If you followed the Year of Return activities for last year, you would have noticed that almost all the activities were centered in the Greater Accra Region.
Apart from some visits to the Cape Coast and Elmina castles in the Central Region by some Diasporans, all other regions were left out in the activities that marked 400 years since the first slaves arrived in Virginia in the US.
Tourism Curator PaJohn Bentsifi Dadson, who works with the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), has revealed that nothing really happened in the other regions because they failed to submit their plans or activities for the Year of Return.
He revealed in an interview on Showbiz 927 on 3FM that there was a national call for people to present events and activities for the Year of Return.
“Unfortunately when the call was made for people to bring events to be part of the Year of Return…the primary mandate of the [Ghana Tourism] Authority is to promote the country and so the Authority was going to promote the Year of Return. So if you had an event which you thought was good enough to put in this calendar, present it the secretariat will look at [and] add it to the events and promote it.”
He stressed that the GTA does not organise events and did not organise any of the Year of Return events.
“What the Authority does is to lend its support to what bona fide organisers and tour operators will be doing.”
Asked if the GTA received any event from the other regions, PaJohn responded that, “A lot weren’t coming…a lot of people were sceptical about this whole thing….”
With Ghana launching the next phase of the Year of Return, the Tourism Curator is hopeful that the other regions present their events to the GTA.
“Hopefully now that there is the ‘Beyond the Return’ we are going to encourage a lot more people to come from the regions…to enter more of their events…,” he said.
By Dela Aglanu|3news.com|Ghana