Tourism development and travel expert, Ikechi Uko, at the sidelines of the Accra Weizo held in Accra, Ghana, speaks about the factors militating against seamless travel within West Africa, need for intervention by ECOWAS Commission President for deepening of collaborations among tour operators in the West African region, among other issues.  brings excerpts:

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Last year, we decided to do a road trip, and in the course of the road trip, we found out that the border officials were not fully obeying the protocol of ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) for free movement and the rest of that. We were allowed to move, but there were a lot of obstacles. So, we now said, ECOWAS protocol has been in place for a long time, can we reimagine it? Is it possible we look at it and say, what is not working? So, that’s one.  We also found out that only one part of the whole ECOWAS thing is working, that is in travel. People are able to move, but groups have issues moving. Security is down, and governance is bad. So, we felt the area in which we play is actually the success story. Let’s talk about the enablers. People who had enabled those processes to work and most of them in travel and tourism are transporters and tour operators. We decided to do a summit of tour operators because we found out that the tour operators need to work with each other and they have not been doing that. If we do a summit of tour operators, we can actually first network them and secondly, challenge them. Third get them to take a position on how to improve things. That’s why we concentrated on that. And we are happy that one way or the other, ECOWAS itself reached out to us and decided that they are interested in what we are doing.  In the last one year, ECOWAS has been very busy trying to do a lot in tourism and travel. But they were dealing with the federations in different countries. They found out here that we are playing at a level that deals with the real players. That’s why you saw ECOWAS participate this year. They now feel, okay, this is the audience we need to be talking to because they resolved the problem of the ECOWAS protocol. That it was not the problem of ECOWAS. It was more of a problem of the implementation by the different countries. So, that was something that we are happy it was thrashed out. That was about the theme.

The thing about forming groups is that professional politicians take over those things. The group that ECOWAS is already dealing with, I won’t say they are politicians but they are people who are not actively involved in the business. So, if you now set up this association everybody is clamouring for, the association will eventually be taken over by these professional people who have time and money and are not active in the business. For now, this informal kind of thing we did, asked everybody to network. Now, if you are planning a tour between Gambia and Senegal, have the Representative of Gambia Transport Company here. You can call him up and he will provide that for you. If you want to do tours to Senegal, there is Elrad, here. So, what we have done is to provide partners for each person. I know some people will attend an event like this, they won’t collect these contacts. Then suddenly they will need to do business in Gambia, they will start calling me to give them my connections. People are expected to network at a high-profile conference such as this. But many failed to do so. Then you get back to Lagos, and you have need to do business with Senegal, you start to call me. Am I the one who should network for you. That’s why we do this kind of event, so that you come there and build trust because Africans are wired differently. You need to trust someone to do business with. So, when I now recommend to you, if something goes wrong, you hold me responsible.  Now, we don’t do. It’s now a policy in my office that we don’t give out our contacts again.  If you want, come to the event, meet the people. That little sharing of your card we did, you see positive fallout of it.  So, they need to network a lot more. Next year, and also at Akwaaba, most of them are coming to Lagos, Nigeria. We have over 20 tour operators coming from East Africa. They want to come and make friends with tour operators in West Africa. So, for these people that you saw at 2025 Accra Weizo, they’ve made friends and networked with each other. So, anybody that is smart. So, associations to me in West Africa haven’t been effective as a model for deepening relationships because the people who are not very, what I call the tourism agitators, have time and nuisance value. And they will try and capture the association for a platform, prestige for them. They won’t take back the information of whatever is discussed to their members. They finish the event, everybody goes home and that’s it.

I’ve asked the tour operators to put together what they discussed. They raised like five points. Those are the points that we’ll help them collate and send to the president of ECOWAS Commission. And say, these were the problems identified. These ones you’ve told us can be handled by countries. But this other one has to be handled at the policy level. So, these are our expectations. If ECOWAS endorses a tour operator, without ECOWAS endorsement, if you turn up at the border, the person who is trying to give you trouble will know that there’s a higher authority you can call. Those are the kind of things that, when we were coming to Ghana last year, at the border, when we got there, once the Ghana immigration saw that it was a government vehicle that came to pick us, they treated us better. Because they knew we were guests of the government. So, we’ll be collating the things that were discussed and agreed upon by the tour operators and we’ll now present it to the president of ECOWAS Commission.

I’d rather wait for them to articulate it properly because you know, they formed a group among themselves and they talked among each other. I want this to be more participatory than we sitting down and putting it together. Let it be that they own it. That these presidents of these associations, they own it. If they now want to say, okay, we’ll form an association ourselves, we’ll help them. We spoke with 10 different presidents who were supposed to be there.

You see, each is a sovereign nation and they can decide to implement it well or refuse to implement it. But they are signatories to the ECOWAS Protocol. If you sue them for preventing you from staying 90 days and above, if you sue them for preventing you from doing business, you will win. But the man stopping you at the ports, he says he’s exercising his rights. But his law does not cover that. So, it’s just that immigration man misapplying the law, because there is nothing in the law. The representative of the ECOWAS President told us, everybody signed to that protocol. And they have not withdrawn. That’s where the media and tour operators have power. If you keep exposing it, something might be done about it. If you keep reporting them, why did we recognise the president of ECOWAS? He decided to drive by road to go and experience these things. I watched the video where he was challenging every single person. Now, there’s a girl who did a video and she has been to 20 countries by bike. I shared the video to the ECOWAS man at the conference. She said the three worst immigration in the whole of Africa is between Zambia and Angola. Then two, Benin and Togo. The worst is Togo and Ghana. So, he said Benin, Togo, Togo and Ghana. So, Togo is the bad boy, because it’s on both sides. I sent that report to the ECOWAS president. I just shared with the ECOWAS commission to show you that the lady says three of the worst in Africa are in ECOWAS. And it’s just between Lagos and Accra.

We have a lot of such requests in the past. State governments will say next year’s Akwaaba they would host it. We ignore those things. So when people say do this, the necessary things to make the event successful when it comes to that you will see that the will is not there. You’re left to do it alone. Like for us, this is not a profitable business. It’s been more like CSR and that’s why it was easy for me to stop it until the government of Ghana says we have to restart it, and we restarted it. In the discussion, we had with the new team, they asked how is Accra Weizo valuable to Ghana tourism? And I said, we have brought over 100 tour operators to Ghana. How? We listed them. We have brought this number of airlines: Air Peace, Asky, Medview, Aero, ARIK. We have brought Lagos State government, Calabar Carnival, NCAC (National Council for Arts and Culture), NIHOTOURS (National Institute for Hospitality and Tourism). We brought Dubai Tourism to Ghana. We brought South Africa Tourism here. We brought Kenya Tourism. We brought Uganda Tourism. We brought Gambian Tourism. And no other organisation in Ghana has been able to provide that amount of value. So, if you want us to move it there, it wouldn’t be my problem to now begin to organise the resources to move it.

We are detailed. We plan and we make sacrifices. We are not expecting to make money in the beginning of our projects. We invest time, our own personal money to build those products. That’s why when the products become profitable, everybody now jumps in and they die. Why?  They have not built and are not detailed. They have not built those things. We did one in Gambia, Bantaba. Flight tickets between Lagos and Gambia  is more than N1.7 million. So, how many people are going to fly in from Nigeria? How many people are going to fly in from other places? If a co-host comes to play and provides those supports, and Senegal or which other country provides those supports, we can get involved. Whereas, as of now, I’m not going to put my money to that. So, but it looks like a nice idea because there and then, I had offers by different organisations. And what makes travelling exhibitions and conferences successful are very detailed things that a lot of people who jump into it do not know because they don’t know how it works.

From your own personal experience you have seen that the border is a problem. That’s one. Two, that visa regime will help everybody. Ghana is already plugged into the American markets. You see, the hotel I stayed in, the students, everybody, all universities exchange. Almost every American university brings students to Ghana. Now from Ghana, they fly to Nigeria. They started coming to Harvard and go. These are big boys. But there are smaller universities that come to Ghana. So if the visa thing is possible, they will just come here and drive down. Ghana is a gateway, but Nigeria is massive in their eyes. Everybody wants to experience that. If anybody should drive that multiple visa thing, it should be Nigeria. Because we start to benefit from other people’s hard work that’s important. The people operate in silos. I asked Ghanaian thought create to nominate their Nigerian partners. Only three people could nominate. You know, the awards we give we’ll ask people to nominate. Then for Nigerians, most of the thought creators are independent. They don’t work with partners. They just pay for hotel. That’s it.

The first thing we wanted to achieve is to get them to learn to work with each other. And for that, we are very successful. The second thing we also want to achieve, when ECOWAS told us they were coming, is to get ECOWAS to begin to see not from the eyes of governments, but from the eyes of the people. And we’re very happy with that. So AI and others, that’s contextual because we’ve done some experiments. Approach people digitally  and approach them analog. The Nigerian market responds better to analog. And I gave an example during the UNWTO conference in Abuja, where I had to speak on AI. I told them the biggest online travel agency in Nigeria has the highest number of offices. Physical offices, brick and mortar. So if you are an online travel agent, what are you doing with brick and mortar offices? So it tells you that online isn’t that reliable.  In Ghana, you must have seen four of their offices. So, if the top three online agents in Africa and West Africa also have the highest number of offices, that tells you there’s a limitation to what technology can do.