The Oyo State Commissioner for Information, Culture and Tourism, Dr. Wasiu Olatunbosun has said that this year’s Omituntun Pacesetter Festival of Arts & Culture is to discover new talents that will represent Oyo State in national festivals.
The Commissioner said this at Lekan Salami Sports Complex, Adamasingba, Ibadan on Monday, where glamour was added to the cultural parade, food courts, arts and craft exhibition, as well as troupe and masquerades displays.
Olatunbosun maintained that the festival is part of the efforts of the Oyo State Government to preserve and promote the beauty of Yoruba arts, culture and heritage to the world.
He explained that the festival was used to showcase the 33 Local government potentials in Arts, and Culture and to identify new talents that will represent Oyo State in national festivals like Abuja carnival and Nigeria art and culture festivals.
Olatunbosun maintained that Governor Seyi Makinde-led administration is providing an enabling environment for businesses to thrive, saying that over 160 tourism potentials are in the state.
According to the Commissioner, “This is the second edition of the Omituntun Pacesetter cultural festival and our aim is to promote arts and culture. We want to use this opportunity to identify new talents that we can use to represent Oyo State in national festivals like the Abuja carnival and Nigerian art and culture. So, the talents that we identify today will be the set of people that will be representing Oyo State.
“We are using this forum because we realize that the representatives of Oyo state are getting older and we need new talents that we can showcase anywhere and anytime they have a national or international festival of arts and culture.
“We all know that Oyo State is a haven of culture and art as well as tourism and this administration has succeeded in making an atmosphere for private investors to come to Oyo State.
“You can see that the number of hotels, that is the hospitality business, has really increased in Oyo State because of the environment created by Governor Seyi Makinde, and we have succeeded in creating another environment for other tourism investors to come and invest in the area of tourism. For instance, we have about 160 tourism potential in Oyo State and we want people to come. As you can see, this is a culture and tourism festival. We have many people all over Nigeria that came home from abroad to witness today’s festival.
“Like I said, this is the second one. We had the first one last year. By God’s grace, we are going to have another one next year. So, it’s going to be an annual event and if you look at the Aso Oke festival, before we came in, they had issues but the moment we came in we started it. So, we had it last year, and we are going to have it this year as well.
“But this one cuts across all those sets of cultures across the 33 local governments in the state. So, unlike the Aso Oke festival that is domiciled in Iseyin and the Festival that is domicile in Ibarapa central, this festival cuts across 33 local governments of the state and it will help us to develop the talents and help them to showcase their cultural potential that they want the whole world to see.
“If you look at what we are doing today, we are live-streaming it and people are seeing it all over the world and we have people all over continents that are watching it live and if you look at it; you will see that even most local governments showcase young talents.
So, with those young talents, that means that this adage in Yoruba that says ‘Oosa ti aba fi oju omode han, ko ni parun.’ So that literally means that if you start teaching your children your religion and the festival of your family, that festival will not go into extinction so that is exactly what we are doing. If we don’t have this forum, those potentials will just die without living in them.”
Be the first to comment