By: Ignatius Oli
In everyday economics, currency is anything a society agrees to accept as a store and measure of value, political currency borrows that logic: it is the stock of trust, legitimacy, and leverage a politician can draw on to get things done. Like money, it can be earned, spent, hoarded, inflated, or devalued, and it is not fixed to a title. A sitting officeholder with no grassroots loyalty can hold less real currency than a rival who commands the ground. Cross River State supplied a clean illustration of this in 2023, when the incumbent Governor Ben Ayade, contesting the Cross River North Senate seat on the APC platform, was defeated by the sitting PDP senator, Jarigbe Agom-Jarigbe, despite Ayade’s control of the machinery of state.
Analysts generally treat political currency as a composite of interlocking strengths: electoral proof, demonstrated by votes won and elections delivered rather than merely contested; institutional control, reflected in command of party structures or government machinery; financial muscle, the resource base that funds campaigns and loyalty networks; public legitimacy, especially among younger and urban voters organizing beyond traditional parties; and coalition value, the practical measure of how much other power blocs need you.
Comparing Governor Bassey Otu’s APC and the challenging PDP through this lens gives a more grounded forecast of the 2027 contest than incumbency alone would suggest.
Following the reasoning above, let’s examine the APC’s Currency and it’s consolidation from the Top: Governor Otu enters the race holding the most valuable form of currency an incumbent can have: an uncontested party, he was affirmed as the APC’s sole governorship candidate, with his primary functioning less as a contest than a coronation, delegates across all eighteen local government areas endorsing him and his deputy, Rt Hon. Peter Odey (Phd) without opposition. He has reinforced this by replacing the Central Senatorial District Senator and the party chairman, while retaining the sitting Senators from the Southern and Northern districts, and by swapping out House of Representatives members across the Calabar Municipality/Odukpani, Akamkpa/Biase, Abi/Yakurr, Obubra/Etung, and Ogoja/Yala federal constituencies. He has also solidified his next tenure with a reconfiguration of candidates as APC flag bearers for the state’s House of Assembly seats.
This shows a governor actively re-minting his party’s currency in his own image, extending it down to the ward level through the appointment of 196 Rural Development Officers, one for every ward in the state, tied to the federal Renewed Hope Ward Development Programme, a structure that links state patronage directly to the ruling party’s national brand.
He has also moved to manage the inevitable fallout from a consolidation this aggressive by inaugurating senatorial-district reconciliation committees, chaired by Edem Duke in the South, Ebuta Ayuk in the Central district, and Larry Odey in the North, and by pledging refunds to aspirants who lost out in the primaries.
Prince Otu has also worked to build his political currency beyond party structures: securing the return of the Tinapa Business and Leisure Resort to state control, leading a state-wide campaign, still legally contested, to have Cross River recognized as a littoral, oil-producing state, and using platforms like the 20th anniversary Calabar Carnival and engagements with the State Elders’ Forum and Traditional Rulers Council to project unity. The risk in this strategy is that aggressive consolidation creates aggrieved insiders with nothing left to lose inside the APC, and Cross River is already seeing that risk convert into currency for the opposition.
The PDP’s Currency: Borrowed Legitimacy and Grievance: The PDP’s governorship candidate, Sir Arthur Jarvis, brings a different kind of currency: outsider credibility built on his profile as a university proprietor rather than a career politician, paired with an aggressive challenge to the administration’s record.
His campaign has worked to devalue Prince Otu’s currency by declaring the governor’s “seat vacant” over alleged underperformance and by publicizing what he frames as state harassment of himself and his running mate through tax audits and demolition notices, a strategy designed to convert perceived persecution into gaining public sympathy and turnout.
The clearest currency transfer in this race for the PDP is personnel, Sir Arthur Jarvis has chosen as his running mate Barrister Alphonsus Eba, the very party chairman Governor Otu removed from the APC; a discarded APC chairman anchoring the PDP’s ticket is a direct transplant of institutional knowledge and internal grievance into the opposition camp. Similarly, the sitting Abi/Yakurr federal lawmaker, Hon. Alex Egbona’s defection from the APC to the PDP hands the opposition an incumbent officeholder with name recognition in a constituency the APC currently holds, though he now faces Rt Hon. John Gaul Lebo, the same PDP rival he narrowly beat in 2019, giving that particular contest real historical weight.
Even so, the ousted chairman’s political capital is arguably smaller than what the PDP has been unable to hold onto elsewhere. The party’s current state chairman, Barrister Venatius Ikem, carries more organizational weight within the existing structure than a recent defector does. Also, the PDP would have been more competitive bringing back Prince KJ Agba who resigned from the PDP and defected to the APC under the banner “KJ for Otu 2027,” citing frustration with the party’s internal democracy and now also dissatisfied with the APC. Agba, whose family includes former federal minister Goddy Jedy-Agba, represented exactly the kind of financial muscle the PDP would need to fund a campaign across the 18 local government areas; his departure was a loss the party has not offset, not a hypothetical one it can still choose to prevent.
Amidst the above, the clearest drag and complication on PDP currency in Cross River State is Professor Sandy Onor, the party’s 2023 gubernatorial candidate in the state, who narrowed Prince Otu’s winning margin to roughly seventeen points in the last election.
Rather than mounting a second run for Diamond Hill, Onor has redirected his political capital nationally, emerging as the consensus presidential candidate of the Nyesom Wike-aligned PDP faction for 2027. National ambition is a legitimate escalation of currency, but it removes a proven vote-getter from the state race at precisely the moment the PDP needs a unified local front, and it ties Cross River’s PDP fortunes to a bruising national factional contest between the Wike bloc and the party’s rival leadership structure. Notably, even Jarigbe Agom-Jarigbe, once cited as proof that PDP grassroots strength could outmuscle an incumbent governor, has since defected to the APC since October 2025, meaning that specific reservoir of currency has itself since moved into the ruling party’s ledger.
Weighing the balance between both political parties, on paper, the PDP has assembled real currency: a defected federal lawmaker, a defected former party chairman as running mate, an energetic outsider candidate, and a live grievance narrative against the incumbent.
But currency is comparative, not absolute. Prince Otu’s currency is institutional and consolidated: a unified party, control of state resources, a ward-level patronage structure tied to the federal ruling party’s brand, and the structural advantages of incumbency that Nigerian governors have historically converted into re-election.
The PDP’s currency is real but scattered, assembled from defectors and grievances rather than a single coherent power base, and further diluted by its most prominent state figure pursuing a national rather than a state mandate, and by a fresh defection, Agba’s, that quietly removed one of its few reliable sources of campaign financing.
On the strength of this analysis, the APC enters 2027 as the clearly stronger party in Cross River State, and Governor Otu is considered the firm favourite to secure a second term. The PDP’s chances of an outright gubernatorial upset are low, realistically in the range of a long-shot rather than a coin-toss, since converting borrowed and grievance-based currency into a unified ground campaign is precisely the kind of consolidation that Onor’s national detour, Agba’s defection, and the party’s history of internal factionalism make difficult to achieve on this timeline.
Where the PDP’s currency is genuinely competitive is downballot: the defections raise the cost of an APC sweep and could plausibly flip specific National Assembly seats such as Abi/Yakurr, where Egbona and Lebo carry real prior history into a rematch. Barring a significant scandal, an economic shock, or a late reconciliation that channels Senator Sandy Onor’s networks back into the state race, none of which currently appears imminent, incumbency currency (APC) outweighs opposition currency (PDP) in Cross River State, and the balance of the evidence points to Governor Otu’s re-election in 2027.
20th July 2026.
