Nearly a Kilometer of Greenhouses, Little to Show: the story of Uyo

By KebbiDailyNews on Mon Sep 15 2025

The project, launched with fanfare several years ago, was supposed to be a cornerstone of Akwa Ibom’s agricultural development strategy

Uyo — Drive out of the city airport, and you will pass a row of plastic tunnels the length of a small town. They are impossible to miss: steel ribs, translucent sheeting, neat planting beds running in regimented lines. They were sold to the public as a fix — for hunger, for jobs, for the endless crisis of Nigerian agriculture. They were billed as a quiet revolution in tomatoes and lettuces, a modern solution to long-standing problems. The truth on the ground is messier and uglier.

The greenhouses were launched under the banner of modernization: showpiece projects meant to prove that the state government could do more than build roads and monuments to itself. Press releases and local blogs described tomato plantations on the Ibom International Airport road and promised greenhouse clusters across the state, part of a broader plan to seed each local government area with controlled-environment farms and youth employment schemes. The images were irresistible — neat rows of fruiting vines, smiling young farmers in white caps, the governor cutting ribbons. You could see the narrative forming: efficiency, productivity, the state stepping in to rescue the countryside.

What the glossy photos did not show was what happens when these projects leave the cameras and the speeches. Several of the greenhouse sites that were heralded as the future of Akwa Ibom agriculture sit largely idle. Where agricultural production was promised, there is sporadic activity at best; where private-sector partnerships were touted, there is little evidence of sustained operation. Local reports and community footage indicate that some facilities fall into periods of disuse, weeds colonizing the edges of painstakingly built beds while taxpayers keep paying. Those who live nearby — smallholder farmers and market traders — complain that the project’s benefits never trickled down to the people who needed them most.

This pattern should be familiar by now. Across the state there are megaprojects that cost millions and yield little. Legislators have publicly fretted about an abandoned science park into which billions were poured, projects that were supposed to transform technology and industry but instead became monuments to mismanagement. The science park is not the greenhouses, but it fits the same pattern: big numbers, bigger promises, and then the long silence. When an administration can quickly summon funds and fanfare for a headline project, it should also — one would think — be able to show audits, usage figures, and sustainability plans. Too often, those numbers are either absent or opaque.

There are several overlapping explanations for how this happens. Sometimes the problem is simple incompetence: a project is conceived without a realistic operating plan, or without the training and support that will let local farmers turn machinery into livelihoods. Sometimes private partners fail to show up after the state has built the scaffolding. Sometimes, maintenance budgets are never allocated. And sometimes, not infrequently, projects are designed as political theater: a way to show progress to a TV audience without the messy work of seeing a program through for years. The greenhouses are small enough to touch this entire catalogue of failure. They are also large enough to matter.

The sums involved, when you trace them through budget documents and supplementary spending lists, are not trivial. The state has, in recent years, shifted significant chunks of money into agricultural line items and special initiatives that promise food sufficiency and youth employment. That is reasonable — investment in agriculture should be a public priority — but reasonable investment requires follow-through. Money for capital projects without money for personnel, technical support, market linkages, and maintenance is not investment; it is theater. The public deserves to know how much was spent, who maintains the facilities, who benefits from the harvests, and whether the promised supply chains — to processing plants, to markets, to export desks — actually exist.

What is striking about Uyo’s greenhouses is the gap between the promise and the payoff. In public statements, the project’s custodians speak of raw tomato supply for value-chain factories and youth programs that will reduce urban unemployment. On the ground, the factories and the marketed jobs are either delayed or wholly absent. The result is not just wasted money; it is a profound erosion of public trust. When every ribbon-cutting becomes an occasion for photographs rather than the start of measurable change, citizens learn to read the press releases the way they read campaign flyers — as temporary illusions. And illusions, ultimately, are more corrosive than honest failure.

Reviving the greenhouses would not be impossible. The infrastructure exists. With transparent accounting, an honest audit, an infusion of managerial capacity, and real partnerships with private processors and market operators, these projects could deliver produce and livelihoods. The question is whether there is the political will to do that work: the messy, unphotogenic labor of long-term operation, training, and market development. If the answer is yes, then the greenhouses will be a success. If the answer is no, they will remain another chapter in a familiar story.

There is a moral dimension to all of this. Public projects are not sculptures; they are obligations. When leaders present agriculture as a solved problem because they have erected structures, while failing to ensure the conditions for production, they have done something worse than waste money. They have misled people who depend on government promises. In a country where food inflation bites, where a bag of rice or a crate of tomatoes can determine whether a household eats that week, such misdirection is not merely bureaucratic failure — it is a form of neglect.

Local voices who ask for accountability are not asking for theatrics. They want audits and results: a line-item accounting of expenditure, a log of produced output, names attached to managers and maintenance contracts, and a timetable for when these greenhouses will supply the markets they were promised to serve. They want training programs that produce skilled operators, not one-off ceremonies. They want to know whether the governor’s office intends to convert these tunnels into productive farms or prefers to keep them as a background for speeches.

If Akwa Ibom wants a legitimate agricultural revolution, it must treat this as an operational problem, not a PR one. That means transparent budgets, community engagement, and institutional continuity. It means countersigning the press photos with performance indicators that are updated, verifiable, and public. The alternative is that these greenhouses join the long list of projects that glow briefly on inauguration day and then darken in the years that follow.

For now, the plastic tunnels on the road out of Uyo stand as a test. They test whether the state’s officials will accept scrutiny; whether they will publish the books and answer the questions; whether they will turn the infrastructure into a pipeline of food and work, rather than another expensive but empty promise. The people living around those tunnels know what is at stake: their plates, their incomes, and the little faith they still have in government. The rest of us ought to care, too. Public money, once spent, must produce public benefit. Anything less is not just waste — it is a political choice.