At the top of the Ado-Awaye hills lies a lake suspended 433 metres above sea level. Local people say the lake is named Iyake (Yoruba for “crying woman”) after a weeping, barren woman who fell in the water hundreds of years ago, conferring on it powers of fertility.
This belief in the divine is evident in the foothills, where a huge boulder is emblazoned with the words, written in golden letters: “Here we come: African Jerusalem.”
Ado-Awaye, a tourist site as sleepy as the community it shares a name with in the south-western Nigerian state of Ogun, gets a modest 3,000 or so visitors annually. Most of these are religious worshippers who climb the 369-step path to the top, where they camp or visit the lake, which is reportedly one of only two natural suspended lakes in the world. Others are hikers or visitors to an annual festival held every November.
But as Nigeria experiences its worst cost of living crisis in decades, tourism is on the back burner. Even Detty December, the country’s month-long potpourri of festivities, has been affected.
And in Ado-Awaye, divine pilgrimages have slowed down. “[Just] over 2,400 came this year because of current economic challenges,” said Niyi Okunade, a prince of the community who organises site tours.
On paper, Nigeria is a tourist haven. In the north, there is the colourful Kano Durbar festival, the sand dunes of Yobe and the country’s most popular game reserve in Bauchi. In the Middle Belt, teas, strawberries and apples grow in towns around the Mambilla and Jos plateaus, with some of the most beautiful landscapes on the planet.
Down south, there are waterfalls, museums, colonial-era relics and carnivals, as well as dozens of beaches along the seven states that border the Gulf of Guinea where small resorts are tucked away in endless tranquillity. There are also spots where visitors can enjoy an array of street food and those seeking the coldest of drinks can request “mortuary standard” beers. On the streets, huge speakers keep the mood electric, blasting Afrobeats and other genres from Owerri bongo to Fuji music.
Billionaires reportedly go whale-watching on a couple of small islands outside Lagos that connect to the Atlantic. The River Osun still draws thousands every year, despite record levels of pollution from gold mining.
This year, Nigeria’s multitude of stars were joined by foreign celebrities from Chloe Bailey and Saweetie to Tyla and Gunna in Lagos for Detty December. The multipurpose 12,000-seater Lagos Arena is being built to allow events to be hosted all year round.
But according to the tourism ministry, there were only 1.2 million visitors to Nigeria in 2023, 20% more than in the preceding year. The figure was on par with Ghana (1.1 million) but pales in comparison to those of South Africa (8.48 million) and Kenya (1.95 million).
Ikemesit Effiong, head of research at Lagos-based geopolitical research consultancy SBM Intelligence, blames an infrastructure deficit and an undercurrent of insecurity in a few areas choking tourism.
“[There is] a dearth of world-class hotels, especially in secondary and tertiary cities … a siloed hospitality culture which doesn’t integrate events, logistics and catering into a coherent whole – for example with travel packages – and a lack of customer awareness of promising locations, festivals and even the country’s tourism potential,” he said.
“Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and even Ghana do a much better job of selling their countries domestically and overseas than Nigeria.”
Okunade says that Ado-Awaye is lacking “modern hotel accommodation for the visiting tourists” as well as a lift or cable car system to elevate the site to world-class standards. “Government should invest more,” he believes.
In the 60s and 70s, Nigeria attracted medical tourists from across the world but many of its hospitals are now shadows of their former selves.
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In the absence of tourists, rampaging bandits and terrorists have set up bases in remote areas; the feared Sambisa forest, where Boko Haram reportedly kept the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls, was an abandoned game reserve.
The Obudu mountaintop cattle ranch, a project in the biodiversity-rich Cross River state, and its international marathon have lost their shine since the tourism-loving, saxophone-playing governor who initiated them left office. The annual Calabar Carnival, where the singer Akon dramatically rolled about in a white balloon while headlining in 2012, has declined in status too. Many museums are semi-open, with barely any upgrades in decades.
Nigeria has a wide network of underused airports and airfields and an improving rail system. But on one night this month, every conveyor belt at the new Lagos international airport terminal went out of service, leaving passengers waiting for their luggage for more than two hours.
Henry Erikowa, founder of Falcorp Mangrove Park, an ecotourism resort in the former oil capital of Warri, said young people were not as interested in preserving their heritage, or working in tourism, as in the past and should be incentivised to do so.
“They are all interested in oil money now,” said Erikowa, who has been looking for trainee zookeepers for years.
In 2009, one of Nigeria’s most distinguished public servants launched Good People, Great Nation, a rebranding campaign for Nigeria’s image abroad. But Dora Akunyili, the information minister who made her name working to combat counterfeit medicines, failed to get a buy-in from the government she served or from the wider population.
Some say a similar but better-run effort, backed by the government at the highest levels, is needed to drive the change required to make Nigeria a true tourism powerhouse.
“You have to create a culture of serving people, not just have people in service roles … A lot of that work has to be top-down driven, with policymakers at the federal and state levels,” said Effiong. “Many potential Nigerian tourist hotspots are left on their own to figure this out and it makes for a hodge-podge of experiences.”
