…NIHOTOUR Wins Top Tourism Supportive Agency Award
The Director General, DG, of the National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism, NIHOTOUR, Alhaji Nura Sani Kangiwa, has stressed the importance of staff capacity development as key to the success of any organization in achieving the implementation of its core mandate.
Kangiwa made the remark while declaring open a retreat organized for senior management staff of the institute over the weekend in Keffi, Nasarawa State.
A press release, signed by the Director, Media and Public Relations Unit of NIHOTOUR, Mr. Ahmed Mohammed Sule, the DG noted that staff capacity upgrade is the best means of charting an agency’s mission-vision for achieving efficiency and sustaining staff camaraderie, which is fundamental to best service delivery.
Lamenting the abysmal record of achievement of NIHOTOUR in its 28 years of existence to provide skills proficiency, technical upgrading programmes and professional knowledge-based education in the hospitality and travel tourism in the country, Kangiwa said that it is regrettable that the 8nstitute failed to actualize its robust mandate.
He emphasized his resolve to make NIHOTOUR the warehouse of knowledge and specialist skills and a foremost enabler of tourism development, not only for Nigeria, but in the West African sub-region as envisaged by the founding fathers of the institute, adding that he is fully committed to fulfilling the institute’s sector-specific mandate.
Reeling out his three-point agenda, which include: staff welfare; institutional capacity development; and sector-specific repositioning; Kangiwa said that to achieve these, staff attitude of indiscipline in the form of late coming to work, absenteeism, truancy and lack of commitment to work must stop.
He said, “Repositioning NIHOTOUR as the game changer in moving the Nigeria’s hospitality travel-tourism industry to greater height as the socio-economic hub of the country is a task that we must all strive to achieve.”
He added that all resolutions at the end of the retreat will serve as the basis for management’s policies and operations, which are expected to impact on the efficient and effective delivery of the institute’s mandate.
Meanwhile, NIHOTOUR has won the top tourism supportive agencies year 2020 award of the Seven Wonders of Nigeria.
In a letter dated 22nd February, 2021 and signed by Nkechi Uko, organizer of the Seven Wonders Nigeria tourism award to the DG, it said the award was in recognition of the dogged pursuit of NIHOTOUR in the promotion of the travel tourism industry in manpower training and skills upgrade in the face of the global crisis that hit the industry, occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic during the year under review.
The letter reads in part, “In recognition of your dedication and remarkable efforts to drive and sustain domestic tourism, the Seven Wonders of Nigeria…has the pleasure to inform you that your valiant efforts have not gone unnoticed and have thus been recognized as one of the leading tourism supportive agencies in Nigeria 2020.”
Arrangements to hold the award by the organizers have reached advanced stage as presentations for the award is billed to take place in Abuja during the 7th Abuja Jabamah, from 26th to 27th March, 2021 alongside a Tourism Master Class Training session.
