There are some other uneducated youths that are on the streets and who are talented. These are the areas we want to go into to take them off the streets. We are thinking at the committee level to come up with some policies, and some laws to help them for the Ministry of Tourism to implement them.
Our cultural heritage is being eroded everyday as people have left some good cultural values, what counsel would you give in this area?
It’s important that we should protect our culture and heritage. It came up on the floor of the House as a resolution that we should protect our culture. We want to dedicate a whole week for our cultural heritage in a carnival like so that we can address it. If you look at developed countries, they value their culture. But due to westernisation, we deviated from our culture in terms of food, clothing and others. What we need to do is to orientate our people that culture is your value, uphold and promote it. That doesn’t stop them from going to places. If you go to China today, why they are making progress is because they value their language. Even in their primary and secondary schools, and the universities they use their language to teach. But, here in this part of the world, we embrace English Language and you have to learn the language very well before you can speak it. By the time some people get deeply into it, they would not speak their language again and they would call their language vernacular. There are some people in Lagos State today that don’t wear “ankara.’ We are not the producers of Ankara, but we believe that it’s our culture. People prefer to wear suits, so we need to talk to them. If you look at it, people are coming back to our culture gradually. This is why you see people wearing ‘aso ebi’ to ‘Owanbe parties.’ We have saddled the Ministry of Tourism with that responsibility to put up a programme that would bring all our cultural values together. People from all the local governments have to come to a place for one week to bring out their culture from different areas in terms of clothings, foods and others to bring out our identities. I have made a provision for that in the budget, we are still expecting them to come up with a proposal on this.
You spoke about blackout in some parts of Badagry recently on the floor of the house, you want to tell us more about that?
…Yes, it’s over four years now, the people have been in total blackout in a whole Badagry West Local Council Development Area (LCDAs) and two other communities that are close to two international borders; Owode and Seme Borders. Those are some of the places, where the Federal Government generates high revenue. Owode is one of the best land borders in Nigeria. They have been in blackout for your years now and nobody is saying anything. So I had to cry out to the state house of assembly to help us call those concerned to do something about it I believe that the state government can help us out. I thank the Speaker of the House, Rt. Hon. Mudashiru Obasa for directing the House Committee on Energy to rise to the occasion and see what they can do to help out.
So how have you been connecting with your people for development purposes?
We recently did an empowerment programme that was borne out of the pressure on us to help our people to get jobs in the civil service. In the past, the state government used to advertise to people who want to work to apply, but it is not possible now. There is no vacancy anymore, but our people don’t want to believe that. What we do now is to engage them and talk to the ministries that have connections with the people on empowerment such as the Ministry of Women Affairs and Poverty Alleviation (WAPA), the Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Wealth Creation, and others. We tell the people that if they are interested, they would be trained and they would get loans from the Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) to start businesses. They would assess them and do the necessary things. They might want to go into agriculture and others. They obliged and we were able to get about 1,200 people on board. That was where we stopped. We put out application and we had to stop at that number, we will roll out more applications later.
Apart from these, what else have you done for your people and what are your plans for the future?
I have done so many things. Even as a member of the executive of the state, I used to pay school fees of students of higher institutions. If you are a resident of Badagry and you applied to the Lagos State University (LASU), Lagos State University of Science and Technology (LASUSTECH), and Lagos State University of Education (LASUED), I would pay your school fees for the first year. But there is a social contract; when you progress, your results would determine if you would still be part of the scholarship programme. Once you have second class upper division and above, I would continue, I have been doing it for the past four years for a sizeable number of students. I pay their school fees in year one and we are still doing it. We didn’t stop at that, those who graduated with good results, we help them with jobs.