Mayor of Housing, Rivers Tourism Agency identify low handing fruits to boost economy

• Set to restore Rivers leadership status in tourism and entertainment

The Rivers State Tourism Development Agency (RSTDA), has sealed partnership deal with the Mayor of Housing to boost tourism and entertainment.

This is aimed at rebooting the economy of the state by restoring confidence in the economy as the state government seeks to boost ease of doing business (EoDB).

The partnership, which was sealed after the Rivers State Economic and Investment Summit which ended on May 23, 2024. was unveiled at an event at the GRA where the Director-General  of the RSTDA, Mr Yibo Koko, gave details of what he called the low hanging fruits initiative to tap into obvious advantages.

He presented the Mayor of Housing, My-Ace China, the CEO of the Housing and Construction Limited, who has demonstrated capacity and willingness to join in the task.

It was gathered that some banks have also indicated interest in partnering with the Agency to achieve the objective of the Sir Sim Fubara administration in the Tourism sub-sector.

It was noted that tourism alone can restart the economy, based on what worked for the state in years past when the city led other states and cities in entertainment and tourism.

The new role of the RSTDA seemed to have been rediscovered at the economic summit and fresh mandates with marching orders may have been issued.

The DG of RSTDA,  talked glowingly about the gains of the Rivers State Economic Summit and the Creative Art, saying the Mayor of Housing was part of the panel on creative economy and his participation led to the decision to go back and start from the ‘Low Hanging Fruits Initiative’.

He said Gov Fubara’s body language suggests positivity and this has led to trickling effects on creative economy and the young people.

He also gave insight into how reputations are ruined online, saying Algorithm or Artificial Intelligence (AI) picks what comes online most frequently and uses it to characterize a person or place for profiling. “So, when people click on your name, what comes up is the thing AI says you are. For Rivers State, it’s the steady bad news in the media that AI picks to brand the state.

“The RSTDA wants to reverse that and we want the many good things happening in the state to be brought up deliberately.
“The state government wants entrepreneurs and investors to be the ones driving wealth creation and the growth of the economy. We want to bring back the vibrancy of the Garden City and we know the role tourism and entertainment can play.”

He took time to articulate what constitutes the low hanging fruits and how the RSTDA planned to harvest them with support from partners, especially the Mayor of Housing.

Speaking, the Mayor of Housing (My-ACE China) showed huge excitements working with the RSTDA. He talked about negative image of the state to people afar and said this must be reversed.

He said: “I started estate business in Abuja. In 2021, we wanted to extend to Port Harcourt, but the first thing the CEO of our company then told me was all about insecurity in the Garden City and all the associated hypes. He asked me how I would need over five Mopol (military police operatives) to move about in Port Harcourt. The narrative then was that Port Harcourt was unstable and unsafe. We argued and agreed I would be the one to go, and if I was killed, he would stay away.”

Mr China said he however found a different Port Harcourt. “Coming into Port Harcourt at last, I was shocked at the peace and stability, at the hospitality, at the liveliness, cuisine, housing potentials, etc. In housing we were more than 100 brands in Abuja hustling for space, but I came into Port Harcourt and saw only two active brands. It was like I could beat them ad be the topmost.

“I called my people and said, this is a deep market. I staged the biggest event in Port Harcourt. It was shocking. People came out because of the shouting I did. This was the same Port Harcourt they said would swallow me.

When I went into the nitty-gritty of doing business in Port Harcourt, I found why the narrative was looking gloomy.”

He said there was a political dilution of peoples’ goodwill and will, and most persons in the state were victims, including top people doing so well. “I discovered that there are very many unsung people here that felt they would not make it unless they went to Lagos.

So, I chose the comedy industry to start the push to sell Port Harcourt with positive narrative and restart of the story of the city. I began to sponsor them with whatever little I had.

I am the first corporate body to scale Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) because others start CSR when they make it, but I started from the start or even before the start of my project. As of this year, we have won ‘brand of the year’ for three years running just by doing little by little.”

This year, he went on, “Having seen the battle we faced to succeed, we found that most investors study the algorithm (digital representation of frequency of happening in a given city) and they flee. Now, we said, let’s do media visibility for the Garden City. We made sure we briefed the press frequently on the positive things happening in Port Harcourt which would have been ignored. We saw it paid off because more positive stories began to come out of Port Harcourt. Now, we have decided to start a competition in the body of journalists in the state on positive news. It has been said that bad news is good news. So, for good news to overtake bad news, it has to be told 100 times over bad news. Bad travels 10 times faster than good news. So, good news has to perform 100 times more than bad news to overtake bad news.

He said he was waiting for his land papers to come out so I can start big news moves when suddenly I learnt that an economic summit was about to hold.”

He said: “Peter Obi talks about 200,000 boreholes. If one per cent of Nigerians is 200,000, so if you can do one borehole in a year, you can have water solution. That’s is just the statistics.

“So, part of the fundamental things why we are here today is to tell everybody that the awareness and deliberate narrative change can start now and here; and we can begin to talk about the positives of Rivers State, we can skew the algorithm back in our favour. If Lagos State has 15 million people and they have less people talking about their potential, that would reduce visibility to the work of about three million people. Rivers with six million people need to work harder. If 50 per cent or more of our people talk about the positives of this state, it will beat that pattern or algorithm.

|So, the idea is, who else will tell them. The good book said how will they hear, if somebody doesn’t preach to them. We thus put this meeting together so you can all preach the message of the positives of Rivers State.

When this competition as outlined by the DG (of the RSTDA) begins, it would launch Rivers State back as the tourism capital of the world. By the story told by the DG, if the tourism promoters of Dubai could come to Port Harcourt to promote a show and only seven persons showed up, the small number was not because there was scarcity of talent or lack of interest from the youths of Rivers State, it was because of lack of narrative-pushing to tell the youths that there was opportunity somewhere.

When I started my project in Alesa Eleme, I was told don’t go oh, they do worry oh. But today, I have not even started the project proper and I have got an award from the same Alesa Elele youths as ‘Hero of Development’ all because of little corporate social responsibility (CSR) things I did for them. It broke my heart when they came to me and said they could secure our facility. They said all we needed to give them were equipment and gears not costing up to N5m. We did that donation in December 2023 but I was weak when they said for 20 years, no company had donated those things.

It is about the narrative being peddled around the state and around the communities. The story is not being told. If you don’t load the search engine with good stories, you won’t move up on the scale of attractive cities and investments. Let’s get to the level of knowing what to tell and what not to.

The governor says Rivers State is open for business again, and the RSTDA seems to take the bull by the horn to lead the charge. They have a huge ally in an enthusiastic entrepreneur and investor, the Mayor of Housing, who has taken the state by storm to shake it back to action and national reckoning, and away from image of centre of political crisis.