Taraba State Commissioner for Culture and Tourism, James Gana, has said that the ministry is developing a tourism masterplan to enable the state to harness its abundant tourism potentials. He said this would be done with the involvement of foreign investors in the state’s tourism sector.
Gana made this known in Jalingo while interacting with newsmen on the activities in the tourism industry in the state.
He singled out the popular Mambila Plateau, the cemeteries of old German soldiers, the Gashaka National Park and the hot spring water found in Sadauna Local Government, as some of the major tourist attractions in Taraba. According to him “if these potentials are harnessed, Taraba will become a world tourism centre.”
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Declaring that the State’s tourism potentials “cannot be listed within even a day,” he said Taraba had a tourist attraction in virtually every local government, with the most popular being the Manbila plateau.
“If you go to the Mambila plateau, from my tour in all the interiors we discovered that they have seventeen waterfalls and all of them have a minimum of forty to sixty Mega Watts electricity generation if you’re using it as hydropower,” he said.
Also in the Mambila plateau, Gana said there are some areas where a Golf course could be constructed, declaring that the weather in those areas is similar to that in Europe. “All these are tourism potentials,” he said.
At the Gashaka national park, which is one of the biggest national parks in Nigeria, having boundary with Adamawa State and Cameroon, the commissioner said, there are wild animals there, though they have gone far because of the activities of poachers.
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“There is hot spring water there which you don’t need to boil, you just come with your cup of tea and take your tea and coffee there. All these things are so fascinating in the state,” he said.
Other tourist attractions in the state include those in Kurimi local government area, where the cemetery of early German soldiers is still reserved, and in Ibi, where the missionaries’ cemetery and those fire mysterious cemetery are located.
In Wukari, Gana said there are crocodile ponds been “that have been in existence for over two to three hundred years.”
“Go to Zing and see rock formations there. You will appreciate the work of God. The rocks are as if they were assembled by a human,” he said. These are few among the many potentials in other local governments, he explained.
He added that recently Taraba discovered a number of Hippopotamus and that the state had invited experts from Zimbabwe through the United Nation “who came out with their plans to see how we can conserve these animals so that they can be domesticated within the lake there. We are also looking at how we can bring other animals so that they can coexist in the lake.”
