Beyond the NYSC Camp: Cross River’s rot, the locust years, and the demands of recovery
Joseph Odok
The outrage over the dilapidated National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) Orientation Camp in Obubra is justified and overdue. Corps members have endured crumbling hostels, inadequate water, failing sanitation and facilities so degraded that the NYSC leadership has threatened or moved to suspend further postings. Capacity has collapsed from roughly 2,500 per stream to little more than 1,000, with hundreds seeking relocation. The state government’s swift decision to shut the camp for comprehensive overhaul and temporarily relocate orientation exercises to the University of Education and Entrepreneurship in Akamkpa is the correct, responsible response. Yet the camp is merely the most visible tip of a much larger iceberg of institutional and infrastructural decay that accumulated over years of announcements without delivery.
That decay did not begin in 2023. It was deepened, accelerated and normalised during the eight years of Benedict Ayade’s administration. Those were the locust years: budgets of kinetic crystallisation, quabalistic densification, olimpotic meristemasis and quantum infinitum that promised first-world transformation while delivering near-zero performance. Signature projects (the Bakassi Deep Seaport, an international airport, Super High way, dozens of factories) were commissioned on billboards, in television studios and newspaper pages far more often than they appeared as functioning realities on the ground.
Of the much-trumpeted 38 factories, the overwhelming majority remained empty shells or stalled constructions years later. Tinapa, once a bold statement of ambition, was left to weeds and debt. The civil service grew demoralised; promotions stagnated for years; morale sank. Critical maintenance (desilting of drainage channels, upkeep of fire service assets) was neglected. Fire vehicles fell into disrepair or were effectively lost to the system without adequate replacement; today’s limited operational capacity is the product of remedial effort.of Governor Bassey Otu not inheritance.
Floods and erosion that now regularly embarrass the state are not acts of God alone. They are the predictable consequence of years in which systematic desilting and drainage maintenance received deaf ears. The same pattern held for roads, erosion-control sites and public institutions. Projects were announced with fanfare and then left to rot or to the mercy of contractors who delivered substandard work. Most road were rather painted with tar and not asphalt and they decayed within time frame of their construction. Yala became a home of dust, Obudu and Bekwara roads are still a consequence of Ayade’s mess. Major parts of CRS were disconnected from the national grid with many communities no longer having access to electricity on a phantom promise of power plant that were nothing but avenue to loot the state. The cost of destruction is always lower than the cost of rebuilding. Cross River is still paying that price.
Those who raised these issues during the Ayade years were not always celebrated as patriots. Some were treated as enemies of the state. Critics faced arrest and prolonged detention on inflated charges. I spent 117 days in custody for the offence of speaking uncomfortable truths. Many residents, conditioned by the politics of “food on the table” and praise-singing, dismissed such criticism as personal hatred. Today some of the same voices who once defended or ignored the rot have discovered sudden rage against Governor Bassey Otu. The injustice lies less in the existence of legitimate impatience than in the selective amnesia that denies the scale of what was inherited and the direction of the current recovery effort.
A government reflects the mood of its people. Years of applause for grandiose budgets and digital inauguration ceremonies helped produce the decayed Cross River we now inhabit. The emerging public consciousness that refuses to allow leaders to sleep is healthier for democracy. It is already yielding concrete results. The rapid government intervention on the NYSC camp is one. The handling of the Denis Odama matter (where the governor directed the withdrawal of a complaint initiated by aides and secured the critic’s release) is another signal that this administration can still distinguish between accountability and vengeance.
Ongoing desilting exercises, efforts to restore fire service capacity after long neglect, recovery of Tinapa from years of limbo, road works across several corridors, and attempts to stabilise a demoralised civil service form part of a policy direction of recovery, consolidation and gradual development. These efforts sit on the foundation left by earlier administrations, including those of Duke and Imoke, and seek to reverse the damage of the intervening locust years.
None of this excuses slow delivery or substandard remedial work. Cross Riverians are right to demand higher standards. More federal transfers and improved revenue create an opportunity, yet the accumulated rot far exceeds what any single budget cycle can erase. Governor Otu must recognise the impatience of a people who have waited too long. He must cut waste deliberately, communicate more transparently about the use of public funds, and ensure that rehabilitation meets acceptable quality thresholds. Accountability and openness are not optional extras; they are the only durable foundation for the recovery agenda.
It is easier to destroy than to rebuild. The present outrage, if channelled constructively rather than as selective bitterness, can accelerate the rebuilding. Cross River deserves leaders who treat criticism as feedback rather than treason, and citizens who remember how the rot was allowed to deepen. The NYSC camp is a symptom. The cure requires sustained vigilance, honest reckoning with the past eight years of non-performance, and a government that matches the people’s rising expectations with visible, measurable, transparent action. That is the standard against which recovery must be judged.
. Dr Joseph Abang Odok, a Senior Lecturer, a Social Change Agent, a Lawyer and a Philosopher, writes from Lokoja