Ground has been broken on the 6,000-seat Edo Arena, a state-of-the-art conference hall and event centre in Benin City, the capital of Edo State in Nigeria.
This Day said the Edo Arena, which is to be called the ‘Rema Dome’ in honour of a famous local afrobeat singer, is sited at the former Garrick Memorial School Ground.
Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State and afrobeat singer, Divine Ikubor, popularly known as Rema, performed the ground-breaking ceremony.
The new venue will be built on about 5 hectares of land and will serve as an entertainment hub, hosting many events, from concerts, to national conferences, symposiums and other larger events.
In February this year a ground-breaking ceremony was held for Africa’s first purpose-built arena which is set to open in Lagos, Nigeria, at the end of 2025.
The $100 million arena will have capacity for 12,000 and is projected to host events including concerts, family entertainment, basketball games, UFC fights, boxing matches, WWE shows and more.
The Rema Dome is expected to drive the influx of people into Edo State in line with the government’s vision to make the region a popular tourist destination.
Governor Obaseki said, “When we came into government in 2016, we didn’t have a venue for events but rather we were hiring canopies for events and renting places for large events, especially when we invite people out of the state. It became clear that we needed to have a venue where we could host large events.
“In the course of our planning, we realized that Edo has a unique advantage. They don’t call us the heartbeat of Nigeria for nothing. Edo enjoys tremendous traffic as most Nigerians move through Edo State and we noticed that it’s a huge economic advantage for us.
“We have the capacity to host national events and attract all Nigerians here. We made strategic plans as we began to sell our culture and position ourselves to attract more people to our state.
“We are using sports to attract people to our state as we remodeled the Samuel Ogbemudia Stadium into a world-class sports center. We can boast today of the best sporting facility in Nigeria.
“To host cultural and entertainment events, we used the old Observer premises into a world-class sound stage that can host about 2,000 to 3,000 guests.”
Obaseki said that the development of the arena will mean hotels will spring up in different locations in the State, creating employment opportunities.
He added, “This is what many countries in the world live on, not petroleum or crude oil but tourism. These countries don’t have the fraction of what we have in the state in terms of tourism. What they have is the infrastructure to support tourism as this is what we have started to build in Edo State.
“When completed, this will be one of the biggest and largest spaces that would attract events into the state. This project is important to us as most of our projects embarked on by our administration have opened the State for more investors to come in.
“When you have people like Rema associated with a project like this it becomes a global project.”
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