Please fact-check me: Ten years ago, the biggest tourist attraction in Nigeria was Prophet TB Joshua’s Synagogue Church of All Nations. Ten years later, it is Detty December.
At the height of Joshua’s SCOAN, as the top draw for foreign tourists to Nigeria, international airlines flying into Nigeria adjusted their schedules because of the Synagogue’s activities.
Please assume I am lying and fact-check me.
Lagos State learnt from what happens around the world. Two Rs are the biggest drivers of tourism worldwide: Religion and Romance.
You see, Sigmund Freud, the greatest psychoanalyst who ever lived, said man’s greatest urges are the God urge and the “life instinct”, of which our sexual instinct, otherwise called libido, was a core component.
Mecca in Saudi Arabia welcomes 20 million visitors annually for Hajj and Umrah, making it the world’s most visited religious destination. Hajj and Umrah are different. Hajj can only be done at specific times of the year. Umrah can be done at any time of the year except for a few days during the month of Dhu al-Hijja.
Paris, France, is the most visited romantic destination on the planet with 18 million visitors.
And this is where the genius of Lagos and its leaders comes into play.
They have combined religion and romance, using these two big draws to make Lagos the year-end pearl of African tourism.
The successive Muslim Governors of Lagos, in the persons of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and Raji Fashola, SAN, did not allow their religion to blind them to the potential of the Synagogue as a money-spinner for Lagos.
With the Synagogue’s sometimes not-so-spotty reputation as a religious institution, they still gave it as much support as it needed.
Elsewhere, we saw what happened to the Shiites in Kaduna.
No matter what you think of Shia Muslims, Kaduna under Nasir el-Rufai lost a golden opportunity to turn Zaria into a global hub for Shia pilgrimage due to the international flight restrictions placed on Iran.
You do not have to like them to profit from them. We in Black Africa must learn to be goal-oriented. What is the goal? To attract foreign investment into Nigeria.
If you can do that through religion, which you can then place reasonable restrictions on, why not?
Please fact-check me: Hajj and Umrah collectively are the second largest contributors to the Saudi economy, with $12 billion annually.
Since the death of TB Joshua, attention has shifted to the Redeemed Christian Church of God’s Holy Ghost convention, which attracts over 5 million worshippers both online and offline.
And between Lagos, Ogun, and Oyo States, that religious pilgrimage is adding millions of dollars to their state coffers.
And then comes Detty December. For the uninitiated, the “Detty” in “Detty December” is a Nigerian street lingo for illicit romantic liaisons that are meant to start and end during the end-of-year holiday season.
It is our own version of What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, invented as a phrase in 2003 to draw visitors to Sin City!
And Detty December did not just happen. The Lagos State Government made it happen by investing millions of dollars in an international advertising campaign and supporting the entertainment and hospitality industries through the Lagos State Ministry of Tourism, Arts, and Culture.
My little counsel to the Lagos State Government is that the next step they should take is to lobby Eon Productions, owners of the James Bond movie franchise, to shoot part of their next Bond movie in Lagos during Detty December.
Do you think that all those cities chosen as Bond locations are picked at random? No! Intense lobbying and money-ing go into it.
Let me give an example. Bangkok, Thailand, was a little-known tourist destination before the year of my birth (1974). And then the Thai government lobbied and partly bankrolled Eon Productions to shoot the Bond movie, The Man with the Golden Gun, in Thailand.
Fast forward to today, and Bangkok is now the most visited city on Earth with 30.3 million visitors so far in 2025.
Whatever the Thai government spent to promote The Man with the Golden Gun had been recouped more than a thousand times!
Moral of the Story: If you want to attract tourists to your state, focus on the two Rs, religion and romance, and you will achieve through that what festivals, masquerades, and other tourist attractions cannot accomplish.
Reno Omokri
