12/06/2026
THE RUINS OF TOMORROW: HOW THE FAILURE OF CONTINUITY IS ROBBING BIASE LGA OF ITS FUTURE
A Statement on the Abandoned Market Infrastructure in Biase Local Government Area
The images before you are not photographs of a war zone. No bomb fell here. No flood swept through. What you are looking at is something far more deliberate â and far more damaging. What you are seeing is the quiet, unhurried destruction that comes when leaders choose to abandon what their predecessors built, when the culture of governance treats every new administration as a fresh page on which the previous chapter must be erased.
These photographs â taken at what was clearly designed to be a functional, revenue-generating market facility somewhere in Biase Local Government Area â tell a story that no official report will willingly tell. They show covered market stalls with concrete display platforms standing empty. A security gatehouse stripped of its window frame. A water tank mounted on a concrete tower, surrounded by tall weeds, connected to pipes that serve no one. Open market canopies with roofing sheets rusting away, their structures slowly surrendering to the elements. Residential or administrative quarters with weeds pushing through the corridor, doors hanging open to the rain and sun.
This is not poverty. This is policy failure. This is the cost of a governance culture that does not understand â or does not respect â the principle of continuity.
WHAT IS CONTINUITY IN GOVERNANCE?
Continuity in governance is the commitment of successive administrations to sustain, build upon, and complete the developmental projects initiated by their predecessors, regardless of political affiliation, personal differences, or the desire to claim sole credit for progress. It is the recognition that public infrastructure belongs to the people, not to the official who commissioned it. It is the principle that a school built under one chairman must be maintained under the next; that a market constructed with public funds must be operationalised and kept functional no matter whose signature is on the commissioning plaque.
Continuity is not a luxury. It is the backbone of sustainable development. It is what separates governance from mere administration. It is the difference between a local government that grows its people and one that merely spends their money.
WHAT BIASE LGA LOST BY ABANDONING THIS MARKET
Let us be specific, because specificity is what accountability demands.
A functional market of this visible scale â equipped with structured market stalls, covered trading halls with raised concrete platforms, a water supply system, administrative quarters, and a security gatehouse â represents a multi-million naira investment of public funds. The concrete alone in those market platforms could not have been cheap. The blue metal pillars holding up those market canopies were not donated. Someone â most likely the taxpayers of Biase LGA and the Federal Government through FAAC allocations â paid for every block, every sheet of roofing iron, every pipe connected to that water tank.
And yet today, weeds are the only tenants.
Consider what a functioning version of this facility would have generated. A properly activated market of this size would produce daily levies from traders, monthly stall rental fees, gate charges, and associated commercial activity that ripples outward into the surrounding economy. Accumulated over months and years, this represents a significant and recurring source of Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) for the local government. Traders would have benefited. Transporters would have benefited. Small business operators, food vendors, and artisans would have found a structured platform to reach customers. Young people would have found employment as market hands, security personnel, cleaners, and administrative staff.
Instead, this facility is generating nothing but shame.
If this market had been kept operational for even five years, Biase LGA could have generated hundreds of millions of naira in cumulative revenue â money that could have funded primary school renovations, rural road maintenance, healthcare centre supplies, and scholarships. Every year of abandonment is not just waste. It is a theft of potential from the people of Biase.
THE DANGERS OF GOVERNANCE WITHOUT CONTINUITY
The failure of continuity is not merely an administrative inconvenience. It is a developmental catastrophe with consequences that ripple across generations. Let us examine these dangers with the seriousness they deserve.
1. Perpetual Underdevelopment
When each new administration insists on starting its own projects rather than completing or sustaining existing ones, a community is condemned to a cycle of perpetual incompletion. Roads are started and abandoned. Markets are built and left to rot. Health centres are commissioned and never supplied. Nothing is ever fully functional. The community is always in a state of becoming, never arriving. Biase LGA has far too many projects in this limbo, and this market is only the most visible example.
2. Catastrophic Waste of Public Resources
The funds spent constructing this market are gone. They cannot be recovered. Every naira that went into that water tower, those market stalls, those covered canopies â it is spent. But the value those funds were meant to create has never materialised. This is not just financial waste; it is a moral failure. In a community where many residents live below the poverty line, where children lack adequate school furniture, where health facilities are under-equipped, the deliberate or negligent abandonment of revenue infrastructure is unconscionable.
3. Erosion of Public Trust
When citizens watch government after government commission projects that subsequent governments abandon, they lose faith in the entire system. They stop believing that government can deliver. They become resistant to community taxation, to voter participation, to civic engagement â because they have learned, through hard experience, that their cooperation produces nothing lasting. The social contract between government and governed begins to dissolve. This erosion of trust is one of the most dangerous long-term consequences of governance discontinuity, and it is one of the hardest to repair.
4. Loss of Competitive Advantage
Markets are economic anchors. They attract traders, investors, and service providers from surrounding areas. They raise the economic profile of a community. When Biase LGA fails to maintain and operationalise such infrastructure, it cedes economic activity to neighbouring communities and local governments that do. Traders go elsewhere. Revenue follows them. And Biase falls further behind in the competition for economic relevance.
5. Dangerous Message to Future Leaders
Perhaps most alarmingly, a culture of discontinuity teaches the next generation of leaders that abandonment is acceptable â even normal. When no one is held accountable for letting a multi-million naira public facility fall to ruin, the lesson absorbed by upcoming politicians is that governance is about commissioning photo opportunities, not delivering lasting outcomes. This cultural inheritance is arguably the most dangerous legacy of all.
6. Environmental and Safety Hazards
Abandoned infrastructure does not simply sit still. It deteriorates. Roofing sheets rust and collapse. Unchecked vegetation becomes habitat for reptiles and pests. Broken structures become sites for criminal activity. What was built to serve the public economy becomes, in its neglect, a public safety hazard. The irony is as bitter as it is avoidable.
A DIRECT WORD TO THE LEADERSHIP OF BIASE LGA
The current leadership of Biase Local Government Area must understand that the people are watching, and increasingly, the people are documenting. The era when governance failures could be quietly buried under press releases and empowerment ceremonies is passing. Citizens equipped with cameras and platforms are walking through the wreckage of abandoned projects and asking the questions that council chambers are reluctant to hear.
We ask directly: Who built this market facility? What administration commissioned it? What was the total cost to public funds? Why was it not operationalised? Who made the decision to abandon it? And what is the current administration's plan â with timelines and budget â to restore it to functionality?
These are not hostile questions. They are the basic minimum of accountability that any democratically elected government owes its constituency.
Continuity is not about praise-singing your predecessor. It is about respecting the people enough to finish what was started with their money. It is about understanding that a chairman's tenure is not a personal enterprise but a stewardship of public assets and public trust.
CONCLUSION: THE MARKET THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN
What these photographs show is not just a neglected market. They show uncollected revenue. They show traders without a platform. They show unemployed youth. They show a local government that could have been economically self-sustaining but chose, through inaction, to remain dependent. They show the price â measured in rust, in weeds, in wasted concrete â of leaders who build for ceremony rather than for community.
Biase LGA deserves better. The traders who would have set up stalls here deserve better. The families whose livelihoods would have been supported by this market deserve better. The local government treasury that would have been enriched by this facility deserves better.
Continuity is not a political favour. It is a governance obligation. And its absence here is not merely a failure of management â it is a failure of leadership, of vision, and ultimately, of conscience.
Issued by RayTalker â Bold Commentary. Real Talk.
Civic Accountability Platform | Biase LGA, Cross River State, Nigeria
"Speaking truth to power, so the people are never powerless."
