Tourism Planning and Development: A Panacea to Economic Recession in Nigeria

Abstract

The current economic recession in Nigeria has come down heavily on the nation’s economy in no small way. Even though crude oil still remain the mainstay of the nation’s economy, diversification of economy and exploitation of potentials of tourism resources are seen as a panacea to the current economic meltdown in the country. This paper therefore identified various tourism potentials and resources readily available in the country. This ranges from water tourism resources, vegetal tourism resources to land scape tourism resources and anthropogenic cultural tourism resources. The authors observed that tourism planning and development in Nigeria is under- exploited despite the enormous potentials. Thus, the paper suggests strategies to adopt by the government, private sector, host communities as well as workers in the tourism industry to alleviate the poor state of tourist centres in Nigeria. The paper concludes that the tourism sector has very huge potentials which if fully supported and the menace of terrorism and kidnapping is curtailed in Nigeria, will contribute significantly to the economic diversification everybody is yarning for and Nigeria will bounce back from the two edged sword of economic meltdown ravaging the country.

Keywords: Economic recession, Economic diversification, Tourism development, Public-Private partnership