Reflections on the mission and vision statements of selected public arts institutions in Nigeria.

Abstract

The state of the administration of public arts institutions in Nigeria calls for the attention of stakeholders especially in the area of policy formulation to achieve positive actualization of their statutory functions. No doubt, Nigerian arts institutions have performed excellently well in the past. However, recent discovery indicated a backward shift in the delivery of service when compared with private arts institutions in Nigeria. Some of the factors responsible for this, are low funding, inexperienced staff and inadequate modern facilities but incoherent, illogical and immeasurable mission and vision statements have not been given scholarly attention to have had influence on the backward shift in the delivery of functions. Through the descriptive method, the paper identifies the incoherence and illogicality in the contents of the mission and vision statements of the selected arts institutions. The paper reveals that the mission and vision need to be refocused, narrowed down and measurable over a particular period of time. The paper concludes that understanding how arts and cultural institutions operate according to their mission and vision is an important aspect of arts administration. The paper, therefore, recommends that arts and cultural administrators and managers should be versatile in both theoretical knowledge and practical experience in arts and cultural administration.