Ben Ayade’s cross border politics By Adeola Akinremi

Honestly, the opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), is in meltdown. The party is in the middle of the most disastrous leadership crisis in living memory. Of course, we all know now that things are no longer the same between Clark, the father and Jonathan, the Son. It is the same for most members of the PDP. Let’s use the right phrase: the party is over.

I don’t want to do a cascade of PDP’s literature of everyday decline since the party was ousted from power by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). It may be that the party is wilted in political dynamism or was in power for too long a time that it doesn’t know how to take advantage of being the leading opposition party.

Still, the ray of sunshine for this political season is coming from a governor elected on the platform of the PDP.  Isn’t it a surprise that while most of the “change governors” have been busy watching the “body language” of President Muhammadu Buhari in aggregating their body of advisers and commissioners in their states, the real change has started in Cross River State.

And this, that the first official working visit of President Buhari happened in Cross River State, is a little strange.  For the politics side of it, you’ll have expected it to happen in Lagos, Kaduna or any of the APC states, but Buhari will not go with politics but progress.  That’s a thumbs up for Professor Ben Ayade, the Governor of Cross River State from no other person than the nation’s number one man.

 It is debatable, if any of the governors who assumed power on May 29th has made an impressive progress like Ayade in terms of tangible results.

Yes, we’ve heard about tour of some key areas in Lagos, visits by businessmen and several declarations by the state governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, they are simply intangibles by which the progress of the state in the last five months cannot be measured.

In the north, the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai has given clemency to prisoners on death row, visited flooded areas and promised government support, while given consideration to the blueprints of his new commissioners. These are intangibles. The tangibles in Kaduna, if it is deemed appropriate will be the controversial demolition of houses that the government termed recovery of lands owned by schools and hospital, acquired by people illegally.

Now, what is Ayade doing differently, the groundbreaking for the construction of the proposed 260-kilometre Calabar-Ikom-Katsina-Ala superhighway and a deep seaport in Cross River State is one of such examples. In June last year, I travelled through Calabar-Katsina-Ala Federal Highway in Cross River State and it felt like a road to hell.

I know we are a nation of no accurate statistics, but I can imagine how many people have lost their lives on that road. I can equally imagine the kind of stomach-turning trip that President Buhari made on that road on Tuesday when he went there to perform the groundbreaking—no thanks to the downpour that prevented his helicopter from airlifting him to the event venue.

Once in Cross River State, Buhari’s impression of Ayade was formed, though a few individuals with party blood in their veins had tried to prevent Buhari from going to Cross River.

He said: “That I am here in person underscores the importance that the Federal Government attaches to this. It is indeed a significant milestone in the economic policy of the governor. This is the first groundbreaking under my Presidency. I commend Ayade and his team for their foresight in conceptualising this project.

“I want to assure you of the commitment of the Federal Government to ensuring the completion of the project. I promise I will come back to commission it. I urge the governor to ensure that work is done on it quickly.”

For Ayade, that’s an unusual endorsement from Buhari and I hope the professor will continue to excite his kinsmen with works and not bore them with words. And in a classical first, Ayade brought his predecessors, former governors Donald Duke and Liyel Imoke together for the event, In spite of the difference between the duo.

Inventiveness has been at the heart of governance in Cross River State since the state lost its 76 oil wells in the aftermath of Bakassi brouhaha and that is a lesson for many states, especially those who recently got the bailout to pay salaries.

Ayade knows the economic importance of this road to the state and how the new seaport will bring changes to the lives of the natives, so he decided to set forth at dawn without the usual inscription of  “federal road, bear with us.”

The new road being funded with a 500 million Euros facility from a financial institution in Israel and support from Skye and Heritage banks in Nigeria under  public-private-partnership model will serve as an evacuation corridor for the new deep seaport. The seaport will have a draft of 14 metres and a key wall of 680 metres that will allow for all sizes of vessels to berth. In a rare first, the road will have broadband internet connectivity, speed cameras, ambulance services, and photo solar system. Welcome to a new Nigeria from the south.

In its five months in office, Ayade can boast of other good records, the construction of a garment factory that will provide jobs for young women and widows is a social policy that is important to growth and development of any state just like the road and seaport infrastructure being provided to prop up the economy of Cross River.

But how Ayade handled the initial sudden cancellation of Buhari’s trip to Cross River to perform groundbreaking for the proposed road on September 17, based on alleged lack of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and incursion of the Cross River National Park, is something every state governor should learn from in dealing with a president, especially when in opposition. Ayade didn’t go to town to shout APC, when Buhari turned down his offer to visit the state, he simply proved Buhari wrong by showing the evidence that the proposed road would not traverse the Cross River National Park, as the superhighway would be several kilometres away from the national park.

This last one: Buhari has equally shown that truly he belongs to nobody and that is good for our polity and Nigeria’s development. President Buhari’s action has erased the memory of Olusegun Obasanjo years, when Lagos paid the prize for being an opposition state.