I have consistently argued that Nigeria’s stunted development is not entirely the fault of criminal politicians. The electorates have been their major accomplices: they condone and reinforce the spectacular failures of these men and women, and even idolize them in the face of their misrule and misappropriation of public funds. This leaves us in a horrendous situation where criminal politicians, knowing that there exist no consequences of any kind for their failure, not only ransack the public treasury but deliberately create a hostile environment for their electorates.
Cross River State is presently experiencing a similar situation where Cross Riverians have fully realized that they made a terrible mistake in electing Mr. Ben Ayade as governor of their state. The main tragedy here is that this realization comes after eight ruinous years from which the state may never recover. And to think that this failed governor was rewarded with a second term after his first catastrophic reign between 2015 and 2018, makes the people themselves wonder what exactly occupied their thoughts when they thronged to the polls to re-elect him despite his first chaotic reign which showed no sign of promise.
Eight horrendous years of Ben Ayade’s misrule have driven Cross River into oldness and the state has retrogressed considerably from being one of the best states in Nigeria to becoming the dirtiest and one of the most vulnerable. It is heart-rending that a state known throughout the world for its tourism and cleanliness fell into the terrible hands of an opportunist who decimated it in every economic sense, piled up heaps of rubbish on its streets, and is on the verge of leaving it gasping for life.
During his two calamitous tenures, Governor Ayade failed woefully and spectacularly to raise the internally generated revenue of the state, yet his budgets, which came with embarrassing titles, were in trillions of Naira even when these outrageous sums were totally at variance with the state’s internally generated revenues. More embarrassing is how this situation turned Government House in Cross River into a theater of court jesters so that most Nigerians now looked to Cross River for the comic relief!
Below are Ayade’s budgets and their titles during his eight destructive years as governor:
2016: N350 billion = Budget of Deep Vision
2017: N707 billion = Budget of Infinite Transposition
2018: N1.3 trillion = Budget of Kinetic Crystallisation
2019: N1.043 trillion = Budget of Qabalistic Densification
2020: N1.1 trillion = Budget of Olimpotic Meristemasis
2021: N277.7 billion = Budget of Blush and Bliss
2022: N276 billion = Budget of Conjugated Agglutination
2023: N330 billion = Budget of Quantum Infinitum.
A governor drafting a trillion Naira budget when his state struggles to generate N1 billion in revenue every month is synonymous with a gateman who earns N30,000 monthly but has “solid plans” to acquire a private jet and a super mansion in the most exclusive part of the city!
Ayade’s eight-year reign, besides its abysmal failure, consistently insulted the intelligence of Cross Riverians by announcing white elephant projects that even the governor himself knew were unrealistic; yet he thought it worthwhile to drown Cross Riverians in his pool of unremitting deceptions. One of such projects, which was absolutely unnecessary, was his proposal for a highly fraudulent superhighway, for which he claimed he needed an outrageous: N648, 870,730,739.23. For clarity, here is the amount in words: Six Hundred and Forty-eight Billion, Eight Hundred and Seventy Million, Seven Hundred and Thirty Thousand, Seven Hundred and Thirty-nine Naira, Twenty-three Kobo. An amount enough to construct all the roads in the entire South-South if the money is kept away from the claws of criminal politicians.
It must be recalled that Ayade had concluded plans to fund his so-called superhighway project through a loan for which our people were to pay back the sum of N300 million every month, that is N3,600,000,000 [Three Billion, Six Hundred Million Naira] annually for 180 years – approximately two centuries of slavery for several generations yet unborn – all for a superhighway for which the people had no need, especially at a time when roads within the state had turned into death traps under Ayade’s watch.
I am excited that we defeated him on that occasion and saved several generations from internal slavery!
Following the resilient opposition he faced over his unwanted superhighway, he later announced in his characteristic fashion another white elephant project: the construction of an international airport in Obudu. Shortly after that announcement, this failed governor chased Obudu indigenes out of their ancestral lands, illegally grabbed their lands, had their homes demolished, and left the people homeless! He also had their farms crushed without compunction – for an airport, he clearly had no capacity to construct.
Under Governor Ben Ayade, Cross River is now one of the most perilous places in Nigeria, with cult groups and killer herdsmen wreaking incalculable havoc and killing people on a daily basis despite the governor receiving N500,000,000 [Five hundred million] monthly for Security Votes – money he never accounts for!
No state on earth deserves the kind of economic ruin, incompetence, deceptions, destruction, infrastructural decay, hopelessness, and the utter mismanagement that Ayade brought upon the people of Cross River State. No people deserve that!
Despite being a first-class failure in office, Ayade is asking the people of Cross River North to elect him as their Senator! Not only is his senatorial ambition utterly disrespectful, it is equally insulting, to put it mildly. To have oppressed the people, ruined their state, mismanaged state resources, and destroyed people’s homes and their farmlands and still have the temerity to ask for their votes when you should be apologizing and preparing to face charges for crimes against humanity, is a testament that you have a low opinion of your victims.
There should be serious consequences for failure, especially for a political figure who has proven on countless occasions that he is unreliable, that his words have no weight of any kind, and one whose siblings are notoriously constituting a nuisance throughout the state because their brother is governor. The other day, I saw a video published by CrossRiverWatch in which the governor’s brother Frank Ayade was “generously” spraying bundles of money at a public event whilst dancing to Makossa music – something he had absolutely no capacity to do prior to his brother becoming governor. His siblings are also using officers of the Nigeria Police Force to harass innocent Cross Riverians for daring to express opinions that do not massage their overly bloated egos. The case of Comrade Agba Jalingo, who was recently picked up from Lagos to Abuja, on the orders of the same Frank Ayade, readily comes to mind.
What is more galling in his senatorial ambition is that Ayade absented himself from the primary election back home and was in Abuja vying to actualize his ill-fated, ill-conceived, unrealistic, hilarious ambition to be Nigeria’s President via his comical campaign slogan: “Afrotionism”. When that ambition crumbled flat on its stomach, as it was expected to, he ran back home and wrestled the senatorial ticket from Martin Orim, who had been legitimately elected winner of APC’s senatorial ticket for Cross River North. Martin Orim, who was his former Chief of Staff, cowardly surrendered the ticket to Ayade without the slightest resistance to defend his mandate! Preposterous!
As I write, Ayade has long abandoned state work. He is now entirely engrossed in his senatorial ambition and how to install Tinubu as president so that he could get an appointment in the event that he bites the dust in Saturday’s senatorial election. One thing is now clear, which is that Ayade can no longer stay without the free money that Nigerian politicians enjoy at the detriment of millions. It is, for this reason, he’s been trying desperately to grab any political straw, just so that he does not drown into permanent oblivion.
In December of 2022, Ayade was at the Chatham House in London trying to answer questions for his incompetent boss who says he wants to be Nigeria’s president even when he is clearly not qualified or fit to be one. Ayade was answering questions for another when he had vehemently refused to answer a deluge of questions from Cross Riverians genuinely asking why he failed to fulfill one out of his truckload of electoral promises after eight years in office.
For his unprecedented failure as Cross River’s governor, I call on the people of Cross River North to peacefully but firmly express their displeasure at the polls this Saturday by unanimously rejecting a flamboyant governor whose misrule not only heap hardship on them but left them homeless. Here is a governor who walked and defecated on the heads of the electorates who made him governor, then at the twilight of his atrocious regime, he comes back to the same people he oppressed and deliberately deprived of basic things of life for close to a decade, asking them to send him to the Senate in order to continue his misrepresentation.
With five days to the election, Ayade announced the appointments of 38 new officials on February 20, 2023, via a press statement signed by his spokesman Christian Ita. As Comrade Agba Jalingo later revealed, almost all the beneficiaries are from Cross River North, the Senatorial District where he’ll be seeking votes on Saturday! There is therefore no doubt that the so-called “appointments” were carried out with an eye for Saturday’s election. More desperate moves should be expected in the coming days as Ayade’s day of electoral doom approaches. But regardless of his shenanigans and clandestine schemes, the people must remain resolute in their permanent rejection of a governor who ruined their state and is asking to be compensated for it!
Elias Ozikpu, a playwright, polemicist, human rights activist, and citizen journalist, is a Cross Riverian and writes from Abuja.
NB: Opinions expressed in this article are strictly attributable to the author, Elias Ozikpu, and do not represent the opinion of CrossRiverWatch or any other organization the author works for/with.
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