22 April 2018
When a king is out of touch with his kingdom, the people are often treated to sumptuous promises of an El Dorado solely build on quicksand. This aptly and undeservedly typifies the prevailing scenario playing out in Cross River State at this time. The ensuing twisted epithets of bogus castles being built in the air since 29th May, 2015 got elevated to an Olympian height when on 30th November, 2017 Governor Benedict Ayade stood at the hollowed precincts of the State House of Assembly and presented a mindboggling budget of N1.3Trillion for the 2018 fiscal year tagged “Budget of Kinetic Crystallization”. As expected, the John Gaul led State House of Assembly which has clearly acquitted itself as an appendage of the Governor’s Office or a mere extension of the Peregrino House quickly did the “needful” by passing the budget estimates with all the impracticable line items into law wholesale.
Blighted by sustained, unrestrained and egregious excess budgetary estimates, Senator Benedict Ayade has demonstrated an inordinate affection for expansive figures just for the fun of it. The man has not hidden his uncanny desire to inflate numbers and he is a genius in showcasing unimplementable budgets. You would recall that Ayade’s first full blown budget was for the 2016 fiscal year with an estimated N950 billion; he backtracked a bit to N305Billion in the subsequent fiscal year of 2017. Unfortunately, the governor has never presented a scorecard of the percentage implementation of his previous budgets and the attendant sectoral impact on the local economy to the people. In the same vein, the State House Assembly that has the statutory obligation to oversight the executive with respect to budgetary performance, evaluation and appraisal has since lulled itself to slumber.
There is no question in any discerning mind that the governor and the members of the state parliament are in a league of lagardly pace socioeconomic development agenda for the state. Otherwise, why is there such consistency by the governor in presenting appropriation estimates that are completely out of sync with the absorptive capacity of the state at this time, yet the members of parliament would pass these proposed estimates into law without raising an eyebrow and due recourse to the dire financial strait of the state?
In presenting his scandalous 2018 budget in late November, 2017, Governor Ben Ayade took an exultant pleasure in revealing to his audience made up of a combination of members of the State House of Assembly and a pathetic coterie of his appointees that he needed the expansive budget to enable the state warehouse investors’ funds for his “Signature Projects”. Really! Since when did a state budget become a gauge or repository for investors’ funds? This is a measure of the depth of crass naivety or unbridled deception in the process of public sector budgeting that has greeted the state under the watch of Senator Benedict Ayade. It is a strange and outrageous invention unknown to economics, public finance and accounting. The sad narrative is that Senator Benedict Ayade has etched himself in history as the governor who subjected Cross River State to a fulsome contempt against global best practices in budgeting, standard procedure in public financial management and known theoretical underpinnings.
The state does not exist in isolation; therefore the strenuous attempt by the governor to reinvent the wheel by setting up a budget template that is not only ridiculous but also unknown anywhere in the world is akin to making Cross River State a laughing stock in the comity of states in Nigeria. The state is fast achieving the notoriety of putting up overbloated annual budgetary figures with no meaningful impact on the local economy. A state budget is the most potent short term economic planning document that sets the tone for a robust long term progress. A well articulated and faithfully implemented budget is the necessary corollary to building a viable economy. Serious leaders know that the starting point for actualizing their economic blueprint is the budget. Apparently, in the last three years, Senator Ayade has shown that he is either unwilling to learn the ropes or he is unconscionably incorrigible and allergic to sound reasoning on the economic front.
It was quite amusing to watch the governor reel out his achievements after three years on the occasion of the signing of the 2018 budget into law. Senator Ayade’s speech was laced with half-truths and some very spurious claims. Among the achievements was the fact that he got his EIA approved by the Federal Ministry of Environment for the construction of his much touted Super Highway. But the governor did not tell his audience that the provisional approval he got for the EIA was predicated on 23 stringent conditions with timelines attached to some of them. Besides paucity of funds to embark on this project, the governor is aware of his inability to fulfill most of the conditions in the EIA. So the Super Highway is as good as a moribund project.
The governor hinted on his purported dual carriage road project in the Northern Senatorial District of the state. He embarked on this voyage of vain glorification about two years ago ostensibly convinced of his administration’s lack of capacity to undertake and deliver on the project in record time. Governor Benedict Ayade had performed a groundbreaking ceremony for the Mfom-Okpoma-Imaje-Abuochichie-Obudu-Obudu Ranch Road with pomp and pageantry in 2016. The road was estimated to gulp a whooping N33Billion but it was summarily abandoned after earth work was carried out which further degraded and worsen its usage for almost two years now. Regrettably, the road is now a menacing nightmare and death trap to motorist on that axis of the state. There is no doubt that the abandoned and forgotten dual carriage road has taken a cue from the long list of the governor’s failed and unreliable promises.
In his speech at the said occasion, Governor Ayade described his supposed feat in the Deep Seaport project in superlative terms. The galling question is: What has the governor really achieved by securing the approval of EIA, mappings and surveys of a project whose main precursor (i.e the Super Highway) for success is already tittering on the brink of imminent failure? The idea from inception was that the Super Highway would serve as the forerunner and evacuating route for goods from the Deep Seaport to Nigeria’s northern corridor. With a Super Highway that is existing only in paper and gigantic billboard in Abuja, Governor Benedict Ayade may have strung up another high profile dream whose reality will remain elusive to Cross Riverians. It will be too uncharitable for the people to wake up to the sad reality that they entrusted their sacred mandate to a man who only exhibited a considerable facility for unrealized dreams in four years.
Again the governor alluded to the garment factory as another great stride of his administration within the past three years. The ownership of that big tailoring shop (that is exactly what it is at the moment) is still shrouded under complexity, contention and secrecy. Who owns the big tailoring shop? This is a question only Governor Benedict Ayade can answer. A whooping N2.7Billion was said to have been invested in the project without due appropriation by the State House of Assembly, yet there is a hazy cloud over the stakes of the state in the company. Judging from the performance indices of his government which is quite obvious, it may not be out of place to assert that Governor Benedict Ayade’s best efforts in the last three years have only translated to paper achievements and media hype.
One might as well state it as clearly and pointedly as possible that the occasion that took place on Thursday 10th April, 2018 in Calabar where the N1.3Trillion 2018 “Budget of Kinetic Crystallization” was signed into law was a fake fiesta of fun and delusion. As the governor made spirited attempt to salve the wounds of deceit inflicted on Cross Riverians from his three years annual budgets by asking his audience to “commit the 2018 budget to God” his conscience came alive. He confirmed that the weightiest burden on a human mind is a condemned conscience. Senator Benedict Ayade’s conscience was sorely at war with him and he broke into tears and wept profusely in the public glare. He had asked for an open cheque to spend as much as he wanted and the State House of Assembly handed it to him on a platter, the natural inclination would have been to engage in a giddy celebration but the man rather found himself at sea.
That Senator Benedict Ayade won’t have the financial nerves to implement a meager 7% of the 2018 budget is unarguable. What Cross Riverians have had under Governor Ayade is nothing more than concocted imaginary budgets and woeful hallucinations have taken the place of visionary leadership. The people are yearning for real and implementable budgets and the day Benedict Ayade presents one, they will know; and the self-inflicted burden will be lifted and the fountain of tears in his eyes will dry up.
Missang Oyama is an Economist, Social Commentator and a Deeply Concerned Cross Riverian. Oyama writes from Lagos, Nigeria. Email: missangoyama@gmail.com, Twitter: @MissangOyama5.
