The Minister for Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy, Hannatu Musawa, has said Nigeria’s creative industry, if harnessed, could add $100 billion to Nigeria’s economy.
OsunDailyNG reports that Musawa said like South Korea, Nigeria needs to make the sector business conducive for investors to put in their funds.
In an interview with Arise News on Wednesday, the Minister decried poor investment in the sector. She, however, noted that President Bola Tinubu has expressed interest in expanding the frontiers of the sector to grow the economy.
She said: “The creative industry has the potential to add $100 billion to Nigeria’s GDP by 2030. The creative industry has the kind of potential. You look at other countries and I came up with that specific target, because I did a very academic research and deep dive as to what can come out from this industry. I worked together with the Boston BCG, Boston Consulting Group, to come up with the best potential, how we can hit it. Because Mr. President said to me that he’s creating this ministry because he wants it to have a cultural expansion. He wants it to have an economic impact and expansion.
“And so with BCG we worked together looking at benchmark countries such as South Korea. They were able to do it. So South Korea, Brazil, in all the different countries that were able to really leverage.
The Minister commended the quality of content produced by Nollywood and other creative sectors of the country. She said Nigeria’s quality content has drawn the world’s interest into Nigeria.
“It’s not about it being a first world country or not. It may be a first world country. But if you look at the in the other way, what Nigeria has to offer, I made that assessment based on the content and the creativity that came out of Nigeria and what the world’s interest is in Nigeria now, not because of anything, but because of that content, whether it’s through our art, through our artifacts, through our music, through our films, the second largest film industry in the world is Nollywood. So there’s a lot of interest there,” she stated.
Musawa stressed that with right policies from the government aimed at creating conducive business environment that would achieve the 2030 target of about $100 billion.
“It’s just for government to put that enabling environment, close all those lacunas, put the framework in place, do a proper data mapping that will allow the industry to grow. So that number really came out from a very academic exercise. And I feel that we can even do more than that, because now with the tourism industry, which I feel tourism and creative industry and the cultural industry, they not only overlap, they complement each other.
“So there’s a way that you can put that together. And when you talk about tourism as well, we tend to forget the power of domestic tourism. And I think it is also within domestic tourism that we’re going to be able to pull some of those numbers,” she added.
