By Jonathan Ugbal
The Speaker of the Cross River State House of Assembly, Honorable John Lebo has said that those criticizing past and present Governors of the state over the alleged failure of the Tinapa premier business and pleasure resort do not appreciate the issues that have bedeviled the USD470 million dollar facility.
Mr. Lebo took to Facebook to express his dissatisfaction over the perceptions of people on the failing of Tinapa which critics now term a white elephant project.
He wrote that: “The analysis is so simple that it suffocated most of the real challenges.
“Tinapa by concept and vision is a project that only the federal government can fund not the other way round. We must applaud Donald Duke for the deep vision. Once the state government took over the funding, the debt recovery space was too short, so successive government battle to repay the debt used to fund the vision.
“When Yar’adua became president, the federal government was more in pulling out the sovereign guarantee given to the state Government, which was done immediately and we started paying back from our lean federation allocation first to the federal government.
“The federal government past and present never believed in the Tinapa concept, the activities of Customs, Immigrations, FIRS, Export promotion council clearly knocked out (the) Tinapa concept.
“Tinapa was a long term investment funded through short term loans and future federation allocation.
“No federal government may ever support the Tinapa idea. Tinapa was a massive ideological threat and cannot be achieved without restructuring,” he wrote.
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