According to a report from Politicaleconomistng, Barely one year after Nigerians stopped him from turning the National Theatre into a hotel, the Minister of Culture and Tourism, Edem Duke, secretly jetted off the country to the United Arab Emirates, UAE, where he traded off the nation’s cultural pride to Mulk Holding, a diversified UAE-based conglomerate with interests in retail sector and other businesses.
The secret deal which was successfully shielded from the Nigerian media, in spite of a subsisting concessioning arrangement with the Bureau of Public Enterprises, BPE, was signed and sealed in December , 2014 between a delegation led by Duke, the General Manager of the National Theatre, Kabiru Yar’Adua and representatives of Mulk Holding, said to be ploughing the sum of $40 million (about N7.5 billion) counterpart fund into the project.