While swearing in his huge crowd of 28 commissioners last year, Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State charged them thus: “Apply extra prudence, reduce economic miasma and focus on setting targets that you will accomplish. I charge you to recognise the fact you come from Cross River, a state that is known for class and elegance.”
Today, it seems Ayade himself never applied himself to that learning point.
This past week, Cross River State was in the news and for all the wrong reasons again and became the butt of jokes. What brought the opprobrium on the state was, sadly, the actions of the governor who goes by the title of Professor and equally has another professor and former university head as deputy.
With a stroke of the pen, Ayade approved the appointment of more than 1,106 persons into various positions such as senior special advisers, special advisers, personal assistants, chairpersons and members of boards of agencies known, unknown, fake and illegal, all in the name of the state. I make bold to describe as fake, many of those agencies whose board the governor made appointments to. This is because they do not exist in the eyes of the law as the agencies were never established by any known law. They remain bogus or in fact “ghost agencies”.
These latest appointments come after the governor had over the last one year and five months appointed an estimated 500 persons into other similar ranks and positions. He started his appointment spree by creating new ministries and ended up with 28 ministries and commissioners, setting a record of having more cabinet members than there are members of the state House of Assembly, which number is 25!
Ayade’s attempt at justifying the expansion of the cabinet falls flat on the scale of sound reasoning. Hear him: “When government finds it difficult to survive, individuals find it more difficult to survive.
It is the time you need to expand government to accommodate all through the challenging times.” The only meaning of the above is that the enlarged cabinet is meant to serve the personal economic needs of the appointees. Could that be part of what politicians dubiously call “empowerment” or worse still, “rehabilitation” for politicians whose grip and plug in to the waste conduit of government had dwindled?
The portfolios and designations of the commissioners are simply obfuscating. There are separate ministries for Works; Water Resources; Transport; Social Housing; New City Development; Lands Development and also a Ministry of Infrastructure. How different is the mandate of the Ministry of Climate Change from that of Environment? Then, you have three separate ministries for Power, for Petroleum Resources and for Gas! One ministry goes by the name “Ministry of Rural Transformation, Establishment & Training’, just as there is a ministry for International Donor Cooperation.
When those appointments were made, many of us raised concerns against what was clearly a lack of clear focus by the governor. My worry for our state, for Ayade and his governance style began from reading his inaugural speech. It dripped of highfalutin expressions, reminiscent of speeches by students’ union leaders often meant to wow the audience and say little. He talked about two major projects he referred to as his “signature” projects: a “super highway” and a new, state-owned seaport. I daresay that many people from the state were wowed and excited at these, but not some of us.
I questioned the necessity of building an alternate highway from Calabar to Obudu when there is already a federal highway along that route but which road had gone terribly bad and required an urgent attention. As I pointed out recently, this so-called super highway which proposes to cut across the state, bringing down the ecosystem in its path and ending in Benue State, is simply a highway to nowhere! I also saw through the weaknesses in the framing of the dream for a superhighway and the seaport. At the announcement of the project, Ayade claimed that the sites and designs for both projects were ready and all he needed was a date from President Muhammadu Buhari to visit the state to kick-start construction.
I questioned whether there was already an Environmental Impact Assessment, if the local communities in the project sites had been mobilised and where the funding would come from since the 2015 budget of the state had been passed prior to Ayade’s emergence. That budget therefore did not envisage or provide for those projects. In fact, at the time Ayade was talking about this, the state House of Assembly had not been inaugurated and so I wondered how the approval and appropriation were going to be handled. But Ayade claimed the funding was sourced outside the state’s coffers, from some “investors”. I am not sure he ever explained to the people what the terms of those funding agreements were and what the state was giving, whether now or in the future. So, the state’s future may have been signed off without the present generation knowing.
Months down the line, the state has gone ahead with the construction of the white elephant called the superhighway, even without an approved EIA while communities have been sacked, individual and family property, including economic trees destroyed without assessment and compensation. What is worse, the forest is being depleted and no account rendered of the logged woods. Could this whole scheme have been a smart way of selling off the highly-priced wood from the forest?
This last week’s action of Ayade in appointing more than 1000 persons surely takes the cake in jejune governance. Curiously, as noted earlier, some of the agencies, by their names, have conflicting areas of work. The governor needs to let us know how some of the agencies whose boards he constituted are different. Examples are the Cross River State Portside Authority; the Cross River State Seaport Authority and Cross River State Port Authority. There is also the Health Insurance Agency and the Health Insurance Board under the latest bazaar of appointments.
As it happened with the creation of ministries, the boards and agencies “created” or for which the governor has shared positions are as laughable as they come. For example, there is a Private Hospital Regulatory Board and a Private School Regulatory Board. Shouldn’t appropriate units within the health and education ministries have been saddled with those duties? And we need a whole agency to handle the onerous task of Tinapa Resort reactivation; the same thing with the protection of the rights of street hawkers that the governor has come up with an agency for.
There are more other “strange” agencies like the Passenger Protection Agency; the Stamps Duty Board (something the tax authorities are fully competent to manage) and the Diaspora Trust Fund Board. Happily, chairman nominee of that “board”, Attah Ochinke, has demonstrated courage of conviction by turning down the appointment. What is more, even the list shows an infantile approach to governance with some names listed with aliases in bracket. It surely looks like some joke or lackadaisical behaviour taken too far.
One question people keep asking is, “How did we get here?” The answers are varied. One is that, we, the people of Cross River State have, for too long have been laid back about governance. We have imbibed the culture of ceding more power to our leaders than they actually need. For too long, the refrain has been “carry go” and “it is their time, wait for yours”, whenever there is a whiff of opposition or attempt to question those in authority. So, when Ayade started manifesting tendencies of poor governance, few saw it or accepted when some of us pointed out.
Today, many have come to the realisation. And I equally ask what the opposition political parties in the state are doing to challenge Ayade’s style. It seems the members of the All Progressives Congress in the state have not done enough as a major opposition party there but are more interested in what they can get from the federal level, where their party is in control.
To those ones and the rest of the state, we need to brace ourselves and challenge the shenanigans of Ayade’s government or risk him pushing the state from the famed “People’s Paradise” to a possible “Lost Paradise”
Follow me on Twitter: @obobef
Punch
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