Gloria Odion, Reporter 

The Nigeria Association of Tour Operators (NATOP) marked the 2026 World Tourism Day with a multi-zone celebration across the country, combining professional training, technology, destination marketing, tourism awareness and domestic tourism promotion.

In the South-West, nearly 200 tour operators converged on Ziba Beach Resort, Lagos, where the association turned the World Tourism Day celebration into a practical classroom on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital tools to transform tour operations and destination marketing.

The Federal Capital Territory and Northern Zone, in collaboration with Naija Adventurers, organised a Tourism Awareness Walk and hike to the Centre of Nigeria, while the South-South Zone celebrated with a destination tour designed to promote tourism attractions within the region.

The activities were organised in line with the 2026 World Tourism Day theme, “Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism.”

Speaking during the South-West celebration in Lagos, NATOP President, Hajia Bolaji Mustapha, said the decision to combine the annual celebration with professional training was aimed at equipping tour operators with the knowledge and digital skills required to remain competitive in a rapidly changing tourism industry.

According to her, the training was designed to teach operators how to deploy AI and other digital tools to promote destinations, create compelling tourism content and grow their businesses.

“We follow the theme and blend it with the current situation. Let’s do the training so that we attach it to World Tourism Day, with the theme, and make sure that we have achieved something while also celebrating,” she said.

Mustapha said the training would help tour operators produce better digital content and use AI to tell compelling stories about Nigerian destinations.

She stressed that operators needed to embrace the digital revolution rather than allow emerging content creators to take over a space traditionally occupied by professional tour operators.

“As tour operators who are willing to tell the good story of Nigeria, we need to bring ourselves up to speed and align with the digital revolution. Let everybody go digital,” she said.

“We also see content creators taking our business, so we want to align with what they do.

“We are the ones who understand the business, and we will be able to tell the story better, so that anybody coming to Nigeria will be able to discover Nigeria with the experts.”

Why Ziba Beach Resort

Explaining the choice of Ziba Beach Resort as the venue, the NATOP President said the association deliberately links its World Tourism Day activities to tourism destinations in order to expose members to facilities and attractions they can subsequently market to tourists.

She said the resort was particularly suitable because of its location and recent expansion, including the launch of its third phase.

“We always attach World Tourism Day to a tourism site. If you look at this whole area and this community, that’s why we see that Ziba is a tourism site. We want to explore it and, of course, the resort has newly launched its third phase.

“We will use this opportunity to look at their rooms, look at how we can sell this destination, and showcase it as a resort that is actually in Nigeria, not Zanzibar. By using the place, we would kill two birds with one stone,” she said.

The operators subsequently embarked on a facility tour of the resort, assessing its accommodation, recreational and other tourism offerings from the perspective of how they could be packaged and marketed to visitors.

Training critical to industry growth

Also speaking, NATOP Vice President, South-West, and Chairman of the zone’s World Tourism Day Organising Committee, Mrs Wonuola Olatunde-Lamidi, said the training was necessary because many operators still lacked adequate knowledge of the fundamentals of tour operation.

She particularly identified tour-package development as an area where some operators needed stronger professional capacity.

“Many don’t understand the foundation of what it is to create a tour package. And when you have people that are not well-trained in an industry, the industry will not grow,” she said.

Olatunde-Lamidi, who said she had spent 16 years in the industry and co-runs Diamonds and Pearls Travels with her husband, explained that professional competence and effective destination marketing could significantly influence where tourists choose to visit.

She said her company had evolved from being perceived merely as a travel agency into a Destination Management Company (DMC) and a trusted tourism brand through deliberate destination promotion.

“We have become a company that, when we talk about a destination, people want to go to that destination because of how we have portrayed the destination,” she said.

According to her, tour operators have considerable influence over destination choices because of their ability to package, market and communicate the attractions and benefits of particular destinations.

“You may not realise that, as tour operators, you can actually decide where people go. You can make people go to a particular destination by marketing it, by letting them know the benefits of that destination,” she said.

The World Tourism Day programme therefore combined learning with leisure, as participants had the opportunity to tour Ziba Beach Resort, inspect its facilities and unwind as part of the celebration.

For NATOP, the 2026 celebration provided an opportunity not only to commemorate World Tourism Day but also to reinforce the need for professional capacity development, digital transformation and stronger destination storytelling as tools for growing Nigeria’s tourism industry.

Monday Discourse with Ibrahim Nasiru 

The recent technical discussions between the leadership of the newly transmuted Nigeria Ports Economic Regulatory Agency (NPERA) and the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) mark a critical turning point in the governance of Nigeria’s maritime sector.

Prompted by a definitive ministerial directive from the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Dr. Adegboyega Oyetola, the two agencies are moving to operationalize the transfer of Inland Dry Port functions from the old Nigerian Shippers’ Council architecture straight to the NPA.

For decades, Nigeria’s maritime ecosystem has been severely suffocated by overlapping institutional mandates, administrative friction, and a counterproductive confusion over who regulates commerce versus who drives infrastructure.

By enforcing this sweeping separation of port economic regulation from core operational development, the federal government is finally addressing the structural flaws that have long stopped Nigeria from becoming the dominant maritime hub of West Africa.

Under the fresh provisions of the NPERA Act 2026, particularly the critical alignment of Section 51, the administrative boundary lines are being redrawn with clinical precision.

The old regime, which forced the Shippers’ Council to simultaneously act as an economic referee and an active promoter of inland dry ports, was an unsustainable model that created inherent institutional contradictions.

You cannot effectively police a commercial market while actively building and managing its operational assets.

Shifting the promotion, development, and operational oversight of inland dry ports entirely to the NPA allows the authority to leverage its massive, existing deep-sea infrastructure and engineering competencies to rapidly scale up these hinterland Ports.

This clean realignment ensures that Inland Dry Ports stop being slow-moving administrative projects and finally become hyper-efficient logistics nodes that seamlessly extend the economic reach of our coastlines into the landlocked states of the North.

Consequently, the collaborative maturity demonstrated during the recent strategy session between NPERA Director-General, Dr. Pius Akutah, and the NPA Managing Director, Dr. Abubakar Dantsoho, signals a refreshing departure from the toxic inter-agency warfare that defined the past.

In previous dispensations, such a sweeping transfer of functions would have triggered fierce turf battles, with executives aggressively hoarding administrative powers to the detriment of national trade efficiency.

Akutah’s strategic proposal for a high-level joint committee—integrating NPERA, NPA, the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA), and the parent ministry, proactively tethers all moving parts to a single, accountable execution framework.

This coordinated approach is exactly what is needed to assure international shipping lines, domestic clearing agents, and private concessionaires that the transition will be frictionless, legally sound, and completely free from double-taxation trapdoors.

Ultimately, the successful execution of this structural unbundling will be the ultimate metric used to grade President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Marine and Blue Economy agenda.

If properly managed, freeing NPERA to focus strictly on economic regulation will create a fiercely competitive, transparently priced maritime marketplace that drives down the prohibitive cost of doing business at our Ports.

Simultaneously, placing the Inland Dry Ports within the NPA’s operational portfolio should accelerate cargo evacuation times, de-congest the chaotic Apapa and Tin Can corridors, and unlock the dormant multi-billion dollar trade potential of the hinterlands.

Minister Oyetola has laid down a courageous, legally backed blueprint for structural clarity. It is now up to the joint leadership of Akutah and Dantsoho to aggressively transform this institutional unbundling into a thriving, world-class economic reality.

Ibrahim Nasiru is a public affairs analyst

Gloria ODION, Maritime Reporter

The Media Anti-Corruption Initiatives (MACI) has forged a strategic partnership with the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to strengthen media-driven efforts to promote transparency, accountability and ethical conduct in Nigeria.

The partnership was sealed on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, when a seven-member MACI delegation, led by its National President, Mr Funso Olojo, paid a courtesy visit to the Resident Anti-Corruption Commissioner, Lagos Zonal Office, Mr Chukwurah Alexander, at the ICPC’s Lagos office.

Receiving the delegation, Alexander described the media as a critical partner in the ICPC’s public enlightenment and corruption-prevention mandate under Section 6 of the ICPC Act, 2000.

He commended MACI for its commitment to discouraging public participation in corrupt practices and expressed optimism that stronger collaboration between the media and the Commission would deepen public awareness and prevention efforts.

The meeting focused on developing a structured collaboration framework that would reposition the fight against corruption from a predominantly reactive approach to a more preventive and citizen-driven campaign.

Among the areas identified for collaboration are strengthening the strategic role of the media in anti-corruption advocacy and public reorientation, aligning media initiatives with the prevention-focused provisions of the ICPC mandate, and promoting global best practices in anti-corruption communication.

The stakeholders also discussed the need to distinguish between general information and actionable intelligence in investigative reporting, while promoting responsible reporting that can support legitimate anti-corruption investigations.

Other areas of proposed collaboration include continuous training and capacity building for journalists on anti-corruption reporting, development of a framework for data sharing between the ICPC and MACI to facilitate fact-based journalism, and the organisation of joint mobile and community-targeted sensitisation campaigns.

Speaking during the engagement, MACI National President, Olojo, reaffirmed the organisation’s determination to support the ICPC’s anti-corruption mandate through responsible and ethical journalism.

Olojo said citizens must be actively involved if Nigeria is to achieve the kind of society envisioned by its people.

“If we must achieve the Nigeria of our dream, the people must be actively involved,” he said.

He described the ICPC as a key coordinating institution within Nigeria’s anti-corruption architecture and pledged MACI’s continued commitment to using the media to promote integrity, accountability and responsible citizenship.

The MACI delegation comprised Olojo, LOD Onyeji, Tunde Ojudun, John Iwori, Abba Collins, Esther Komolafe and Ruth Sunday.

MACI is a non-governmental organisation committed to promoting ethical journalism, accountability and citizen participation in the fight against corruption.