The Importance Of Creative Arts

“National development is the ability of a county or countries to improve the social welfare of the people e.g. by providing social amenities like quality education, potable water, transportation infrastructure, medical care, etc.”(Dawe, 2017). According to Reference Dictionary (2017),” Creative arts include drama or theatre, music, film, creative writing, graphic design, photography and visual arts.” Creative arts are a major part of national development since through creative arts, the identity of a country is revealed. Through creative arts the government gets revenue and many other benefits. Creative arts and a sense of culture are the easiest and most cost effective way to achieve national development in Africa since it shows our identity,

I believe national development is mainly based on the people and that the people make up a nation not the infrastructure. This means that without the people, there will be no nation. These people in the nation have an identity, a sense of belonging to the nation. In most African countries, the original and traditional African culture is lost due to factors such as colonization and blind copying of western cultures. These western cultures have used creative arts in line with their culture to boost their economy and achieve high GDP’s and we try to copy their styles of creative arts such as hip-hop and other forms of culture. In our schools and institutions, our children are also taught western cultures and are taught according to a western curriculum. This is stated by Hugh (1961) in his speech on February

Most people travel to other countries just to learn about their culture. Worldbank (2013) states that: “Tourism is one of the largest and fastest growing sectors of the world economy, and tourism in Africa is ripe for development.” This shows the alarming increase in the tourism and why we need to harness that factor to gain revenue and achieve nation development.
Most African countries live in poverty but have rich cultural assets. These assets can be harnessed to bring revenue and development to these countries. With all these reasons why we need to improve and take care of our culture, the question that follows is; “how do we do that?” There are various ways of preserving our culture. For example asking a renowned money organization such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to come to our aid to realise this development. A question is asked by Kabanda (2014) who asks