Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Mac-Folly Hospitality Ltd, a member of the Sifax Group, owners of Marriot Hotel, Mr Chike Ogeah, in this interview with BAMIDELE FAMOOFO, says the future of Nigeria lies in exploring the opportunities in the knowledge industry, which comprises hospitality, tourism, culture, among others
You are a major player in the hospital industry. Could you give an overview of the industry in Nigeria?
The sector is evolving in Nigeria. It has come a long way from where it used to be 10 years ago, even the major hospitality facilities that were here (Eko Hotels, Federal Palace Hotel, etc.) have gone through massive renovations to bring them to modern day standards. Hospitality as you know is not all about hotels, but other facilities. There is a nexus between hotels, tourism and culture. There are other areas in the hospitality sector that we are yet to explore. There are places like Ikogosi Cold and Warm Springs and other sites in the country, where good facilities can be put in place for people to come and relax, like what they tried to do in Obudu Cattle Ranch.
However, we have issues with security all over Nigeria. It is unlike Lagos where there is relative peace. You see, Lagos is not Nigeria, because here there is stability. There are great facilities like the Federal Palace Hotel and Eko Hotel, overlooking the waterfront. You see things like that in Cape Town, but we are yet to explore the opportunities in this industry in Nigeria, though we are coming up. Yes, there are new hotels like Marriot springing up everywhere in the country, especially in Lagos and Abuja, but we are not yet there. We are just evolving, but there is no doubt that the hospitality industry in Nigeria will be the next big thing.
Apart from culture and tourism, there is also a major nexus between hospitality and aviation. So, as we continue to improve on the facilities in the hospitality industry, we can make the aviation industry better. In aviation, we now talk about the aerospace, where we can now begin to fabricate aircraft parts, manufacture and do maintenance. So, with all these things coming up, we can make the economy better.
As far as I’m concerned, we have gone beyond oil, and the next thing we will be chasing in the knowledge economy is hospitality, culture, tourism and aviation. These will become the next major revenue earners for our country. Like I said, look at Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, and even Saudi Arabia, they have added football to it. Basically, it is about entertainment, getting people to relax. Look at what happened at the last world cup in Qatar, look at the facilities. They had hotels that were built into the stadium; hotels were built into the airports. If you ask me, this business of making people comfortable wherever they go, whether they are doing business, whether it is a flight experience, the whole idea is to make people to be comfortable when they are out of their homes.
Nigeria has been battling with revenue generation, because oil which has been the cash cow is no longer sustainable. How do you think the government can explore the hospitality industry to boost its revenue?
Well, if you ask me, the government of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is already doing that. You can see from the way he has prioritised the ministries he created. Apart from the Ministry of Digital Economy, he created the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, which he has linked with the NTDC and he added the creative industry. He also ensured that he appointed young persons to drive these ministries contrary to the case in the past. You will find out that most of these industries are all interrelated; technology is involved in driving them all.
Hospitality is the 21st century oil and this government, at least in its early days, recognised this fact. Oil is gone. Go to Europe now, they will penalise you for running fuel cars, and there are areas you cannot even take your fossil fuel car to. There is absolutely no doubt that the creative, hospitality, tourism industries will become the next revenue driver for our country. Any serious government, especially in Africa, must take this seriously, because we have all it takes to achieve it. All we need to do is develop the facilities around these industries to earn the revenues. Most importantly, the greatest drivers of all these things are security and power. Once we can deal with those two things, these industries would fly.
We are lucky in Lagos. If you go and build this kind of hotel somewhere in the North or East, it is not going to work. Except you can make available security and power, you cannot assure people of comfort, you can’t bring them to come and relax, because the whole idea of relaxation is to keep people safe.
I was a member of the political class and I realised that we made that mistake. It is not about having people carrying guns, following you around to provide security. When I was a commissioner in Delta, I had about security following me around, providing security. But I later realised that it is not the way to go. With four or six men carrying guns to secure my house, I could not sleep, but when I come to my house in Lagos, I slept with no security guards around me. All I had was those corporate guards that mount the gate, they don’t carry gun, and I slept peacefully. I have a place in London where I have been living since 2005. I sometime put my key in the door and go upstairs to sleep, and the next day I started looking for the keys, forgetting that I left them in the door the previous night. They will be there for two weeks some times, and nobody comes into your house, that is security.
Over there, nobody is hungry, even the homeless is homeless for a reason. Except something is exceptionally wrong, you can’t sleep outside. There is a major welfare benefit system for the downtrodden. So, there is no need for people to steal. If we can take care of poverty in our country, insecurity will drop significantly. I think it was the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo that said many years ago that the children of the poor who are not catered for will not allow the children of the rich to live a peaceful life. We would not have had anything like Boko Haram today if we had taken care of the Almajiris. We must empower the downtrodden through education and we will be secure as a nation. These are some of the steps I believe the government must take if we want to secure our nation.
Some African countries appear to be doing better than Nigeria in the area of tourism and hospitality. What can Nigeria do to catch up?
Countries like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and places like Kenya and South Africa are tourists’ haven. Yes, they also have their own challenges, political and otherwise, but they are much developed compared with Nigeria. So, they have massive great hotels, which complement their aviation sector. The same thing applies with Kenya and Mozambique. In a place like Seychelles, which is a hospitality haven, you see beachside Marriot Hotels built into the water and it looks like a fairy tale. The painful thing about this is that we have the topography for it, but somehow, our leaders had never put their minds to it.
There was a leader we had some time ago who said our problem was what to do with our oil money. That was when we should have started to prepare for today. I imagined that if we built hotels on that expressway to Epe from Lekki, which is by the water and make it a tourist haven, you would find out that the whole of Europe in summer will empty there. To get a booking for hotel will become a problem because all over the world, everybody comes there. You can imagine the kind of revenue we would be earning from that kind of tourism masterpiece.
I visited somewhere in Malaga, Spain, with my family. There, the weather was very harsh during that season, but people all over the world came visiting. With our own temperate weather, you can only imagine what would be happening here if we had such a facility. So, what I think is that we are late starter but it is something we can easily catch up with, with the right policies. We need to engage young people who have seen how these things are done in other places to drive the sector, and we have to be deliberate about it.
Nigerians are hard hit by the harsh economic situation, fuelled by subsidy removal, naira devaluation, among other factors. Do these affect your business?
I would say yes and no. What we have in Nigeria is hyperinflation. The naira is weak but coming by the weak naira is another issue to worry about. For that reason, a lot of people, especially those living in the GRA here, who would ordinarily come around to cool off in Marriot for the weekend, are slowing down. But then, the aspect which has also been an advantage for us is that those who would ordinarily go abroad for holiday are also finding it difficult, considering the cost to fly a first class ticket, etc., due to exchange rate. So, people like that will pick their bags and say, “Let me go have a holiday at Marriot”. One of the reasons we went for a full management contract with a hotel chain like Marriot was to get all the benefits we can get from a global brand. Marriot has a loyalty programme which they run, such that a Marriot customer coming from anywhere in the world would look out for a Marriot Hotel in their destination coun8try. There is software for that and we get a lot of people coming through this loyalty programme. These people even pay in foreign currency, so it is a win-some-lose-some situation. You can imagine if everything was fine, we would have done better as a business. It would have been a blast if the economy was working the way it should. But even now, a lot of times we don’t have rooms, and that is why we are starting work on an extension. We also have a plan to build a convention centre maybe somewhere on the Island. We are considering building another Marriot Hotel in Abuja.
How can we then harness the nexus among hospitality and aviation, tourism, culture, etc. to generate revenue?
We have been talking that for some time now. That is what we call ‘aerotropolice’. This is already happening in places like Johannesburg. You just walk out of the airport, step into a hotel and walk into a shopping mall close by. So, you don’t even need to leave the environment of the airport for you to get everything done. And you know we have the land to accommodate all we are talking about. Look at the Murtala Mohammed Airport for instance, the expansive land will accommodate this. You can visit Cape Town without moving into the city, yet you will do everything you would like to do. Imagine the quantum of revenue we could get by making these facilities available in Nigeria. But I think we have reached that state in Nigeria when we have suddenly realised that these things must interconnect to move the nation forward.
