Who died and made Valentine’s Day about flowers and chocolate? Probably an innovative advertising executive.
According to the National Retail Federation consumer spending survey, Americans will spend $18.9 billion on Valentine’s Day shopping.
Valentine’s Day is about retail, not romance.
Easter is considered a holy day but also a day for Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies. …. according to WalletHub, Americans spent $22 billion on Easter in 2024, with $3.1 billion going to Candy alone.
Christmas Day is also now about a Christmas Tree, toys, and eating rice; in the UK alone, according to a Finder UK report, about £28.6b was spent on Christmas gifts in 2024.
However, Black Friday is the grandfather of holiday shopping. The American holiday of Thanksgiving gives way to a shopping frenzy of frenetic shoppers fighting for bargains. Facteus, a transaction data provider, tracked Black Friday spending in 2024 over $36 billion.
The model seems straightforward: pick a holiday or event, brand it, monetise it, and create local jobs. There may appear to be an excessive amount of consumerism at play. Still, it all makes economic sense: shopping and spending create demand for stuff, people make stuff, people are employed, and employed people grow an economy.
After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush told the American people to “go shopping.” He had a point: consumer spending was 40% of the economic activity in America then; today, it’s calculated at 68%. If Americans stop using their credit cards, the economy grinds to a halt, and jobs are lost.
An economy is really about micro and macro transactions between individuals and firms. The government’s job is to encourage and accelerate these transactions, to clear the transaction expressway, so to speak.
So, in the tried-and-tested method of copying what works, we should also look for opportunities in Nigeria to brand our local festivities, convert them to economic activities, and create jobs. For example, millions of Nigerians travel around the world to South East Nigeria for two weeks every year. How have the state governors trapped commerce from these “visitors”?
Landing at any airport in the West, you can buy souvenirs, pins, mugs, and hats. We buy and wear them with pride and put them on our fridges. If there was an Aba or Ekiti Mug or label pin, would the Nigerian diaspora buy it? If there were Kano Pillars shirts at Abuja International Airport, would the diaspora buy them? We can only know when they’re available, but these are small things…
Okay, let’s look at festivals. The New Yam Festival—have we branded it? I attended a bonfire in Abuja. We were given marshmallows to roast…. marshmallows, not yams. Why have we not created a one-week eating ceremony around yams? Get Nestle to sponsor a yam sauce-making contest and attract people who will stay, eat, and spend. What about plain, simple New Yam Festival T-shirts? How hard is that?
Have we commercialised that ceremony at the Osun River Goddess festival? I have seen people return from Israel with tubes of River Jordan water. On Amazon, 200ml bottles of Holy River Jordan water are sold for $10.25, which is about N2,500 for 200ml of river water. Is anyone selling holy Osun River water and paying taxes?
Have we milked the slave trade? Do you know how much the Southeast can make charging African Americans for the “Roots Tour”, where tourists are taken on the ancient Arochukwu slave trade route? With stop stations, hotels, food, branded palm wine, special slave gear, hospitals, security, car hire, photographs, souvenirs, etc..…….do you know how many jobs I have just listed? Local jobs? Robin Sanders, the then African American US Ambassador to Nigeria, went there to visit; there is a small museum there, the Slave Museum of Arochukwu; it’s just sitting there untapped….
In America, there are paid tours of the Underground Railroad that saved escaped enslaved people pay…. The New York City Underground Railway tour costs $35 per person…. In Senegal, Heritage Access, a tour company, offers an 8-day tour of Senegal at $1,999.99 per person, including flights from New York. Goree Island is a big tourist attraction because of its history as a major slave-trading centre. Instead of reparations, push tour packages.
So why not rebrand the Osun River festival, call in experts, monetise it, and offer a package to African Americans, complete with Yoruba names and spiritual rebirth, for $2,500 per person? Planes will be filled, and forex will be earned. Lagos had the Bar Beach, which is now gone.
Lagos had the Kuramo beach, which is now gone. Lagos has the Elegushi beach. I recall driving for hours to watch Fela perform at Lekki Sun Splash decades ago. Can’t we do to Elegushi what Brazil has done with Copa Cabana? Again, how hard is it?
State governments must create the conditions for the private sector to monetise events and create jobs. This economic activity should be left to professionals to manage.
Cross River has shown that it’s possible to successfully brand, execute, and monetise an event.
Let me end with the Aragungu fishing festival. This festival covers the entire spectrum of how to and how not to do this tourism thing. The Aragungu fishing festival started in 1934 to mark the end of hostilities between the Sokoto and Kebbi Caliphate. This event was so popular that the Nigerian government put it on our stamp and currency. A hotel was built in 1987 to house the visitors. The festival had seating stands where tourists could sit and watch the fishermen. MTN sponsored it. Three Nigerian leaders—Gowan, Obasanjo, and YarAdua—attended it.
But no festival has been held since 2009.
Why?
Well, reports are vague, but it appears that 2010 President Yar’Adua’s death on May 5th, 2010, meant that the state could not hold a significant event because the governor was late Yar’Adua’s son-in-law.
2011 was an election year, and the usual festival period clashed with the election season, so it did not hold.
In 2012, the state was preparing for re-run governorship elections following the Supreme Court’s annulment of the governor’s election and order for a re-run.
So, for Arugungu, elections trump tourism. All those local jobs that were fed from Arugungu are now dormant. It should not be so…. Tourism creates jobs; jobs feed an economy…. more jobs, more prosperity, that’s how it should be.
