Tourism In The Southeast And Its Challenges

Southeast is a region in Nigeria just as beautiful as its people. Thankfully, it has a good number of tourist attractions that vary from the Okposi salt lake, Ogbunike caves to the Ngwo pine forest and many other places with aesthetic values.

Tourism is all about sightseeing, tourists travel through the expanse of certain places and take time to appreciate the beauty and view the place offers.

Tourism has a whole lot of importance to the state and the country at large. It helps in poverty alleviation as well as job creation, it also aids in attracting foreign investors that help in the nation’s development.

Tourism has not thrived as much as it should in the southeast due to a vast number of reasons as seen below;
Poor infrastructure: For tourism to prevail in any part of the world, it is ideal and important that infrastructure like good roads, electricity, and water be put in place for effective tourism. However, the infrastructure in the southeast is really bad.

There are bad roads on almost everywhere you turn which makes transport more than difficult when tourists visit. There are a lot of excellent hotels in the southeast however, they are just not standard enough for foreign tourists.

If our infrastructures are so bad that we have to leave the country at any given opportunity, we cannot expect the tourists to visit again.

Insecurity: Tourists are less likely to visit a place where their safety would be compromised and the security situation in the southeast has not been exactly “safe”.

There have been issues of kidnapping, robberies, murders and so on, this makes tourism especially difficult in these areas. No one wants to get hurt or worse, killed during a tourism expedition.

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Misrepresentation of Ndi Igbo: The wrong perception of the southeastern people also hinders tourism in the southeast. The Igbo people, for the most part, are being perceived in a very harsh light and this does not help our tourism situation at all.

Foreigners are always hesitant to travel in the southeastern areas with their perception being that the Igbo people are said to be cunning and dangerous. Mistrust does not go well with tourism.

Mismanagement of tourist sites: The southeastern government not has done much in the area of management of these tourist sites.

As a result, they lose their aesthetic value.
There are so many other factors that make tourism difficult but a major key to solving it would be for the government to channel resources towards improving tourism in the southeast region.

The southeast still suffers from the prevalence of the media blackout and improving tourism would be a way to ameliorate this issue. All the states that make up the southeast area have places of aesthetic value and it would indeed be a big crime if we do not showcase our beauty.