By Archibong Jeremiah
Mr. Donald Duke, former Governor of Cross River State has accused the Senator Liyel Imoke administration of not allowing Tinapa and Obudu cattle ranch work.
Donald Duke bared his mind while speaking to journalists after a recent facility tour of Adsuit hotel in Calabar.
His words: “Tinapa is embarrassingly simple to get working. First of all, it was well built and it’s still standing, it just needs small renovation here and there, getting the chiller system working, paint the place . There’s a management group that has been begging Cross River State since the past ten years to take over the place and manage it, all you need to do is give it to them and they will arrange the working capital, it’s a political will, it has nothing to do with the facility is the will to make it work, the last administration didn’t have the will, they just didn’t want it to work, they didn’t want Obudu to work. I hope this administration will be different.
“This State, the strength of this State as I’ve always thought it was is on agriculture and tourism and you could see that came in during the December period. And you know one of the painful thing is not having Tinapa to work, because if we get Tinapa working the traffic you see in December will be year long. This will be the most sort destination in the whole West Africa, not just Nigeria. Now you try and envisage the traffic that came in December is year long, the amount of resources brought into our State.
“Now the demand, banks will be throwing money at you to build such facility because they know there’s a market for it. The farmer will make more money because he will grow more food, the hotelier, transporter will make a lot of money, you open a restaurant you will make money, that’s what it’s all about. The economy will function. Then if we are able to reactivate the Obudu cattle ranch, the traffic that goes up and down, you know the traffic from north and south, people flying all across the State, all that will help, tourism is so natural to us, it’s not something we must work hard to achieve, it’s like a second nature”.
While concluding, the former governor described Adsuit hotel as “The best kept secret in Calabar, until I turned into the street I didn’t appreciated it, the extent of work here.”
On his part, the Managing Director of Adsuit Investment Limited, Ntufam Edet Asuquo Umo said: “Adsuit hotel is an outfit of Adsuit Investment limited. We started as Adsuit Enterprise in year 2000, we started in trading, specifically in cement and building materials as an enterprise and later we moved on to investment limited where we expanded and moved on to construction and along the line we thought of not just contracts, we thought of a product that can sustain our teaming workforce, and that’s how we came up with Adsuit hotel limited, I think about six years we started the other Adsuit hotel and just as we were going on there was lots of challenge and we discovered we needed to come out boldly in other to be able to occupy the market”.
“We started with about 22 rooms and now we have 42 rooms, it’s not all about the rooms but other services because we are not just looking at sleeping and waking up and that informed us to come up with Adsuit digital where we have to go into printing and branding.” he concluded.