RE: C’RIVER, OTU AND THE CRISIS OF GOVERNANCE

 LINUS OBOGO argues that Paul Obi’s piece is unfortunate

I read with consternation Paul Obi’s phantom in THISDAY, which he entitled: “C’River, Otu and the Crisis of Governance”. In it, he attempted labouriously, a scrutiny of governance in Cross River State. And after reading his interrogation, I couldn’t possibly agree more that there is, in the craft of public commentary, a delicate line between scrutiny and distortion, between the noble duty to interrogate power and the subtle indulgence in intellectual mischief. 

In the piece, Paul Obi cloaked conjecture in the garb of critique, weaving a tapestry of alarm that unravels upon closer inspection. What he presented as a “crisis of governance” in Cross River State is, at best, a fragile construct, an edifice of assumptions erected without the scaffolding of balance, proportion, or even internal coherence.

Obi’s argument falters not because criticism is unwelcome, but because it is unmoored. He gestures vaguely at “surplus allocations” without the intellectual courtesy of furnishing figures, ignoring the complex arithmetic of governance, the bloated wage bills, inherited liabilities, and the stubborn costs of rebuilding a state long steeped in administrative inertia, literally reduced to a wasteland. Indeed, it is a curious omission for a scholar who ought to understand that governance is not an abstract ideal but a negotiation with realities, often harsh and unyielding.

No doubt, I emerged from Obi’s essay not enlightened, but perplexed. Is his grievance that the governor is doing too little, or that he is doing too much in the “wrong” places? The ambiguity is telling. It betrays not depth, but indecision, a critic unsure of his own thesis, oscillating between accusations without the discipline to anchor them. Such writing may be elegant in tone, but it is ultimately hollow and vapid in substance.

What Obi dismisses as underperformance, others, less eager to indict and more inclined to observe, recognize as measured progress in the face of daunting odds. He conveniently glossed over the institutional atrophy that preceded the current administration: decades of employment stagnation that condemned generations of young people to despair. In less than three years, about 5,000 of these youths have found a foothold in public service, a quiet revolution against hopelessness that Obi’s narrative chose to ignore.

And what of the pensioners, those silent casualties of bureaucratic neglect? The disbursement of ₦10 billion in gratuities to retirees spanning six years is not merely an administrative act; it is a moral restoration, a reclaiming of dignity for citizens long abandoned by the state. This is not the language of crisis, it is the cadence of responsibility, the steady rhythm of a government attempting, however imperfectly, to right inherited wrongs.

Even Obi’s reluctant acknowledgment of the governor’s efforts to reclaim the state’s littoral status betrays the weakness of his thesis. For in that singular struggle lies a vision far more profound than the ephemeral metrics of road counts and ribbon-cuttings. It is a battle for economic sovereignty, for the restoration of revenues unjustly denied, a strategic recalibration that speaks to foresight, not failure. To dismiss this as incidental is to misunderstand the very architecture of development.

On infrastructure, Obi’s lamentations dissolve under the weight of context. Many of the roads he cited as evidence of neglect are federal arteries, trapped in the labyrinth of national budgetary dysfunction. Yet, even within these constraints, the state government has pressed forward, knitting together communities in the North, revitalizing urban centers like Ogoja, Ukelle, Yala and extending the sinews of connectivity across Boki and Ikom. Development, it must be said, is not always a spectacle; often, it is a quiet, incremental stitching of progress into the fabric of everyday life.

There is also, in Obi’s prose, a faint but unmistakable undertone of impatience, a demand for immediacy in a process that is, by its very nature, gradual. Governance is not alchemy; it does not transmute neglect into prosperity overnight. To judge an administration barely three years into its tenure against the accumulated failures of decades is not merely unfair, it is intellectually disingenuous.

Ultimately, what Obi offers is not a diagnosis, but a dramatization, a phantom crisis conjured to provoke rather than to illuminate. It is criticism untethered from fairness, analysis stripped of empathy. And while such writing may momentarily stir the waters, it does little to advance the serious business of holding power accountable with integrity.

Cross River State, it must be re-emphasised, is not in the throes of a governance crisis; is in the painstaking process of recovery and recalibration. The journey is imperfect, as all such journeys are, but it is neither stagnant nor directionless. Perhaps what is needed is not less criticism, but better criticism, one that tempers passion with precision, and replaces the poetry of distortion with the discipline of truth.

Obogo is Chief Press Secretary and Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to Governor Bassey Otu