By Linus Obogo
Almost a year after his curious announcement as Chairman of the Governing Council of the National Youth Service Corps, an appointment that has since produced more anxiety than consequence, little else has been heard of Hilliard Eta beyond the echoes of his own discontent. Can anyone truly begrudge a man so spectacularly stalled from mistaking personal inertia for public tragedy? Perhaps not. For when expectation curdles into entitlement, disappointment often seeks relief in accusation, and frustration finds comfort in the megaphone of grievance.
Thus, at a forum of the Abuja chapter of the Association of Cross River State Journalists, where he was invited to grace the gathering, Eta chose not reflection but rupture. He wandered from civility into caricature, sinking his rabid canine into Governor Bassey Edet Otu, whom he accused of failing to whisper his name persuasively enough at the corridors of power. What ought to have been a sober engagement with ideas dissolved into theatre: a lament not of policy, but of postponed privilege.
His dirge would almost have passed for poetry were it not so nakedly self-referential, a soliloquy of bruised ambition masquerading as concern for a state. To brand Cross River “the weakest” at a time it has secured a $3.5 billion Afreximbank facility for the Bakassi Deep Seaport, earned the African Development Bank’s confidence for a Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zone, and witnessed the formal handover of the Tinapa Business Resort by AMCON, is to confuse stubborn facts with wounded feelings. Institutions do not repose prized assets in the hands of brigands; they negotiate with governments they judge astute, credible, and capable of stewardship. Tinapa’s return is not plunder—it is ingenuity vindicated through patient, competent statecraft.
While Hilliard declaims from the pulpit of perpetual dissatisfaction, the Otu administration has embraced the less glamorous labour of results. Hundreds of youths trained in software development at Tinapa, supported with real funding; two cohorts of 200 Cross Riverians trained in agricultural value chains in Nasarawa, each emerging with skills, stipends, and startup capital; tractors deployed to farmers, market women empowered, and roads steadily unfurling across the state. These are not press-conference mirages but tangible interventions, brick, skill, seed, and steel, plain to all except those who prefer grievance as a compass.
Pathetically, his melodrama over Internally Generated Revenue is no less hollow. Assertions unaccompanied by data are not critique; they are conjecture draped in borrowed robes. A fair mind would attempt a comparative analysis, before and during Governor Otu’s tenure, rather than scatter insinuations like confetti. Investors, after all, are not sentimental; they are forensic. That Cross River is increasingly sought after as a destination speaks with a clarity that Hilliard’s anecdotes cannot smother. Facts, inconvenient as they are, refuse to kneel before rhetoric.
More revealing still is the conflation of personal misfortune with public decline. A delayed inauguration, a fall from party office, and serial complaints are repackaged as proof of a state’s irrelevance. Even his claim of ambassadorial exclusion collapses under the weight of truth, with Vice Admiral Ibas standing as living rebuttal. When patronage pipelines run dry, celebrated table manners appear to take flight, replaced by accusations that smell less of injustice than of entitlement denied. In the end, this is not an indictment of Governor Bassey Edet Otu, but a confession by a man struggling to accept that governance is not a rent-seeking enterprise nor a theatre for perpetual grievance. The return of Tinapa from AMCON merely underscores what sober minds already know: competence negotiates, recovers, and rebuilds; brigandage blusters and blames. Cross River needs neither noise nor thuggery to be heard—it needs, and is getting, steady leadership that converts credibility into capital, assets into opportunity, and wounded pride into irrelevant footnotes of progress.
Obogo is Chief Press Secretary and Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to Governor Bassey Edet Otu.
