Benedict Bengioushuye Ayade, the Cross River State governor, is again in the spotlight as he ended months of speculation of a move to dump the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) on May 13.
The move swelled the rank of governors elected on the platform of the APC and its other key stakeholders and further depleted the fortune of the main opposition party, the PDP.
The APC had earlier harvested big names such as former Speakers of the House of Representatives: Yakubu Dogara and Dimeji Bankole; former Governors Gbenga Daniel (Ogun) and Dave Umahi (Ebonyi) from the PDP in a move to feather its nest ahead of the 2023 general elections.
Ayade’s defection understandably irked PDP stakeholders and threatened the party’s emerging alliances targeting the South South/South East as a springboard to relaunch itself to reckoning. But since the incident a few days ago, questions have arose as to what the real worth of the Professor of Environmental Microbiology is for his defection to have elicited such measure of tantrums from his former party and wild celebration from APC.
While the benefiting party described the action as a “big win” and “morale booster” ahead of the next general elections, the PDP in Cross River State said it was “good riddance”, decrying what it described as “a 419 style of governance and autocratic management” of the party.
Observers are wont to argue that the PDP allegations are not in any way misplaced going by the governor’s penchant for embarking on “ambitious” projects which never see the light of day, in addition to other controversial policies. And such projects, laced and embellished with controversial tags, are many and diverse across the state. Key among them are the Bakassi Deep Sea Port and the 275-kilometre super highway designed to link the 16 local government areas of the state with the outside world.
Digital road for the 21st Century
On October 20, 2025, President Muhammadu Buhari performed the ground-breaking for the ambitious road project meant to connect Cross River with Nigeria’s North Central and the rest of the country. The superhighway which is one of the legacy projects of the Ayade administration is a Public Private Partnership (PPP) at the cost of $3.5bn. The highway is meant to serve as an evacuation corridor from the seaport.
During the ceremony, Gov Ayade said, “It will have a track of 14 metres and a key wall of 680 metres that will allow for vessels from outside and every other vessel to berth.
“It will, therefore, provide an evacuation corridor for vessels, materials and equipment lying in Calabar uniformly, effortlessly to Northern Nigeria. We envision that this road will be done in the next four to five years.”
The initiative generated public outcry with critics and even stakeholders questioning its scale and cost which they said was outrageously huge and crippling for a financially challenged state like Cross River. The state has been financially at a disadvantage since losing part of its territory to Cameroon following the 2002 judgment of the International Court of Justice which ceded the Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon; a situation compounded by the loss of its oil wells to the neighbouring Akwa Ibom State.
Beyond finance, the project pitched the state government against environmentalists, who reeled out statistics about impending the loss the consequent deforestation the project would throw up; the federal government and affected communities which slugged it out with Ayade over the homogenous land seizure and the violation of the National Highway Code. Amid the raging controversies, the project grounded to a halt.
Bakassi Deep Sea Port
The Bakassi Deep Sea Port is also stillborn after months of media hype. The state government said it was seeking clearance from the federal government to commence the project as part of a holistic development plan involving the superhighway.
The state got the official approval of the Outline Business Case (OBC) and arrived at a project cost of between $1.7bn and $2bn. Hope rose for the people of the state when a team of engineers from China Harbour Engineering Company arrived the state in October 2019.
The governor noted in 2019 that, “This project naturally means that the government and the people of Cross River State are taking their Atlantic Coast to Northern Nigeria. This is by taking the ocean 275 kilometres into the hinterland of Nigeria; bringing it to the very corridor of Nasarawa State.”
However, about two years later, in February, 2021, an Ottawa, Canada-based firm, CPC – a global management consulting company – placed an advertisement calling for infrastructure operators and investors to submit qualification documents for the seaport and superhighway projects; which industrialists said were a pipedream.
Controversial budgets
Beyond the mega projects, Ayade’s policies and actions are controversial and superfluous. Analysts have consistently questioned the state’s budgets which are mostly in trillions, describing them as unrealistic in view of the financial status of the state.
The budgets are presented without the usual breakdown or analysis by the Budget Office or Ministry of Finance. There are no records to show the performance of previous budgets, while the level of budget performance and delivery is shrouded in mystery; some even consider his budget presentations a hoax.
The budgets always come with ridiculous tags. The 2016’s was tagged Budget of Deep Vision; 2017 – Budget of Infinite Transposition; 2018 – Budget of Kinetic Crystallisation; 2019 – Budget of Qabalistic Densification; and 2020 – Budget of Olimpotic Meristemasis, while the 2021 budget was tagged Blush and Bliss.
The development earned him knocks across all strata. The APC in the state said the governor had reduced the state to a “laughing stock”, adding that all Ayade’s budgets were “severally defective with a semblance of hallucination which in our consideration are the effect of substance indulgence.”
The thousands aides
Like the budgets, Ayade’s appointment of thousands of aides amid constant protests by pensioners over backlog of arrears elicited severe criticism within and outside the state, and the governor always has ready reasons for his action.
He reacted at a public forum in Calabar that: “In politics, talk is cheap. I have history. I know clearly that poverty is extreme and I decided to bring 38,000 young people to the dining table to allow me the emotional and social temperature to take advantage of my business connection to bring value to Cross River State.”
A public affairs analyst, Edet Abang, said Cross River State had been at a standstill since Ayade held sway, noting that Cross Riverians could only reminisce about the state’s glorious past.
Abang said, “Those were the years of the Tinapa Free Zone and Resort, the cable cars and many more, but Ayade has so far been a liability rather than an asset.”
However, following the governor’s defection recently, the APC has a contrary opinion about the “erudite” professor.
Ayade on his own
Unlike past instances where governors defect with huge crowds with party structure and stakeholders, APC is yet to experience such momentum from Cross River following the defection of Ayade.
Although his deputy Ivara Esu has also joined his boss, federal lawmakers and stakeholders from the state said they are staying put in PDP.
“As far as I know, till date, the National Assembly caucus remains intact. I don’t see any of us leaving. We are legacy members of the party, who have been in this party for the past 15 to 20 years. So, we are not going anywhere,” Senator Geshon Bassey, who spoke on behalf of the lawmakers in the PDP stakeholders forum, noted.
Former governor of the state, Senator Liyel Imoke, who also spoke on behalf of the PDP stakeholders’ forum in Cross River, said Ayade is on his own.
Carpet off his feet
But Ayade seems to have been alone for a long while following his loss of party structure in the Supreme Court judgment, which gave the control of the party structure at the ward and state executive levels to the PDP National Assembly members and other stakeholders in the state.
The judgment gave them power and control of party structures from ward to state level, thereby keeping the governor in a tight corner.
His move to the APC has all to do with 2023 elections. Ayade came from senate to lead Cross River in 2015. Analysts are saying that unlike under the PDP, his move back to the senate in 2023 would be smoother under the APC- and so he moved.
