The Managing Director of Sterling Bank Plc, Mr. Abubakar Suleiman, has assured Nigerians that the Bankers’ Committee will bring the National Theatre Iganmu, now Wole Soyinka Centre of Creative Arts, in Lagos back to world class standard.
According to Suleiman, the edifice is one of the most complex and successful projects embarked by the committee. He made this known during a recent tour of the iconic complex. He said the ongoing renovation of the 47-year- old edifice is an incredible accomplishment that the collaboration between the government and Bankers’ Committee has had since July 2021. He added that “the National Theatre, which represents one of our highest points in terms of ambition, was in the state of disrepair. We are committed to bringing it back to world-class standards. This would arguably be one of the most complex and most successful projects of that nature. This is putting culture back on the map in a big way”. “It’s not just the theatre; this is one of the biggest and most complex event centres you can have in this country.
We will bring it to the public very soon.” Mr Sulaiman explained that the interest of the Bankers’ Committee was not about making money but to salvage a national monument that had been in a state of disrepair for decades. “When we approached government for this opportunity, we had no idea how we were going to make money. It wasn’t about making money. This was about a national monument that had been left abandoned, and we thought anything and everything that needed to be done should be done to restore this to its glory”. “We were shocked at the scale of the work that needed to be done, but we were also impressed by the possibility that it represented. As you’ve seen, this is one of the largest-scale projects of this type anywhere on the continent. The standard to which it has been restored is global,” he added.
The banker assured fellow Nigerians that the National Theatre will neither be managed by the Bankers Committee nor the Federal Government but it would be managed professionally. “We imagined what it would be like to manage a project like this and we have lined up partners that will ensure this is run to an international standard,” Suleiman said. According to the architect in charge of the project, Mr. Ade Laoye of ECAD Architects, “the project had reached 95 per cent completion”. In 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) lent its support for $100 million provided by the Bankers’ Committee to revamp the National Arts Theatre.
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