Cross River still carries Donald Duke’s Tinapa resort at N58.7bn, and is budgeting N8.5bn more for it in 2026

INEC’s own final list of candidates for the 2027 presidential election - not a newspaper’s reprint of it, but the signed commission document, which we downloaded from inecnigeria.org and read - carries this candidacy on page 3 of three. The entry is printed surname first, as "DUKE DONALD", against PRP, age 64, with RABIU KABIRU (80) as running mate. The list is signed on every page by Rose Oriaran-Anthony, Secretary of the Commission. It names eighteen presidential candidates, two more than most published summaries of the field. The qualifications filed with the commission are printed as FSLC WASC LLB.

Donald Duke governed Cross River State from 1999 to 2007 and is the Peoples Redemption Party’s candidate for the 2027 presidential election. The project most attached to his name is the Tinapa Business and Leisure Resort outside Calabar, a state-funded complex of retail, film studio and hotel that has been widely described as idle for most of the years since he left office. Rather than weigh that description, we went to the accounts.

Cross River’s Office of the Auditor-General publishes the state’s audited financial statements free, and we read them. The 2024 statements list TINAPA among the entities the state controls and fully consolidates. In Note 25, fair value through net assets and equity, at printed page 66, two lines appear: TINAPA BRL at 58,700,000 and TINAPA Studios at 73,000, both in thousands of naira, which is N58.7 billion and N73 million. Both figures are identical to the 31 December 2023 column. The gains column against both is a dash.

Two things follow from that pairing. The first is scale: the state’s entire portfolio in that note closes at N126,943,287 thousand, so the resort alone accounts for a little under half of everything Cross River holds in equity instruments. The second is stasis. An asset held at exactly the same value across two year-ends, with no gain recognised, is an asset the state is not marking up - it is carried, not growing.

The 2023 statements put a second figure beside it. Under observation 7.1, unlisted contractual liabilities in 2023, a single row reads "Ranch, Tourism, Tinapa Project" with an original value of N3,718,845,149.46. The audit groups the three, so we cannot say how much of it is Tinapa alone, and we do not.

The more surprising documents are the budgets, because they show money still going in. In the state’s own approved 2026 budget, under the Ministry of Special Duties and Inter-Governmental Affairs, the capital line "Renovation and Remodelling of the Tinapa Lakeside Hotel" carries N5,000,000,000.00 as the 2025 revised figure and N8,000,000,000.00 approved for 2026. Under the Tourism Bureau, a new line, "Construction of Water Park at Tinapa Business and Leisure Resort", carries N500,000,000.00 for 2026 with nothing in either 2025 column.

We looked at whether the 2025 money was actually spent and cannot say. The budget prints a column for performance from January to September 2025; on the page carrying the hotel line it is blank for every project, not only for Tinapa, so its emptiness establishes nothing. On the tourism page the same column is filled in for other projects, which tells us the column works, but the water park is a new 2026 line with no 2025 budget to spend.

The 2025 audited statements, which we also downloaded, still list Tinapa among the controlled entities but carry no valuation line for it and no external-audit result - the fair-value note that produced the N58.7bn figure a year earlier is simply absent. We note the absence without reading intent into it.

What the documents settle is narrower than the familiar story about Tinapa, and firmer. The resort is not written off: the state carries it at N58.7 billion, a figure that has not moved. It is not abandoned in budget terms either: N8.5 billion is approved against it for 2026 alone. What they do not settle is the number most often attached to Duke’s name. We found no audited statement of what Tinapa originally cost, and the widely-cited figure of around $350m appears in reporting, not in any official document we could retrieve. That figure remains unverified, and we would rather say so than repeat it as though we had checked it.

What this rests on

The candidacy, the printed name, the age, the running mate and the filed qualifications rest on INEC’s own signed final list, read on the page. Four documents downloaded free from the Cross River State Auditor-General (auditgen.cr.gov.ng) and the state government (crossriverstate.gov.ng), then read page by page: the 2023, 2024 and 2025 audited financial statements and the 2026 approved budget. Every figure above was read off the rendered page, not from extracted text, because the budget’s columns do not survive text extraction.

What this does not establish

It does not establish what Tinapa cost to build; no audited construction figure could be found, and the widely-reported figure of roughly $350m rests on press accounts we could not verify. It does not establish that the resort is idle or that it is operating - the accounts value it, they do not describe it. It does not establish that the 2025 or 2026 budget money was released or spent. It does not establish how the N3.72bn contractual liability divides between the Ranch, Tourism and Tinapa. It does not establish why the 2025 audit drops the valuation line, and it attributes no wrongdoing to Donald Duke, who left office in 2007.