The U.S. government and Nigeria announced Jan. 20 that both have signed off on a bilateral cultural property agreement designed to preserve Nigerian cultural sites and museum collections through the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation.
The U.S. Department of State announced in a press release that U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria Mary Beth Leonard and Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed have signed a bilateral cultural property agreement during a ceremony in Abuja alongside members of the Nigerian government and the U.S. Mission.
"This agreement solidifies our shared commitment to combat looting and trafficking of precious cultural property by enabling the United States to impose import restrictions on certain categories of Nigerian archaeological and ethnological material," U.S. government officials said in the press release.
Over the course of the past decade, the U.S. government has partnered with the Nigerian government and other assorted state institutions to fund various projects that have come to a total of over $1 million to strengthen Nigeria’s cultural heritage management capacity across both countries, according to the press release. The new agreement will serve to cultivate interchange between U.S. and Nigerian cultural institutions in order to increase public awareness of Nigeria’s rich and diverse cultural heritage.
The new cultural property agreement was negotiated by the State Department under the U.S. law implementing the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which serves to establish a process for the return of trafficked cultural objects, which will help to reduce the incentive to loot sites in Nigeria.
Negotiated by the State Department, the new cultural property agreement is one of a series signed by the U.S. with several other countries, including Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Mali and Morocco.
