Scapegoats, Irrational Irritability: The Politics of Development in Cross River
Joseph Odok
Cross River State has entered another season of political argument in which disappointment is increasingly being converted into anger, and anger into the search for a convenient scapegoat. The latest victim is Governor Bassey Otu. Even the media seems to be working with external forces in Akwa Ibom and Rivers to shut all voices of his recovery and continuity just to build focus around his perceived failures. The complaints are familiar: abandoned or deteriorating infrastructure, insufficient new projects, poor development across local governments, inadequate rural transformation and the feeling that Cross River is no longer moving with the ambition associated with earlier administrations. These concerns should not be dismissed. They deserve evidence, scrutiny and political accountability.
But there is a danger when legitimate dissatisfaction becomes what may be called irrational political irritability: the tendency to attribute every accumulated failure of the state to the government presently in office, while forgetting the historical chain through which those failures were produced. René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire provides an unusual but useful lens. Desire, for Girard, is relational: we learn what to desire partly by observing what others desire. In politics, the same mimetic mechanism can operate negatively. Citizens observe political actors identifying an enemy, and the enemy becomes the object around which collective frustration is organised. The political scapegoat then becomes more important than the structural problem.
Cross River State must resist that temptation. The Liyel–Duke debate has already exposed so much that was lost for lack of continuity, and ambitious projects without economic dividends or impact on the people. The monumental disaster of Benedict Ayade also demonstrates why. At least there was governance in the days of Donald Duke and Liyel Imoke; there was budget performance and impact that was not the case in the utterly consumptive economy of Ayade, which built industry with no product, created food on the table with no hands on the plough.
Imoke’s administration placed considerable emphasis on rural development, roads, electricity, healthcare and infrastructure. Imoke himself has recently explained that, when faced with the burden of sustaining Tinapa and simultaneously meeting basic obligations to citizens, he prioritised rural development, healthcare, education and infrastructure. He has also defended continuity as a principle of governance. In his recent account of the Duke–Imoke Tinapa dispute, he argued that his administration continued projects inherited from Donald Duke and expanded programmes such as urban renewal, street lighting and environmental initiatives.
That record is not beyond criticism. Imoke’s administration cannot escape questions about the sustainability, financing and long-term economic impact of major inherited projects. His recent explanation that Tinapa suffered from unresolved infrastructure, regulatory and commercial problems reinforces the argument that ambitious projects without a sustainable ecosystem can become liabilities rather than engines of development.
Ayade represented a different developmental philosophy. His administration pursued industrialisation and large infrastructure projects, including the proposed Bakassi Deep Seaport and the much-discussed superhighway. Contemporary assessments recognised the ambition but also identified funding constraints and concerns about the limited development of some inherited tourism and rural-development programmes. More than any government, the Ayade administration places a greater burden on Governor Otu. The failed power-plant project created electricity problems after his irrational disconnection of most parts of CRS from the NEPA grid; his roads intervention became dilapidated days after construction, even while still in government; his industrialisation drive left CRS with unfinished structures and no product produced; his food-on-the-table vote-buying strategy left a youth population that lazed around social media in expectation of patronage for sycophancy. His high-sounding budgets with no performance left governance to mimicry and created irrational irritabilities that had no channel of expression other than being transferred to the current administrator.
This is precisely why political memory must be more sophisticated than partisan nostalgia. If Donald Duke supporters remember Tinapa, Obudu Cattle Ranch, Carnival, Marina Resort and Tourism; Imoke’s supporters remember rural development but forget the unresolved burdens of some major projects; while Ayade’s defenders remember industrialisation and food on the table but ignore unfinished or problematic ventures, then all camps are participating in selective memory. Otu inherited this accumulated history.
To say that he has initiated nothing, built nothing or touched no local government is simply not supported by the available record. His government says it has completed 127 kilometres of roads without fanfare, while The Guardian reported the administration’s claim of more than 426 kilometres of road projects across categories, including new construction and rehabilitation. The 2026 state budget also lists major projects across Boki, Ikom, Ogoja, Abi, Bekwarra, Yakurr and other areas.
The administration has also approved a second phase of road projects involving Abi, Bekwarra, Akpabuyo, Bakassi, Calabar Municipality and other locations. Yet these facts do not absolve Otu.
A government should not demand applause merely because projects exist on paper. Cross Riverians are entitled to ask where the roads are functioning, which communities have received them, what has been completed, what remains unfinished and what measurable economic or social benefit has resulted.
The same principle applies to dilapidated infrastructure. Rehabilitation may be necessary, but citizens can reasonably ask why public assets deteriorated in the first place, why maintenance was neglected and whether government is building a system that prevents today’s new infrastructure from becoming tomorrow’s abandoned project. This is where Otu’s burden is greater than his defenders sometimes admit.
His administration has adopted recovery and continuity as central themes. Former Governor Imoke himself recently praised Otu for completing projects inherited from previous administrations, including the Local Government Service Commission headquarters and work on the Calabar International Conference Centre. That endorsement is politically significant because it comes from an opposition ADC former governor whose own administration is accused of a lack of continuity as a central principle.
But continuity cannot become an excuse for the absence of new developmental imagination. Cross River needs both completion and creation. The state needs inherited projects completed where they remain economically and socially justified. It also needs new projects responding to contemporary realities: rural roads, electricity, healthcare, agriculture, education, markets, digital infrastructure, tourism, employment and local economic production. This is where the people should challenge Otu hardest; not through propaganda, but through measurable demands.
The opposition also has responsibilities. It is not enough to photograph a collapsed road and declare the government a failure when that road may have deteriorated under several administrations. Nor is it intellectually honest to discover every neglected facility only when preparing for an election.
The same standard must apply to government and opposition. A government must publish what it inherited, what it has completed, what it abandoned, what it redesigned, what it is currently funding and what outcomes citizens should expect. Opposition parties should interrogate those facts rather than manufacture outrage from every visible defect. Cross River cannot continue to govern itself through alternating cycles of hero worship and scapegoating.
The Duke–Imoke–Ayade experience teaches one lesson; the Otu administration must learn another. Development cannot depend upon whether a project belongs to Duke, Imoke, Ayade or Otu. Once public money has been invested, the project belongs to Cross River. That should be the new political ethic. If Tinapa is useful, make it work. If a road is necessary, complete it. If a hospital is deteriorating, rehabilitate it. If an inherited project is economically irrational, explain why it should be redesigned or abandoned. If a new project is justified, disclose its cost, timeline and expected public benefit. The citizen should be the constant; governments are temporary. This is why Cross River needs neither government propaganda nor opposition opportunism. It needs a politics capable of distinguishing genuine failure from inherited failure, genuine achievement from political advertising, and legitimate criticism from mimetic anger.
The greatest danger is not criticism of Governor Otu. Criticism is indispensable to democracy. The danger is when criticism ceases to ask what happened, why it happened, who is responsible, what can be repaired and what should never be repeated, and becomes merely a ritual search for somebody to blame. Cross River has paid enough for that politics. The state now needs accountability without vindictiveness, continuity without complacency, new development without vanity, and opposition without opportunism.
Most importantly, it needs a politics in which the poor citizen (not the politician’s ego) is the measure of whether government has worked. That is the standard by which Duke, Imoke, Ayade and Otu should all be judged. And it is the standard that every future governor should inherit.
Dr. Odok, Lecturer, Public Affairs Commentator, writes from Abuja