Sustainable Development of Domestic Tourism in Nigeria

The Role of Citizenship Education

Abstract

The development and sustainability of Nigeria’s domestic tourism is predicated on a number of factors that derive from the multi-sectorial nature of the tourism industry itself. The peculiarities of the Nigerian state, and the challenges of leadership and citizenship necessitate a re-consideration of extant strategies for National development and economic prosperity.  This paper examines the sustainable development of domestic tourism in Nigeria against the backdrop of its latent potentials, proposing citizenship education, which activates critical thinking capacities and expands the scopes of understanding and interpreting concepts and their application in practice, as a critical tool. The conceptual framework for the paper revolves around some general questions in tourism development and sustainability vis-a-vis the nation’s sustainable development objectives and aspirations. The theoretical underpinning derives from a blend of Westheimer and Kahne’s citizenship typologies and the 1998 UNESCO model of citizenship education for the 21^st Century, according to which citizenship must be rooted in the principles of personal responsibility, democratic participation, and social justice to effectively serve the cause of sustainable development. The discourse concludes that a critically planned and well executed citizenship education, which is critical to every domain of sustainable development should be in Nigeria’s scale of national priorities and should be vigorously deployed to salvage the nation’s ailing domestic tourism.