Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and the Creative Economy

Kano to Ijebu-Ode: one country, one week, a thousand years of living culture. 🇳🇬

The UK built a $100bn annual tourism economy on one thing: heritage.
Windsor. Buckingham. The Changing of the Guard.

Nigeria has the Eid Durbar. The Ojude Oba. Royal courts alive with cavalry, colour, and centuries of unbroken tradition — happening in the same country, in the same week.

40 million visitors a year choose the UK for exactly what Nigeria already has.
The infrastructure to match our depth is the mandate. We are building it.

Britain built an empire of tourism infrastructure around its heritage. The result - 40 million visitors annually, $100 billion in GDP contribution, and a global brand built on history, ceremony, and spectacle.

Nigeria's Eid Durbars, its royal courts, its fishing festivals, its living traditions - these are not lesser spectacles. They are uncommerced ones. The infrastructure gap is not a cultural deficit. It is a capital market opportunity.

The carriage. The castle. The ceremony. Windsor is not simply a royal residence - it is the most visited heritage attraction in Britain, drawing millions each year. The infrastructure built around it - the hotels, the trails, the ticketed experiences, the transport corridors - is which converts history into revenue.

Nigeria has royal courts, living traditions, and heritage landscapes of equal or greater depth. The question is what we build around them.

The festivals. The heritage sites. The royal courts. The living traditions. Nigeria's cultural inventory is one of the largest on art, and most of it has never been formally mapped, protected, or positioned for investment. The Ministry's nationwide mapping initiative is changing that.

Three productions. Three audiences. One building. One month.

Hope — the National Troupe of Nigeria's World Dance Day production — opened the reactivated National Theatre in April. Toontopia — the free children's animation festival with SMIDS — ran last Saturday. I Wish I Wish: Battle of the Winds runs on May 30.

The National Theatre sits inside a long tradition: Hubert Ogunde, whose company formed in 1945 and whose work was banned by both colonial and regional authorities. Duro Ladipo and Oba Koso. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate the building now bears. The National Troupe, touring for decades. Bolanle Austen-Peters and a contemporary commercial theatre that has put Nigerian work on Netflix.

Year-round programming. Not occasional events. This is what the building was built for.

Toontopia 2026. Yesterday at the National Theatre.

Thank you to SMIDS Animation Studios and Damilola Solesi. To everyone who came. To the parents who brought their children and stayed for the conversation.

The full mapping documents on Nigeria's animation and games sector are available at https://nigeriaeverywhere.com/news/news/fmactce-tourism-mapping-project

We have the source material. Where is our room?

From Nok terracottas to the Benin Bronzes, Nigerian art has shaped global culture for centuries. It’s time our stories, our masterpieces, and our voices stand in their rightful place — not as footnotes, but as foundations.

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