Tinapa works. Just not the way it was built.

Nineteen years after Obasanjo opened it, Tinapa is back in Cross River's hands, and Customs has stopped goods moving into it again. The buildings, the land and the free zone licence have survived. What's needed now is a new business case.

By Nkanu Egbe · October 2026

On 2 April 2007, President Olusegun Obasanjo cut the ribbon on the first phase of the Tinapa Business Resort & Free Zone, on the edge of Calabar. It was billed as Africa’s premier business and tourism resort, Nigeria’s answer to Dubai. Bankers who had financed it called it something every African could be proud of. Obasanjo promised a new airport to serve it.

In September 2026, the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Customs Service, Bashir Adewale Adeniyi, announced that Customs would no longer approve transfers of containers into the Tinapa Free Trade Zone pending a comprehensive audit. Fifty-six containers, with a duty-paid value of about ₦5.5bn, had been seized at Onne. Customs suspected that the free zone was being used to move goods into the domestic market without paying duty.

A lot happened between those two dates. The resort opened to empty shops, built up debts, was handed to the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) and was left in limbo for more than a decade. In November 2025, AMCON formally handed it back to the state. “Tinapa is open again,” Governor Bassey Otu declared.

Tinapa is open, then. The question is whether it can work, and what it would take.

Before Tinapa

Tinapa didn’t come from nowhere. By the time ground was broken in 2005, Donald Duke had already changed how Nigerians saw Cross River, and Tinapa was meant to be the next step.

He came to office in 1999 with a plan built on two things the state had in abundance: land and natural beauty. Duke has said his administration built its strategy around Cross River’s comparative advantages, agriculture and tourism above all. Tourism delivered first. He rebuilt Obudu Ranch with chalets, a presidential lodge and Nigeria’s first cable car, and turned it into the country’s Camp David, a venue for presidential retreats and conferences. Visitors rose from fewer than 1,500 in 2001 to more than 15,000 in 2006. He started the Obudu Ranch International Mountain Race in 2005, which became the world’s richest mountain race. He turned the Christmas festival into a month-long event and, in 2004, launched what became Carnival Calabar, still Nigeria’s biggest street party two decades on. Governor Bassey Otu, two administrations later, credits him with redefining Cross River as Nigeria’s tourism capital.

He remade Calabar itself. The city became known as Nigeria’s cleanest, thanks to a “Clean and Green” campaign so effective that residents felt they had committed an offence if they dropped litter. Arch. Bassey Eyo Ndem, who later ran Tinapa, credits Duke with defining the state’s development by making Calabar clean without excuses. Highways into the city were dualised and its main roads widened. Beyond the capital, his urban renewal scheme took roads, drainage and services to Ugep, Ikom and Okuni, Ogoja and Obudu, the towns that anchor the state’s three senatorial districts. It was designed as a programme in phases, and his successors continued it rather than starting afresh. Liyel Imoke’s administration was still carrying out later phases in those same towns years afterwards. Calabar became a city that hosted national events, and the conference trade that later justified the Calabar International Convention Centre began in his years.

He also reformed the machinery of government. Duke later told Princeton University’s Innovations for Successful Societies programme that his first task was to appoint capable people and change a civil service culture left over from years of military rule, with training for staff and room even for members of the opposition. He privatised loss-making state assets, including the Metropolitan Hotel (now Transcorp Metropolitan) and Calabar Cement (now UNICEM). In 2005 he set up a reserve fund to protect the state against a “rainy day”. He founded the Cross River University of Technology. And he did all this in a state that stayed peaceful while much of the Niger Delta did not.

All of this came from a federal allocation of about ₦190bn over eight years, modest by the standards of oil-producing neighbours. Tinapa was conceived against that record. A governor who had turned a mountain ranch and a city into national destinations had reason to believe he could do the same for trade. The ambition was bigger, and so were the risks.

What Tinapa was meant to be

Tinapa was born out of a financial crisis. After Bakassi was ceded to Cameroon, Cross River’s revenue collapsed. Governor Donald Duke later said he turned to culture and tourism to rescue the state’s finances, and Tinapa was the centrepiece of that plan.

The idea was simple and, at the time, reasonable. Nigerian traders were flying to Dubai, India and China to buy goods they carried home as luggage and sold in markets across the country. Wealthy Nigerians were taking shopping holidays in London and Dubai. Tinapa would bring that trade home: a free zone where wholesale goods could be bought duty-free, with duty paid only when the goods left the zone. That would still be cheaper than flights, visas and excess-baggage charges. Beyond Nigeria, the plan was to supply Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

KPMG carried out a market and financial feasibility study, which estimated that Tinapa could attract 1.6 million visitors a year. The project was to be built in four phases. Private investors were to hold 90 per cent of the shares, with the state and its agencies limited to 10 per cent. South Africa’s Broll Property Group and Southern Sun were lined up to run the property and the hotels.

The numbers grew quickly. In March 2005, Tinapa Business Resort’s chief executive, Sam Anani, put the cost at $184m and projected a return of 31.81 per cent. By the time the resort opened, more than $350m had been spent; AFP later put the total at $450m. By late 2007, Duke was forecasting three million visitors and ₦300bn in annual revenue within three years of completion, nearly double his own consultant’s estimate.

The Tinapa that might have been

Picture Tinapa in December 2010. A trader from Aba or Onitsha drives in on a Tuesday, not by plane. She spends two nights at the hotel and fills a truck at the wholesale emporia with goods she once flew to Guangzhou to buy. She pays duty once, at the gate, and still comes out ahead. Behind her in the queue is a buyer from Douala. That evening the waterfront is full, because part of the Carnival programme has moved to the resort.

None of this needed a miracle. It needed six things to happen in the right order. Each of them was promised, delayed or quietly withdrawn.

The rules before the ribbon. The Federal Government declared Tinapa a free zone on 15 August 2006, under the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Act. The regulations telling Customs how to treat it, the Tinapa Free Zone and Resort Regulations 2009, weren’t gazetted until 30 January 2009. That was 21 months after the opening. In February 2008, ThisDay reported that the operating guidelines still hadn’t been approved. The shops of 2007 opened without the rules they needed to trade.

The allowance kept. According to The Guardian, shoppers were originally promised a duty-free allowance of $5,000 each. After the project was well advanced, it was cut to $330. The trip to Calabar only made sense with the original figure.

A port that worked. Tinapa was built beside the Calabar Free Trade Zone, and a 2005 gazette declared Calabar Port a free port. That was the Dubai model: a port, a free zone beside it, and a market beside that. In 2006, while Tinapa was under construction, the Federal Government awarded $56m to two Dutch firms, Van Oord and Jan De Nul, to dredge the 84-kilometre channel to eight metres. Shipping Position later reported that they cleared about five kilometres and abandoned the rest. In 2008 and 2009, according to DredgeWire, the Nigerian Ports Authority received ₦6bn and ₦7bn for dredging that was never done. In 2014 the Jonathan administration launched dredging for what Shipping Position called a record fifth time, through a joint venture called Calabar Channel Management, with a ₦20bn contract to reach 9.8 metres. That target was reportedly missed despite full payment. When NPA later investigated, the harbour master and port hydrographer for the period said they knew of no dredging by the company during the months it claimed to have worked. In 2016, NPA managing director Hadiza Bala Usman demanded verifiable evidence of the work. The next year, the contract was suspended. In April 2024, Calabar port manager Olumati Festus said the channel’s draught was about 5.2 metres, and that the port had not received a container vessel in 25 years. On 6 June 2024, the House of Representatives ordered an investigation of the 2006 and 2014 contracts. Its findings have not been made public.

Access by road, not just air. Tinapa’s critics counted flights. Liyel Imoke, Duke’s successor, has argued that the visitor projections would have needed 63 flights a day into Calabar. In 2007, the airport handled 207,542 passengers in total, about 570 a day. But Tinapa’s natural customers were never mainly air travellers. They were traders from the markets of the South-East and South-South, and from Cameroon, who come by road. KPMG’s 1.6 million a year works out to about 4,400 visitors a day, a busy market day for a regional wholesale centre. That needed a direct road from the city, a working airport and the monorail, and it needed Customs not to stop goods at the gate.

Investors’ money. Under the 90:10 design, the state would have been a landlord collecting rent. Instead it became a borrower.

A successor who wanted it to succeed. A project of this size outlives any one governor’s term. We return to this at the end.

What actually happened

The sequencing went wrong from the first day. By Imoke’s account, there was no power supply at Tinapa on the day it was commissioned, and he installed an independent power plant to keep it running. In December 2007, the Mail & Guardian found 80,000 square metres of retail space largely empty and staff saying Customs had stopped them selling.

The money went wrong too. Instead of investors’ money, Tinapa was financed with loans: ₦5bn in seed money from UBA in 2002, ₦20bn in bonds arranged by UBA, a 2005 loan from the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development, and a ₦40bn bond backed by a federal guarantee. Cijeyu Ojong, who reviewed the bond proposal at the Debt Management Office, has written of “serious mismatches” in the financing of Duke-era projects. He says the state defaulted on the bond’s interest payments and the Federal Government had to step in. In November 2009, Union Bank petitioned to wind up Tinapa Business Resort Ltd over debts of ₦12.5bn. The guarantee on the bank’s ₦5bn bridging loan was dated 12 June 2007, two weeks into Imoke’s term. In 2021, the ECOWAS Court ordered the state to repay $6,455,846 of the regional bank’s Tinapa loan. Imoke says debt service was eventually taking more than half of the state’s revenue.

Getting there was its own problem. In 2011, Nairametrics reported that a taxi from Calabar cost ₦3,000 each way. Shoppers told Business A.M. that goods inside the zone often cost more than outside it, and that duty was being charged on purchases above ₦30,000.

There was also a recovery that is often forgotten. Between 2009 and 2012, after the regulations were published, Business A.M. reported that two of the four emporia were fully let and 42 of 53 line shops were in use. T-Mart, Woolworths and Shoprite had all taken space. The model was starting to attract tenants. Then, in September 2013, Customs declared the zone improperly constituted, sealed the complex and seized about 40 containers. Tenants left, and AMCON took over management that year. That same year, Woolworths left Nigeria altogether. Studio Tinapa, reported to have cost ₦4.3bn, never drew Nollywood away from Lagos.

“There was clearly a lack of political will,” said Arch. Bassey Eyo Ndem, who ran Tinapa until 2012, blaming the Federal Government. He described himself as “angry and frustrated at a wasted opportunity”.

In Cross River, Ndem’s verdict is often taken further. Talk of political intrigue in Abuja has followed Tinapa for years, including the claim that some in power were uneasy about a duty-free hub in the south and in no hurry to approve its rules. No official has said so on the record. But the sequence speaks for itself: the operating rules took 21 months, the allowance was cut after the money had been spent, and Customs moved against the zone at the opening and again just as it was recovering.

Why the old model won’t come back

Even with every condition met, the Tinapa of 2007 would struggle in 2026.

Retail has changed, and not only in Calabar. The South African chains that anchored Nigeria’s mall boom have all gone. Woolworths arrived in 2011 and left in 2013, blaming high rents, duties and complex supply chains. Truworths left in 2016, citing import restrictions. Mr Price announced its exit in 2020. Massmart’s Game left in 2022. Shoprite, the anchor of nearly every major mall, sold its 26 Nigerian stores to local investors in 2021 for a reported $73m. The new owners kept the brand under franchise, but by 2024 shoppers were reporting empty shelves. In late 2025 the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service sealed stores in Lekki and at Ikeja City Mall. By March 2026, Vanguard reported, the shutdown was complete, a heavy blow to a mall economy it valued at about ₦2.5trn. Retailers in those malls said their trade collapsed with the anchor gone.

The reasons read like a list of Tinapa’s own problems: dependence on imports, a falling naira, difficulty getting money out of the country, duties, and the cost of moving goods through Nigeria’s ports. Trade has not died; it has moved. Nigerian chains such as Bokku! and Market Square are growing through smaller stores in neighbourhoods rather than malls, and Adekunle Adebiyi, Executive Director, Investments at MBO Capital, one of the investors behind Shoprite’s Nigerian operator, says the chain will reopen as standalone neighbourhood stores rather than rely on large malls. If the mall-anchor model cannot survive in Lekki and Ikeja, a shopping resort a taxi ride from Calabar will not bring it back.

The law works against it too. A review by the law firm Templars notes that section 14 of the NEPZA Act prohibits retail trade in free zones. It cites the Tinapa episode as a warning that NEPZA’s approval is not the same as Customs’ approval. Duty-free shopping sits uneasily within that law.

And Customs has not changed its stance. In 2007 it blocked sales, in 2013 it seized containers, and last month it stopped transfers. Any revival that depends on duty-free retail will meet the same resistance.

What is still there

The assets have survived the years of limbo. The 265 hectares include about 80,000 square metres of lettable space, including four 10,000-square-metre emporia and a cluster of warehouses. There is a hotel of more than 240 rooms, Studio Tinapa, a water park, an independent power plant and a truck terminal. The Lakeside Hotel was looted and vandalised on 23 and 24 October 2020, as the #EndSARS unrest spilled over, and the full extent of the damage elsewhere needs a fresh assessment.

The legal status has also survived. NEPZA still lists Tinapa Free Zone & Resort among its operational zones, designated in 2006 for trading and tourism. Its general manager, Dr Francis Ekom, has run the resort since the Ayade years.

How Tinapa can work

Tinapa can work if it stops trying to be Dubai and becomes something Nigeria and its neighbours actually need. That requires six conditions.

First, a settlement with Customs. Nothing else matters until the state, NEPZA and Customs agree in writing how goods move in and out, with every container tracked electronically. The 2009 regulations already required Customs to record every importer’s goods in a database. The current audit gives the state a chance to turn a dispute into a working procedure. No serious investor will commit until that is done.

Second, a production and logistics zone, not a shopping destination. The warehouses and the Calabar Free Trade Zone next door suit agro-processing, packaging, cold storage and light manufacturing. That means turning the state’s farm produce into finished goods and moving them to Cameroon and the Central African market under the African Continental Free Trade Area. The state says it is in talks with agro-industrial and manufacturing partners. Governor Otu says an American company is preparing to begin operations at the site. The retail market is telling the same story: what still works in Nigeria is local sourcing, neighbourhood distribution and wholesale supply, which are exactly what Tinapa’s warehouses could serve.

Third, fix access. A trade zone needs a working port. The Calabar channel has to be dredged and kept dredged, under a contract with independent hydrographic checks instead of trust. The road from the city needs to be fixed. Night landings begin at Margaret Ekpo International Airport on 1 November. The Lagos–Calabar coastal highway is meant to end at Calabar, and whether it will connect to Tinapa and the port is a question its planners should answer now, not later.

Fourth, the state as landlord, not operator. The hotel, water park, studio and warehouses should each be leased to an operator who carries the commercial risk and pays rent or a share of revenue. The ₦18.5bn of debt that AMCON took on is the cost of doing it the other way.

Fifth, leisure built on demand that already exists. Calabar doesn’t need to invent visitors. Ojoi Ekpenyong, managing director of the Cross River State Tourism Bureau, says the December 2025 Carnival drew more than 248,000 visitors and generated about ₦17.4bn, with hotel occupancy above 95 per cent at its peak. A working hotel, water park and events space at Tinapa could take part of that demand, plus conferences for the rest of the year. The studio can be offered as a cheaper alternative to Lagos with incentives attached. Veteran actress Joke Silva has called for its revival, though she warns it needs political will and public-private collaboration.

Sixth, protection from politics. Tinapa needs an independent board, published accounts and, ideally, a law that keeps it running across changes of government. The reason is explained below.

The questions that remain

Several answers are still owed to the people of Cross River.

To Governor Bassey Otu: Who is the American company, and what has it committed to? What did the state pay or promise to recover Tinapa from AMCON? What is the revival budget, and who will manage it? Has a new board or management been appointed since the handover?

To Customs Comptroller-General Bashir Adewale Adeniyi: When will the audit end, and on what terms will transfers to Tinapa resume?

To the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Dr Jumoke Oduwole, and her Minister of State, Senator John Owan Enoh: Will the ministry publish the records showing why Tinapa’s operating regulations took 21 months after its opening, and who decided to cut the duty-free allowance from $5,000 to $330?

To NEPZA managing director Dr Olufemi Ogunyemi: Given section 14 of the NEPZA Act, can Tinapa keep any retail role?

To the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Dr Adegboyega Oyetola, and the chairman of the House Committee on Ports and Harbour, Hon. Nnolim Nnaji: Where is the report of the investigation into the 2006 and 2014 dredging contracts, and who will be held to account for money paid for work not done?

To the Cross River State Government: Will the KPMG feasibility study, paid for with public money, be published?

The elephant in the room

Tinapa’s history is usually told as a quarrel between two men.

It did not start as one. Donald Duke, Liyel Imoke and Gershom Bassey were once Cross River’s “three musketeers”, friends who, by popular account, agreed before 1999 to govern the state in turn. Duke handed over to Imoke in May 2007, but the friendship did not survive the handover. Accounts of why differ. One version holds that Duke, his own presidential bid over, did not back Imoke’s campaign for governor as fully as a friend should have. Duke’s allies say it was Imoke who turned his back on his predecessor once in office. In 2021, Leadership reported that the three had met in Calabar to settle their differences. The peace did not hold. Duke has since said the state’s decline began on 29 May 2007, the day Imoke took office, and Imoke has replied in kind. Tinapa, the biggest thing one built and the other inherited, became the ground on which they fought.

Liyel Imoke’s account is damning. He says Tinapa was badly conceived from the start, and that its feasibility studies were altered to suit Duke, which he says KPMG confirmed. He says it held almost no private money despite being sold as a public-private partnership. He says loans were already in default before Duke left office, and that he inherited the heaviest debt burden in the federation. He points to what he did to keep it alive: the power plant, the monorail link to the convention centre, an ICT hub, and government conferences and parts of the Carnival moved to the site. He says the state gave up its stake because AMCON could bring in capital, with a plan to invest ₦26bn to ₦29bn. “Politics does not kill projects executed with public funds,” he has said.

Donald Duke’s account is that tourism rescued a state whose oil revenue had collapsed, and that Tinapa and the Calabar Festival became money spinners.

Both have a point, and both leave something out. Duke built Tinapa on the strength of a record few Nigerian governors can match: a ranch turned into a national destination, a carnival that outlived its founder, a capital that became the country’s cleanest city. The same confidence that delivered those successes led him to build ahead of Tinapa’s foundations. He opened before the rules and the power were in place, borrowed where the plan called for investors, and bet that a friendly federal government would deliver the port, the regulations and the airport. Every one of those federal commitments was made under Obasanjo. When Obasanjo left office in May 2007, so did the support Duke was counting on. Duke’s critics are right about how he built Tinapa. They are wrong about why it failed, and wrong to let one unfinished project overshadow everything else he built.

Imoke is right that the missing pieces were largely beyond the state’s control, and he built on what Duke left behind, from later phases of urban renewal in the towns to the Calabar International Convention Centre. But on Tinapa, the record shows a governor who maintained the project rather than fought for it, and who called its founder a “serial failure” in public.

Some reject the federal excuse altogether. “The success of Tinapa has very little to do with the gazetting of a regulatory framework or dredging the seaport,” says Princewill Ojong Odidi, a US-based Nigerian project management consultant and financial adviser. “What we need is planning, implementation and defined timelines.” He has a point: Abuja’s failures were real, but planning and timelines were the parts of the project Cross River controlled, and the parts that no handover could survive without.

That is the real lesson. Politics does kill projects executed with public funds. It kills them when the man who built a project and the man who inherits it are fighting each other. A project the size of Tinapa needs years of commitment from whoever is in office. In Cross River, the handover in 2007 began a long feud instead. Even with every rule gazetted and every metre of the channel dredged, Tinapa would have struggled with its founder and his successor at war.

The feud is not over. Donald Duke is the People’s Redemption Party’s presidential candidate for 2027, and Tinapa is likely to be used against him again. Governor Otu should not let the project’s revival become part of that argument. He should build a Tinapa that does not depend on any governor’s goodwill, any minister’s favour or any ex-governor’s reputation.

Nineteen years separate an opening ceremony from a container suspension. The buildings are still standing. The next governor of Cross River should inherit a Tinapa that works whether he admires its founder or not.

Nkanu Egbe is a journalist and economist. Disclosure: he is personally acquainted with both former governors.