BEVERLY HILLS, May 25, (THEWILL) – Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State recently raised the game of political deception to a new level with his ‘circus show’ while inaugurating the State’s new Anti-Tax Agency.
In a bid to impress members of the new agency and the public that he is concerned about the plight of his people, especially the poverty level in the state, the very flamboyant and smooth-talking governor suddenly became emotional, losing his voice, weeping, though nobody could see a single drop of tears from his face.
However, his open acknowledgement that his five-year administration has not succeeded in alleviating the poverty of his people is, for once, an acceptance that his government has been an abysmal failure, the worst since this dispensation in delivering the dividends of democracy to the people of the State despite the immense potential.
It is therefore more disappointing that the Governor, a professor for that matter, would not opt for experienced tax experts as members of his new agency, but ‘men and women of God’, according to him, to stop what he described as the illegal collection of local levies and other forms of unapproved dues from the already impoverished people of the State.
Ironically, his choice of a name for the new agency, Anti-Tax, is in itself antithetical to development in an age when progressive governments are striving to expand the tax net as a way of boosting their revenue base. While we appreciate his concern to lessen the burden of illegal dues corrupt officials of his administration have been imposing on the poor traders and other small business owners, we also believe that there are better ways of doing this.
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Most of the petty traders and small business owners the Governor said he wanted to protect through the so-called tax waivers are even outside the formal tax net. Governor Ayade should also know that issues of taxation go far beyond the executive fiat of an attention-seeking ‘Emperor’ of a state as they are backed by appropriate laws of the land, both at the state and federal levels.
We can now see why the State would continue to wallow in abject poverty with the style of Ayade whose only achievement is that he doesn’t owe civil servants in the state their monthly salaries as he pays them as at when due.
The grandiose and phantom projects, which Ayade refers to as his ‘signature projects’, are already sinking the state into irredeemable debt whilst some stakeholders in the state claim he has siphoned hundreds of millions of naira under the guise of consultancy and design fees for the projects.
His desperation for almost N1 trillion naira in foreign loan at today’s conversion rate for his much-flaunted 275-kilometre Super Highway Project and Bakassi Deep Seaport is ridiculous, unnecessary and condemnable. The Governor, if he so much loves his people as he claimed, should have been weeping over his repayment plan for the bogus loan which could have the state committing to an Irrevocable Standing Payment Order (ISPO) of more than N500 million monthly over 180 years.
With less than N5billion monthly allocation from the Federal Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) and 13 per cent oil derivation, Cross River, according to the Debt Management Office of Nigeria (DMO), has the fourth largest external debt in the country, just as its domestic debts stood at N167.96billion at the end of December 2018.
Having lost its oil-producing status in 2018 to both the handing over of Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon and the Supreme Court judgement which ceded the state’s 76 oil wells to Akwa Ibom State, Cross River has remained one of the poorest states in the country.
The situation has not been helped by the flamboyant lifestyle and the illusion of a grandiose order of those at the helm of affairs in the state. The Obudu Cattle Ranch and Tinapa that would have sustained the State’s launch into a global tourist destination are being left to rot away.
Only recently, in his bid to fight the spread of Coronavirus outbreak in the state, Ayade made another show of his efforts with the purchase of 50 new vehicles for COVID-19 awareness in a state with no single testing centre for the virus. The Intensive Care Units of most public hospitals in the state are also in state of disrepair. Yet, much noise was made over face masks and palliatives, including his proposed employment of 8000 people as volunteers on a monthly stipend of N30, 000.
It will therefore be a miracle for Ayade to see the transformation he desires so much in his people with the paltry monthly allocations from FAAC and the internally generated revenue (IGR) that his new ‘tax waivers’ would surely reduce drastically. Apparently, the Cross River State Governor has more tears to shed as he would soon realise that all his razzmatazz and crocodile tears do not necessarily translate into good governance.
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