The Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC) on Wednesday in Abuja, said lack of data had made it difficult to determine the actual contribution of the sector to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Products (GDP).
Sally Mbanefo, the Director-General of NTDC, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that data was fundamental to the corporation’s effective discharge of its mandate.
Mbanefo said that data was necessary to authenticate the inflows of tourists in the country as well as the outflows.
“We should be able to get adequate data on the traffic of tourists, the expenses on hospitality, medicals and shops.
“It is only when we get all of this correctly that we can actually know where our actual performance is and focus on our short comings.
“As a tourism corporation, we want to be able to say this is the actual tourism contribution to the GDP of Nigeria.
“We do have some contributions but cannot get the actual figure and we will not be happy until we can say these are the statistics from this sector that have contributed to the country’s GDP.’’
Mbanefo said that other sectors of the economy like the Nigeria Immigration Service and Central Bank of Nigeria relied on the NTDC for tourists’ data to assist their work.
She said that the corporation needed a technology that could enable it have access to tourists traffic at all the country’s borders.
Speaking on the different tourism products that abound in the country, Mbanefo said that the country could benefit from them if adequately packaged.
“Religious tourism is one very important area of tourism that we can pay more attention to that would also help us.’’
