INOK SOLOMON
From Donald Duke to Liyel Imoke, Ben Ayade and the present administration: What happened to our economic investments?
Lack of an investment culture is becoming increasingly visible across almost every economic endeavour in Cross River State.
Looking back from 1999 to date, one can reasonably argue that despite our enormous economic potentials, particularly in tourism, agriculture and industrialisation, Cross River State has not recorded a considerable transformation driven by sustainable local investments.
Our problem has never been entirely the absence of ideas, natural resources or economic opportunities. Rather, it is the inability to develop an investment culture that converts these opportunities into sustainable economic institutions capable of generating revenue, creating employment and sustaining themselves beyond the lifespan of individual government.
1. Donald Duke: The Tourism and Agricultural Development Era
It is worth recalling that during the administration of Mr. Donald Duke, Cross River State pursued an ambitious tourism development agenda.
From the development of Obudu Mountain Resort, the Obudu Mountain Race, Calabar Carnival and TINAPA to the introduction of agricultural initiatives involving cocoa, cashew, Castro Oil and Pineapple farming, the state demonstrated a willingness to explore its comparative economic advantages.
Billions of naira were committed to these initiatives, while the State House of Assembly and the State Executive Council approved various investment proposals, loans and development agreements.
However, the critical question remains: Where were the long-term sustainability frameworks?
* Obudu Mountain Resort has struggled to establish a transparent and dependable revenue-generating model for the state.
* The Obudu Mountain Race became an internationally recognised event, but its long-term local economic linkages and sustainability became questionable.
* Calabar Carnival remains heavily dependent on government funding. Whenever government funding is withdrawn, the sustainability of the event becomes uncertain.
* TINAPA remains one of the most visible examples of the consequences of ambitious investments without a sufficiently sustainable operational and commercial framework.
The issue is not that these ideas were bad. Many were visionary. The problem was the failure to build sustainable economic institutions around them.
2. Liyel Imoke: Rural Development and Agricultural Transformation
Senator Liyel Imoke ushered in an administration that placed considerable emphasis on rural development and agriculture.
Rural access roads were constructed to connect communities to markets, rural electrification programmes were introduced, and agricultural development received attention through initiatives such as the Songhai Farm Centre.
The objective was commendable: improve agricultural productivity, connect rural producers to markets and build a stronger rural economy.
But eight years after that administration, Cross River State was struggling with salary obligations, while the state had yet to establish a sufficiently strong revenue-generating agricultural economy from those investments.
The Songhai initiative did not develop into the agricultural processing and commercial enterprise ecosystem many had anticipated.
Where are the graduates and agricultural entrepreneurs who should have emerged from that investment? Where are the processing industries, commercial farms and agricultural value chains that should have continued expanding?
Training people in agriculture without building a system that connects them to financing, production, processing, packaging, distribution and markets leaves a significant gap in economic development.
3. Ben Ayade: Industrialisation Without an Industrial Investment Culture
Then came the administration of Senator Ben Ayade, with perhaps the most ambitious industrialisation policy in the state’s recent political history.
The administration embarked on building factories across different sectors of the economy.
However, industrialisation requires much more than factory buildings, imported machinery and political announcements.
It requires an established culture of industrial investment, technical expertise, operational management, supply-chain development, market research and private-sector participation.
In a state where industrial processing had not become an established investment culture, the administration embarked on constructing factories without sufficiently developing the human capital and operational ecosystem required to sustain them became a nightmare.
The political distribution of factories across the three senatorial districts also appeared to receive considerable attention.
But economic development cannot be driven primarily by geographical or political balancing. It must be driven by economic viability.
Consider these questions:
Did Cross River State have the raw-material potential to support these factories? Yes.
Did we have sufficient operational, technical and managerial expertise to run them effectively? That capacity needed substantial development.
Did the administration establish a comprehensive training and capacity-building programme to equip Cross Riverians with the digital, technical, managerial and industrial skills required to operate these factories? This is one of the major questions surrounding the industrialisation programme.
Today, the operational status and commercial performance of these factory investments demand serious public scrutiny.
What has happened to the machinery? What is the current condition of the facilities? Which factories are producing commercially? How many jobs have been sustained? What revenue has accrued to the state?
These are the economic indicators by which industrialisation should be measured, not the number of factory structures commissioned.
4. The Central Problem: We Build Investments Without Building Investors
Across these successive administrations, one major problem appears to have remained unresolved:
Cross River State has invested more in attracting projects than in developing a sustainable local investment culture.
Our challenges include:
1\. Lack of local participation: Our people are rarely positioned as the principal investors, operators, managers and beneficiaries of the economic transformation programmes initiated by government.
2\. Absence of sustainability frameworks: We introduce projects without sufficiently strong structures to guarantee their survival beyond the administration that initiated them.
3\. Weak investment risk culture: Our political leadership has not sufficiently demonstrated the willingness to build and support long-term commercial ventures whose returns may not be immediate.
4\. Overdependence on external investors: We continue to look outside the state for investors, expertise and operational solutions without adequately developing our own people and local investment institutions.
5\. Disconnect between training and production: We train people without adequately connecting their skills to industries, financing, production opportunities and established markets.
6\. Weak economic accountability: We have not consistently subjected public investments to transparent performance assessments that establish their costs, returns, employment contributions and long-term economic value
5\. Conclusions: Cross River Must Move From Government Projects to a Local Investment Economy
Cross River State cannot continue this cycle of conceiving ambitious economic projects, committing public resources, commissioning infrastructure and eventually abandoning the investments to deteriorate.
We must begin to understand that economic development is not measured by the number of projects announced, factories constructed, loans approved or international events hosted.
It is measured by the capacity of those investments to generate sustainable economic activities.
A functional Obudu Mountain Resort should not depend entirely on government subventions. Calabar Carnival should develop a commercial structure capable of attracting private sponsorship and independent revenue. TINAPA should have a viable business and operational model. Agricultural investments should produce entrepreneurs, processing industries and marketable products. Our factories should become centres of production, employment and revenue generation.
Our people must not remain spectators in the economic development of their own state.
We cannot keep building factories for outsiders to manage, importing expertise for every economic initiative, and expecting our people to benefit merely by wearing the uniforms of government empowerment programmes.
Cross River State needs an economy in which Cross Riverians are not just consumers of government investments but owners, investors, producers, employers and managers of the economic opportunities around them.
We have spent decades attracting investments. It is time to invest in the capacity of our own people to attract, manage, sustain and expand investments.
The next phase of Cross River’s development must not be about who can build the biggest project. It must be about who can build an economic institution that will survive for the next 30 to 50 years without depending on government to keep it alive.
We must stop building projects that depend on government to survive. We must start building an economy that generates the resources to sustain government.
That is the difference between political development and sustainable economic transformation.