We are celebrating Ondo culture with Mare- Deji Falae
Barrister Deji Fale is the Honourable
commissioner for culture and Tourism in
Ondo state and the Chief organiser of the just concluded Mare Festival . in
this interview with Alarinka Agbaye he spoke on Ondo state
government to make Idanre the centre of
tourist destination in the Nigeria and
why celebration of Mare festival
What is Mare Festival
all about
Mare festival is a
festival that was initiated by regime of
Dr Olusegun Mimiko when he came on board
, Mr governor felt it was important for
us to do a couple of things , first of all to celebrate our natural potentials
in the state. We have a lot of beautiful
location across the state, secondly to celebrate the diversity of our culture
as you can see we have musical troops
from different part of the state and local government coming to dance and
showcase their culture here at a point
we discovered that there is a need to
have a state festival where all this things will come together and be
celebrated in one locations and of all the beautiful locations we have in
Ondo state you will agree with me that the hills of Idanre are
beautiful in Ondo state and so because of that Mr Governor said that there is a need to celebrate this location,
to celebrate our culture and that is what initiated the Mare festival. There is
a bit of spot in it as well the term
Mare came from Marebo, ( Don’t fall down) and the idea is that we have the mountain climbing
competition here and we have mountain
climbers from all over the world who have come to take part in this competition
and every year we keen adding new things
to year this year they’ve included grips, they
add grips on the walls so that it
makes it a bit tougher and harder in some area as well, we are getting more
and more in this what we are doing.
What is the economic important of Mare festival
to Ondo people
You must realize that in every location where you have
the convergence of a number of people, what use to happen is that the local business people in that area will
begin to experience an increase in their business in that location , that
transporters too will have their business boosted because of the influx of the
people and also if you look around you
will see that we have restaurants and different drinking joints and the rest of that, some are displaying
their clothing’s their product and all kind of things, what happen is that all this people that come here from morning till evening are going to
eat and buy things and
that means what use to be their turnover in a week mat probably happen in a day, the immediate environment is impacted by the quantum of
business that the local people here
do, in fact we have a competition where the former
location where we use to have Mare have been pleasing with us to move the general activities back to where their own location is because the
people in this area seems to be benefiting more, so the immediate impact is
that the local people here are benefiting more. Also a lot of people comes here
and decide to stay a day or two so the
hotel here are also business too, so there is an immediate and direct transfer of wealth of
visitors to local business in Ondo state.
To what
extent have you gone in cultural re-orientation
in Ondo state
We all know that our
culture is the vehicles of our values,
what we believe in , the language
we speaks and the rest of that , in the ancient
time we had colonization by
force, the white people came force their culture on us and took us away
but in modern times we have this
cultural colonization which means the popular music, popular clothing's that are
been worn by the artists abroad have
started taking over our own natural mode of dressing , language , our
culture and traditions, so we must make
a deliberate and conscious effort to
keep celebrating it and bringing it to
the fore, otherwise you will realize that to a large extent Languages die off sue to lack of use, so you
will discover that if you are not careful, you don’t keep celebrating
what you have you will loose if we do not keep bring our culture to the fore, in the next one or
two generations you will have
some people from here
who may not be able to speak the language, it is something that the government
have to deliberate purse as a policy and we’ve been doing that.
Sir if you look around there has not been much
in term of infrastructural
development of this town, what is
your government doing in developing this town to attract foreign
tourist
I may not agree with
you that not much has been done on the infrastructural development here, if you
drive from Akure to Idanre you will notice that there are certain area where
the road has been fixed, last year there was a lot of works done in terms of
fixing the road but because the attention that has come here, we have the neighbourhood market
that has been built here, we have the
Mega Primary school going on , all this thing take us to the fore, some of this
thing are on doing here next year we have a plan the plan are already going on to improve on
the facilities by the hill, the golf
course in Idanre is nearly completed, it is a standard gold course with 18
holes our plan is that by the end of
February formerly Mr governor
will commission all the facilities we are putting on here to make Idanre a
tourists location, so that when you come to Idanre it wont just be about the
Hill alone, you can do a lot of other things as well the plan is just to make
Idanre a capital tourists of Ondo state.
What are the
challenges so far
Well naturally we
live in an environment in Nigeria where it is difficult to predict to a larger extent how things will turn up
definitely logistic is the major problem to be sure that things will go
according to plan you need to keep checking and rechecking to make sure that
everything go according to plan, we’ve
invited some states, so many
people, musicians, Nolly wood stars and others so the first
thing is coordinating the letters making sure that they get to their
destinations so logistic is always the major challenge so as we move year after year the
mistakes of the past will not repeats
itself
Is your government looking at a
situation whereby Idanre will be visited by tourists all the time
and not just during the Mare Festival
There are few things
that the government is looking at
first of all this festival is a
creation of Dr Olusegun Mimiko, the people of Idanre themselves have their own
community festivals that takes place here and the idea is that for government to come in and support them
we must realize that it cost a lot of money to build costume for them even
if it is Aso Oke and the rest of them to increase from may be 10 20 people to up, increase
the number of dancer, drummers and others so the the government can come in so that
they can make more costumes and
others and get more people involved in
their own festival in the local community, secondly hopefully, will they be
able through the media to blow it up so that whatever they are winking in the
dark, so that the rest of the world can see and hear it. That is the idea we
are hoping to support the community on their own festivals
What is the stare roadmap for
culture and tourism development in Ondo state.
When i came in, we
actually do not have a codified tourism master plan we are working on that right
now but the idea is that we don’t want to go and create something that is
exoteric we already have certain natural endowment and the idea is that we
put everything together so that we have
a five years or more plan so that our focus will be on
nature. Most of the developed world don’t have what we have this is a natural
environment , we have a small both regatta coming sometime this
month, next year we are going to blow it up
again so the idea is to have which will draw them in , some of the
climbers that came last year state for
another week they didn’t want to go because this are the natural things
they don’t have in their place what they use where they come from are
the artificial climbing walls so the them its a new
challenge and that is part of our focus.
