By Onome Amawhe
As Yinka Abioye pushes for the return of FESTAC Africa to Nigeria, the question is no longer whether the country can remember 1977, but whether it can convert memory into cultural leadership, tourism, inclusion and continental influence.

In 1977, Nigeria did something unusually grand. It gathered Africa and the Black diaspora in Lagos and asked the world to look again at the cultural power of a people too often narrated through conquest, slavery, colonialism and deprivation.

FESTAC ’77 was not only an arts festival. It was a civilisational statement. It suggested that culture could be a form of diplomacy, memory could be a form of power, and Nigeria could be more than a large country with oil revenue. It could be the host of Black imagination.

Nearly 50 years later, that memory has become both a blessing and a burden. It is a blessing because FESTAC ’77 remains one of the most important cultural moments in Nigeria’s modern history. It is a burden because Nigeria has not always treated that inheritance with the seriousness it deserves.

This is the context in which Yinka Abioye’s campaign for FESTAC Africa 2027 should be understood.

Abioye, Chairman of FESTAC Africa, is not merely asking Nigeria to celebrate an anniversary. He is asking the country to recover a mandate. At a town hall meeting held at Freedom Park, Lagos, on May 19, 2026, he described the planned return of FESTAC Africa to Nigeria as “not simply the return of a festival, but the revival of a continental vision.” He also described Freedom Park as a fitting ground for the activation because of its connection to colonial memory and the possibility of a greater African future.

That choice of location is important. Freedom Park itself is layered with history. It stands as a reminder that cultural memory is never neutral. It can be buried, neglected, commercialised or renewed. In choosing that space to speak about FESTAC Africa 2027, Abioye was making a wider point: Africa’s future cannot be built only with roads, ports, refineries and technology parks. It must also be built with memory, identity, imagination and cultural confidence.

Beyond a golden anniversary

The easy way to approach 2027 would be to organise a commemorative event, gather dignitaries, replay old footage, celebrate the National Theatre, sing about the glory of 1977 and move on. That would be inadequate.

FESTAC ’77 deserves remembrance, but remembrance alone is not renewal. The true test of 2027 is whether Nigeria can transform one of its greatest cultural memories into a contemporary platform for African exchange.

Abioye’s own framing of the project suggests that he understands this distinction. In his speech, he traced the FESTAC dream back to the 1966 Dakar gathering associated with Negritude and Léopold Sédar Senghor, before its later Nigerian expression in 1977 under Olusegun Obasanjo. After 1977, the festival went into another long silence before its revival in 2022. Since then, according to Abioye, FESTAC Africa has been held in Zanzibar in 2022, Arusha in 2023, Kisumu in 2024 and Accra in 2025, with Dakar scheduled for 2026 to mark 60 years since the original Dakar moment.

This timeline changes the story. FESTAC Africa is not emerging suddenly as a Nigerian anniversary idea. It is being presented as a revived Pan-African circuit that has already moved across African cities and is now building toward a symbolic return to Nigeria.

That gives Nigeria both opportunity and responsibility.

Why Nigeria must not treat culture casually

Nigeria has often behaved as though culture is an informal national asset that requires no serious policy architecture. Afrobeats rises, Nollywood expands, fashion travels, literature wins global respect, comedy crosses borders, and the country celebrates the visibility. But visibility is not the same thing as strategy.

The success of Nigerian culture has often come in spite of institutional weakness, not because of institutional support. Artists build their own markets. Filmmakers improvise around poor infrastructure. Musicians scale globally through private initiative. Writers rely on fragile publishing systems. Cultural entrepreneurs often succeed by outrunning the state.

FESTAC Africa 2027 offers Nigeria an opportunity to correct that habit.

Abioye’s argument is that Nigeria is not merely another possible host. In his words, Nigeria is the “heartbeat of African culture,” with influence in music, literature, fashion, film, technology and entrepreneurship. He also frames the country as a custodian of Pan-African expression, not only because it hosted FESTAC ’77, but because it still possesses the cultural memory, creative energy and symbolic infrastructure to host such a gathering again.

That claim should not be treated as flattery. It should be treated as an assignment. If Nigeria is truly Africa’s cultural capital, then 2027 must show evidence of planning, institutional coordination, tourism readiness, creative-sector inclusion, private-sector participation and international ambition.

A country cannot claim cultural leadership by memory alone.

Yinka Abioye’s more difficult argument

The most significant part of Abioye’s advocacy is not that FESTAC should return. Many people can say that. His more difficult argument is that FESTAC must return differently.

He is not proposing a festival trapped in costume, nostalgia and official speeches. He is arguing for a platform that brings together Nigeria, Africa and the diaspora around practical development themes: sharing best practices, regional integration, travel and tourism, trade improvements and disability inclusion. The purpose, as he puts it, is to foster togetherness in order to drive development across the continent.

That is a more demanding vision because it refuses to separate culture from economics, inclusion and public policy.

In the old imagination, festivals could be treated as temporary spectacles. In Abioye’s emerging framework, they must become platforms. His speech makes this point directly: festivals can no longer be temporary celebrations; they must become economic engines and knowledge platforms. FESTAC Africa 2027, he said, is being designed as a creative economy accelerator, tourism driver, cultural diplomacy platform, inclusion platform for people with disabilities, regional integration and intra-African trade booster, and Pan-African policy and innovation dialogue.

This is the heart of the new perspective. The question is not whether Nigeria can host a colourful festival. Of course it can. The question is whether Nigeria can build a serious cultural institution around it.

The economics of memory

There is a tendency to treat cultural revival as sentiment. That is a mistake. Properly designed, cultural platforms can generate tourism receipts, hotel occupancy, air travel, media value, merchandising, creative commissions, exhibitions, publishing opportunities, film markets, food fairs, fashion showcases, investment forums and diaspora engagement.

The world already understands this. Countries build influence around biennales, film festivals, book fairs, fashion weeks, heritage routes, museums, carnivals and music festivals. These are not mere entertainments. They are soft-power machines.

Nigeria should understand this better than most. Its creative energy is already one of its most successful exports. Yet the country has not built enough world-class platforms to capture the full value of that influence. FESTAC Africa 2027 could become one of those platforms.

This is why Abioye’s corporate appeal deserves attention. He has called on financial institutions, banks, telecoms companies, FMCGs, aviation, hospitality, media, technology, education and tourism players to join in shaping a festival that will resonate beyond 2027. He also argues that FESTAC Africa should not be viewed merely as sponsorship, but as legacy building and alignment with Africa’s creative economy.

For corporate Nigeria, this should be a serious invitation. Brands spend heavily to associate themselves with culture after it has become successful. FESTAC Africa offers something deeper: a chance to participate in building a continental cultural platform from a defining historical foundation.

Government must do more than attend

Abioye has also made a clear request of government. He wants public backing for the initiative, arguing that government support would encourage corporate participation. That is a practical point. In Nigeria, private capital often waits for official signals before committing to projects of national scale.

But government support must not be reduced to attendance by officials or speeches on opening day. If government is serious, its support should be structural.

It should include visa facilitation, airport coordination, security planning, transport management, cultural infrastructure readiness, state-level participation, tourism promotion, international media outreach, heritage programming, educational engagement and diplomatic mobilisation. The Ministry of Art, Culture, Tourism and Creative Economy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Lagos State, relevant federal agencies, museums, universities and creative industry bodies should all have defined roles.

This is where Nigeria often fails: not in producing ideas, but in building execution systems around them.

FESTAC Africa 2027 should not become another promising project weakened by poor coordination. If the country wants the world to come, it must prepare like a serious host.

A Pan-Africanism that must be practical

Abioye’s language around Pan-Africanism is emotionally charged but also useful. He insists that Pan-Africanism is no longer only a political philosophy; it is a living reality. He describes it as self-love and links it to contemporary African music, fashion and film, arguing that when African creativity travels globally, Pan-Africanism is alive.

That is a valuable redefinition. For too long, Pan-Africanism has been trapped in ceremonial language. It is invoked at conferences, quoted in speeches and honoured in memorial lectures, but too rarely translated into systems that make Africans move, trade, collaborate and build together.

A serious FESTAC Africa must therefore confront the practical barriers to Pan-Africanism: visa restrictions, poor air connectivity, weak cultural funding, limited museum infrastructure, inadequate creative-sector data, poor disability access, fragmented markets and the absence of durable continental platforms.

That is why Abioye’s inclusion of disability matters. It prevents the project from becoming a grand rhetoric of unity that excludes people in practice. If FESTAC Africa is to speak credibly of togetherness, it must be accessible not only to presidents, sponsors, celebrities and cultural elites, but also to people with disabilities, young people, students, local artists, informal creatives and communities outside the usual centres of power.

A Pan-African festival that leaves people out has already contradicted itself.

The National Theatre and the question of custodianship

Any serious conversation about FESTAC’s return to Nigeria must also confront the symbolic place of the National Theatre, now named after Wole Soyinka. Abioye himself refers to it as part of the infrastructure and cultural memory that make Nigeria a natural host for 2027.

The National Theatre is more than a building. It is one of the physical reminders of Nigeria’s FESTAC inheritance. Its fate over the years has reflected the country’s wider inconsistency toward culture: grand ambition, long neglect, periodic revival, and uncertain institutional purpose.

If 2027 is to mean anything, the National Theatre and other cultural sites must not be used merely as backdrops. They should become active centres of programming, exhibitions, performances, archives, youth engagement, scholarly conversations and diaspora encounters.

A revived FESTAC should not simply borrow old symbols. It should reactivate them.

A movement or another moment?

The danger before Nigeria is obvious. FESTAC Africa 2027 could become a moment: colourful, expensive, photographed, praised and forgotten. That would be a failure, no matter how successful the opening ceremony looks.

The better outcome is to make it a movement.

Abioye’s plan to hold a symbolic FESTAC event in Nigeria every year while taking the project around the world points in that direction. It recognises Nigeria as the emotional anchor of the FESTAC memory while allowing the festival to remain mobile, diasporic and Pan-African.

That balance is important. FESTAC belongs deeply to Nigeria because of 1977, but it cannot belong only to Nigeria. Its true constituency is larger: Africa, the Caribbean, Black America, Afro-Europe, Afro-Brazil, and all communities shaped by the history and future of Black civilisation.

The genius of FESTAC ’77 was that it understood this. The test of FESTAC Africa 2027 is whether Nigeria still understands it.

The Abioye challenge

Yinka Abioye’s role in this unfolding story is best understood not as that of a man trying to organise an event, but as a man trying to reopen a continental conversation. His campaign is asking Nigeria to take culture more seriously, to treat Pan-Africanism as a practical framework, to draw the diaspora closer, to give young people ownership, and to recognise that creative power can become national power.

That does not mean the project should be romanticised. Big cultural visions require scrutiny. Questions of funding, governance, transparency, programming quality, institutional partnerships, national coordination and long-term sustainability will matter. The stronger the vision, the greater the need for seriousness.

But the underlying argument is sound. Nigeria cannot continue to benefit from cultural prestige while underinvesting in cultural infrastructure. It cannot celebrate Afrobeats, Nollywood, literature, fashion and youth creativity while failing to build platforms that connect them to tourism, trade, diplomacy and education.

FESTAC Africa 2027 is one such platform.

Africa is now

Toward the end of his Freedom Park speech, Abioye declared that FESTAC Africa 2027 is more than a return. He described it as Africa reclaiming space, celebrating itself and inviting the world to engage with its creativity, intellect and humanity. He closed with the emphatic line: “Africa is not the future. Africa is now.”

It is a strong line because it rejects postponement. Africa has spent too long being described as potential, promise, possibility and future. FESTAC ’77 was powerful because, for one extraordinary moment, Africa did not ask to be predicted. It presented itself.

That is the standard before Nigeria in 2027.

The country can stage an anniversary, or it can renew a mandate. It can remember FESTAC, or it can rebuild the institutional imagination that made FESTAC possible. It can host a festival, or it can lead a cultural movement.

Abioye has placed the question on the table. Nigeria must now decide whether it is ready to answer.

Onome Amawhe is a Culture journalist and advocate