Bassey Otu: Something Positive Happening in Nigeria’s Economy
Cross River State Governor, Bassey Otu,talks about the efforts of his government to grow the Calabar Carnival to international standards, promise to build an economy that thrives on digital economy, among others. Charles Ajunwa brings excerpts:
We want you to give an assessment of the 2024 Calabar Carnival and what informed the theme?
This year’s carnival started from the day the theme was announced to be ‘shared prosperity,’ and you could see that almost all the bands struggled and came up with a picture that depicts shared prosperity. My idea of shared prosperity as far as that theme was concerned became very clear, that unless there’s some equality of purpose in every society, there will be no peace. For us to attain some level of progress because here in Cross River State, we need that progress in continuity. We need peace. It became clear that the world over, there will be no peace and progress if prosperity is not shared. The imbalance, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening every day. In fact, the middle class is almost blacked out. For the carnival, since we have a global audience, we wanted to let them know that the only way to take some heat out of our system, in terms of disenchantment, in terms of despondency, is to allow some kind of welfarist democracy where the weak ones in the society can be taken care of and the only way this can be done is to share prosperity. In Nigeria, things are quite tough now. Not just in Nigeria, but Nigeria is addressing its own macroeconomic issues and times are quite difficult. It became clear that we also let Nigerians know that even with the transformation and reforms that are ongoing now, there’s a need for us to share a little prosperity that’s accruing from the gains of what the regulations are putting on the table.
For Cross River State, it’s the people’s first government. We’re trying to tell the people that it will always be people’s first. It doesn’t matter the level of prosperity you attain, whether you’re small, whether you’re big, you are always rich. That’s why what we have is actually a season of sweetness and if you’re there, you’ll see that everybody is very happy. The state is agog and still agog. A lot of people have not been able to wake up yet. But we believe that next year (2025) is even going to be a bigger picture.
Talking about people’s first government, what plans do have to make Cross River a tourism destination?
Well, Cross River State remains a tourism destination as far as we are concerned. We have looked at all our tourism potentials, and we’re working almost in all of them. We’re training personnel, some at home, some in the country, and some outside the country. We’re trying to work on our tourism sites and locations to upgrade them. We’re partnering with investors to make sure that we bring some of them to 21st-century standards. We believe that by the time we get this because we are getting our act together, definitely, that particular thematic area is going to change. For now, we know that in three months or four months, all the hotels were already be taken off the market. So it’s an area that we have to do something very, very urgently, that we are also trying to do. Not just making sure that we have hotels, but upscaling them to world standards to meet up with what some of the guests are actually looking for. We’re trying to make sure in terms of infrastructure that our roads are well taken care of. We’re not waiting for federal government to give us so many roads, because it’s become clear that their priorities are just too many. So we have to help ourselves. We’re trying to do that so that people can easily access these tourism sites with very little difficulty. And we’re looking to make sure also that we stabilise what I would say our product prices by making sure that transportation is improved. But what we need is mass transportation. We’re going to look at the gas very seriously, even though we need the energy in the future. But it still looks to us like here, because of the size of the state. Because from Bakassi to Obandiku, it will take you about six to seven hours. Sometimes eight. It’s quite a huge expanse of land.
So we’re trying to see if we can get some mass transit programmes put in place that will be able to move people easily. The moment we are able to succeed with that, I think prices of food, commodities, and everything will be stable and people will be able to make savings to participate in more tourism activities.
International carnival, a segment of the Calabar Carnival did not hold in 2023 and 2024, has it been scrapped?
No. It has not been scrapped. Actually, we are looking at the prospects of a diaspora band. You know, we have done some researches. This time we are going to have a post-carnival review and that is part of one of the items that we are going to bring on board very soon. We want to make sure that the moment we get that straight, we will be able to find international bands coming in to actually play some roles. We know very well that some of the small rules we put in place for some activities like dressing codes and things like that are not being adhered to. So these are all things that we are going to take in the post-review to see how we put it straight. So the moment we get all these things right, then we will open it up and we will see many countries coming in. That I can assure you.
At times like this, when there is hunger in the land, how are you tackling hunger in the state?
Well, food security happens to be one of the most serious points on our agenda. It’s one of the thematic areas that we trying to make sure that we bring it on board. For any sub-national, in fact any country at all, to be independent, you must be able to feed our people. If you look at the tempo, or the momentum of our agriculture, it was going very well until the invention of this oil, what I call the petroleum sector. After that, it went down. When I assumed office and checked some of the major things that were done, were done by Micheal Okpara, and Okpara ruled so many years ago, which means we really are not taking care to look at what is needed and it’s about our strongest area. When we looked at the percentage of the number of people who are engaged in agriculture, we decided to give it serious attention. Today, we are beginning to reap the fruits of our labour, because we started the proper soil investigation, to know what the soil chemistry is all about and everything. We came up with a proper digital mapping, which you can sit here and know exactly where we’re sitting, what can grow here, and what can happen. Then we immediately moved to our landmarks and looked at what we have and what is available because we know that even in the special agro-industrial programmes that we are doing in Cross River State, it’s being looked at to make sure we do well in cassava, in cocoa, in maize and then oil palm. So, we immediately set up pilot schemes to look at this immediately. For cassava, we do have a 5,000 hectare cassava farm, which for now is a pilot scheme that will provide the seeds and stems, which we’re going to use. The next one that we’re moving to, we’re looking at about 50,000 hectares of land and on the oil palm, we had to immediately go to NIFOR (National Institute for Oil Palm Research) and we got about 3.5 million oil palm seeds. We collaborated with the oil palm growers here, which are in numbers, and immediately came together to set up nurseries and pilots. In fact, we’ve considered even in terms of hydration and other things, we’ve set up proper irrigation structures to oil, to make sure that all those plantations are watered. And in cocoa, we’re trying to revamp, we’ve gone into a public-private partnership to revamp all our cocoa farms which I believe we have some big cocoa-based things right here. I believe that Cross River State in Nigeria today, we have the biggest cocoa farmers and they are taking from here to go and stamp elsewhere, which, of course, is going to change very soon. In terms of our small farmers’ holdings, we have tried to create a grower scheme in which we use the catchment areas and the people from those particular lands and areas to grow whatever we grow and during the period of gestation, we pay them. Then, on cropping and selling them, we make sure that almost all the things we’re doing we have offtakers as well. We will come out and ready to put money in there even though we don’t collect most of the time, because that was our first outing. We don’t know how it will be, and we don’t want to owe people or build up any bad reputation. So we try to make available some facilities to the small growers. We are revamping our micro credit bank, and we’re going to make sure that all the swamps are kind of grown. We’ve done proper registration of all our small farmers, because we discovered that people come from somewhere to give them money to farm, or when they come, they drag people.
You promised to build a Cross River State that thrives on a digital economy, where are you on this?
We discovered that for you to have what I will call sustainable productivity, we need to populate the areas with almost everybody. You know, the agric sector was kind of suffering, because people are looking down on farmers. And in other countries like in Europe and others, when they say this man is a farmer, it’s like owning an oil well. So, I discovered that, yes, a lot of young men are very interested in these digital information systems, but we also need some of them in the agric sector to balance, because if you leave it like that, everybody will want to leave. And we are doing our best, both in terms of training. We are getting set strategically. We are making sure that we have incubation centres and we are struggling seriously against cybercrimes, because we discovered that some elements would come and park them into some big buildings but all they are being taught there is how to cause mayhem. So somehow, we have to achieve that ethical balance in terms of making sure that people that are coming up with this knowledge of big data analytics, and so on and so forth, have some sense of responsibility and we know that we have to watch our backs, and we have to be our brother’s keeper. So we are moving at our own pace, but we do have a template that actually will deliver properly on where we want people to be.
As senator, you were the Chairman on Finance and Banking and other Financial Matters Committee. One issue that the country has continued to face since the coming on board of this present administration in the national level is the floating of the Naira, which has caused a lot of mayhem giving hyperinflation. Given your experience and your background on financial and banking sector, are we on the right trajectory, or could things have been done better?
There’s nothing that we see now, which we’ve not passed through already. Where we are now, we are turning the corner. Most nations you see enjoying today; they’ve passed through the same situation that we’re passing through today. But we believe that the darkest end of the tunnel is also coming to an end. What we are beginning to see is, even though the inflation is resisting, it doesn’t want to come down, but all the other indices are showing that something positive is happening in the Nigerian economy. Our productive level is going up; a lot of creativity is coming; people are beginning to work, to enjoy their money, even though the inflation is biting but at some point, it will turn to gain. So, the pain we suffer is just to see if we can carry all our people along. There must be that sacrifice. If not, we cannot make progress. But it’s left for the managers of the government and so on to be serious about it, and then let everybody know that all of us are passing through this thing together. Then the moment that’s given, and people have that confidence, I believe we will cross the river.
What is the state of facilities at Obudu Ranch?
The ranch went through a period that other events or other facilities also went through. But we are working on the ranch and we are trying to get it strengthened out and we have Marriott and others who are coming to the ranch not too long from now. That’s why we are trying to get the airport ready as soon as possible so that we will be able to connect a full circuit so that somebody can either fly to the carnival or he can fly straight to Obudu.
