This article was published in todays Financial Times 2008 Report on Nigeria

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Cross River: When the rhetoric runs ahead of a shabby reality
By Barney Jopson

Published: June 23 2008 17:47

The name Calabar was bestowed on the capital of Nigeria’s south-eastern state by Portuguese explorers, says Joseph Ushie, a tour guide, as his car purrs along the smoothly-paved streets of the spacious, equilateral town. Today, he says, it has been turned into a marketing acronym: “Come And Live And Be At Rest”.

It is hard to conceive of any foreign visitor coming to Nigeria with such ambitions, infamous as the country is for its pushiness and dysfunctionality, its crime and shoulder-shrugging familiarity with man-made disaster.

But Calabar has sought to shake off the images projected on to the whole country from Lagos, the thrills-and-spills commercial capital, and Port Harcourt, the besieged centre of the oil industry. The town is the apex of Cross River state and Donald Duke, its energetic former governor, tried from 1999 to 2007 to turn the region into a tourism hub.

In the end, the rhetoric ran far ahead of the reality and Mr Duke’s successor has picked up the tourism mantle with rather less enthusiasm. But the experience of Cross River still holds lessons – both dos and don’ts – for the rest of the country.

The former governor wanted to exploit assets that set Cross River apart from much of the rest of Nigeria. One was the relative calm and safety of Calabar, which he augmented with measures such as making motorcycle taxi drivers carry helmets for passengers and by employing street-sweepers to clear dust from the roads every morning at dawn.

“In the popular mind, Nigeria is associated with kidnapping and violence and the blowing up of oil installations,” says Bassey Ndem, who manages one of the ventures established by Mr Duke. “Calabar is the only place I see people sitting by the side of the road having a beer. It’s the only place I’ve seen a single white girl walking down the road at 10pm.”

Outside the town, Cross River also has several natural attractions that pale into comparison with those offered by Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa, but are nonetheless impressive by Nigerian standards. Chief among them are the Obudu Cattle Ranch, located in the state’s misty highlands, and the Drill Rehabilitation and Breeding Centre, where a US couple are working to protect endangered drill monkeys found only in the Cross-Sanaga region.

The goal behind the tourism plan was one that lacks obvious commitment in many other states: to reduce Cross River’s near-total dependence on oil revenues, which are channelled through the federal government and give the state a monthly credit of between N3bn ($25.5m) and N3.5bn.

“We say tourism empowers others: the taxi drivers, the waiters, the people making crafts,” says Mr Ndem. “They provide goods and services for those coming from the outside with their money, so they will benefit and you can tax them. You are sucking up resources from the roots rather than pushing down from the leaves.”

Evidence of the theory becoming a reality, however, is scant. The concrete cubes that are a staple of Calabar architecture are broken up by numerous hotels – the state government says there are 2,000-plus beds – and those visited on a weekday by the FT feel echoey, though receptionists say they fill up at the weekends.

Many of the visitors got to know of Cross River through an expensive advertising blitz paid for by the previous state government. Some are expatriate oil workers from Port Harcourt who want to see something other than the interior of their locked-down compounds.

“The people who come to our place are never disappointed,” says Liza Gadsby, one of the founders of the drill centre. “But are they going to come back? Are they going to tell their friends? Or are they going to say: ‘Yes I liked it, but it’s over-rated.’ That’s the million-dollar question because tourism is made by repeat visitors.”

The number of annual overnight visitors to the drill ranch has climbed steadily to more than 500, but Ms Gadsby says: “If I was in business, running a tourist destination, we’d be bust. But we’re not. We’re here for wildlife conservation.”

The new state administration of governor Liyel Imoke has accepted, implicitly, that too much hope was invested in tourism. “We are consolidating the things done, but also looking at other areas,” says Nzan Ogbe, a special adviser to the governor, who is trying to attract oil and gas companies to set up in Calabar. “Tourism in itself is good, but you have to broaden your priorities.”

Waiting in the dim lobby of Calabar’s Serengeti Hotel is a group of academics from Georgia in the US, who are on holiday. They have just returned from the Obudu Ranch, which took 12 hours to reach after their bus got lost and was then stopped in the dark by “vigilantes”.

The meaning of the Calabar acronym, to them, does not quite ring true.


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

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