The wooden first floor is becoming weaker, posing great danger to visitors. The passage upstairs has been blocked to visitors. The structure already falling off with broken windows panes, chattered doors and broken wooden walls within the museum itself with some parts eaten up by termites or the elements. The corrugated wrought-iron staircases are under severe corrosion. The museum staff obviously lack motivation. There are no good office accommodation for them. Generally, the building and everything about the museum appear forlorn, dingy and despondent. It is not deserving of the status of Lagos State!
To many, it is not a project inaugurated by Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu in Lagos State that should be made to suffer such abandonment. Since the opening of the museum over a decade ago there has been practically nothing done to either preserve the building or upgrading the collections. It portrays a pathetic state of general neglect under which Badagry perpetually groans in successive administration in the state. There is a history of spate of neglected and abandoned tourist infrastructural projects in Badagry. Classical examples are the Vlekete Slave Market Museum, the Badagry marina reclamation and the Slave Tunnel projects respectively. These were projects initiated by the Fashola’s administration but because of the disdain the immediate past Commissioner for Tourism has against Badagry the effort of the Governor to ensure the completion of these projects were grossly thwarted.
Badagry is naturally, historically and topographically positioned as major tourist destination in Nigeria. One of those monuments that account for this is the Heritage Museum which has attracted visitors globally to Badagry apart from domestic visitors which include students from primary up to tertiary institution who throng the museum on daily basis. In 1991 members of the Bob Marley family announced through their spoke person then that they were coming to settle in Badagry because they believed that was where millions of Africans were taken to the diaspora as slaves. But because of the inactiveness of the authorities that be we lost the opportunity to Ghana.
In 2007 the Michael Jackson family members were in Badagry to secure land space for the construction of Memorabilia in honour of the pop star at Badagry. In 2012, former world boxing champion Evandar Holyfield visited the museum. Rev. Jesse Jackson, the first African-American to contest for the Presidency of America, was also at the museum in 2013. Other international dignitaries that had visited the Heritage Museum included diplomats and the American Rap artist L. L. Cool J, Bishop of Liverpool, Rt. Rev. James Jones and former Canadian Ambassador to Nigeria among a host of others. One imagines the impression that these people would have taken home about the sorry condition of the museum!
Museums, if well harnessed and given due attention, can be a place to help shape community identity, stimulate development and become a catalyst for regeneration through the creation of new venues and civic spaces and a resource for acquiring development skills in history, culture and tradition of a people including indigenous technology and at the same time inspire entrepreneurship in arts and other related economic activities that will boost local economy. Museums play important role in tourism development; develop pride in local tradition and customs; promote contact and cooperation across different cultures; develop contact across different age groups; develop community and social networks. The Badagry Heritage Museum should be to Africa and Nigeria in particular what the Holocaust Memorial Museums are to Israel and the rest of the Western World. Such is the importance of this museum to African History. It should be the cultural centre from where various cultural, art, and entertainment programmes are engineered.
We are calling on Governor Akinwunmi Ambode to look in the direction of Badagry, especially for the renovation and upgrading of this historical monument and the completion of the abandoned tourism infrastructure projects highlighted above. The Commissioner for Tourism Folarin Coker is not left out of this appeal though he has demonstrated his dispassionate and large-hearted stance with the hugely successful One Lagos Fiesta, which is the first of its kind in the history of the state. The programme is no doubt a practical good step in the right direction. Such programme stimulates tourism development. We are appealing to the commissioner not to toe the line of his predecessor whose parochial view of tourism development stifled and killed all good intentions Fashola had for tourism development in Lagos State except for cultural programmes and carnivals being celebrated in Lagos central.
END
Be the first to comment