Business law scholar and farmer Dr. John Onyi-Agaba has joined the Cross River North senatorial race, setting up a three-way contest against former governor Ben Ayade and incumbent senator Jarigbe Agom. Onyi-Agaba declared his intention to seek the All Progressives Congress ticket for the district, throwing the party's primary wide open. The entry of the academic-turned-politician reshapes what had been shaping up as a straight fight between Ayade, who governed the state from 2015 to 2023, and Agom, who currently represents the zone in the Senate. Cross River North comprises five local government areas: Bekwarra, Biase, Obanliku, Obudu and Ogoja.
Onyi-Agaba's entry exposes the shallow depth of the APC's bench in Cross River North, where a political neophyte now believes he can dislodge two of the zone's most entrenched gladiators. The scholar's confidence speaks volumes about how the party's structure has atrophied since Ayade's defection from the PDP in 2021, leaving a vacuum that outsiders sense they can fill.
This three-way split benefits nobody except the opposition PDP, which watches gleefully as the APC risks fracturing its support base across the five local governments. Ayade brings the machinery of incumbency and federal connections, Agom wields the advantages of sitting in the Senate, while Onyi-Agaba apparently banks on anti-establishment sentiment among delegates tired of recycling the same faces since 1999.
For ordinary voters in Ogoja who trek to the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital because their zone lacks tertiary healthcare, or farmers in Obudu whose cocoa still rots before reaching urban markets, the personality clash changes nothing. They have watched both Ayade and Agom promise transformation for years, only to see Cross River North remain the poorest part of a state that itself ranks among Nigeria's poorest.
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