Nigeria, Cape Verde sign bilateral tie in Creative Industry

Nigeria and Cape Verde have agreed to build and nurture a veritable bilateral relationship in the creative industry.

This position was made known at a meeting between the leader of the Nigerian delegation who is the Country’s Information and Culture Minister Alhaji Lai Mohammed and his Cape Verde counterpart Mr. Abraao Vincente on the side line of the 64^th conference of the UNWTO regional commission for Africa and the second edition of the UNWTO global tourism investment forum in Cape Verde.

The Minister said he had fruitful discussions with other counterparts and with Cape Verde in particular for the need for a deliberate collaboration in the area of arts, culture tourism and the creative industry in general.

“For Nigeria, our greatest strength is in the area of film, architecture, music and fashion. We are seeking collaboration with Cape Verde but we have noted that our people have already commenced such collaboration though somewhat informally. But as government, we will want to institutionalize and formalize such type of partnerships.”

The Minister applauded the opportunity given to Professor Kunle Adeyemi, by the government of Cape Verde to designing the floating music hub in Saint Vincente Island. He said the hub design is a project that has already been in replicated in 5 different continents.

“Kunle and others have already started doing great things in Cape Verde. He designed the music hub in the Island of st Vincente.

The music hub can congregate African music and music from other parts of the world. It has a recording studio, hall, bar etc, it will create a platform for music, film etc Also one of our ace film producer, Kunle Afolayan was in the Island of Medalo and has already started a film project.”

Mohammed said he learnt that there was an air bilateral tie between Nigerian and Cape Verde before the Covid-19 pandemic halted it.

According to him, Nigeria and Cape Verde commenced bilateral air relations of flying from Sal Island to Lagos but the pandemic stopped it. Once there is air agreement and regular flights, it will improve relations.”

Meanwhile, the Minister of Tourism and creative industry from Cape Verde, Abraao Vincente said the country has embraced the Nigerian ideas by accepting Kunle and his work.

“We have accepted Nigeria, Kunle is a Nigerian architect with wonderful ideas. When we see the music hub he has designed and built in time magazine we feel proud that he is African.

“We can enter an agreement through an MoU where our people can go to Nigeria to learn and Nigerians can come to Cape Verde to learn also.

We always wonder how Nigerians do these things. We want to learn from Nigeria in the area of film, music and creative industry in general.

We have to make the agreement work. We have to bring practical experiences; we have to allow people travel. Nigerian musicians are now ruling the world. We would want to learn from that. We have the content but will want to learn other elements.

We have to make deliberate international program to sell the African brand, we have to send our creative people to move out and reach out to other parts of the world, take our designers, painters, music brand to the international stage and bring those outsides to Africa too.”

The Cape Verde Minister said what Nigerian music is doing worldwide can open doors and opportunities.

“We can learn a lot from Nigeria. In an informal way, Nigeria grew a huge creative industry, so we want to know how they did it.”

Talking on the return of cultural artifacts to Nigeria, the Minister advised that Africa should find a way to build unique museums to put those artifacts and attract international traffic to come view them.

Ime N