FOLA OJO FROM PUNCH
She is a hottie and a show-stopper; a ravishing and jaw-dropping strutting and swaggering beauty, a paralysing and pulverising pulchritude. That’s Dr Betta Edu. At only 37, and one of the youngest ever in Nigeria’s historical annals; she became President Bola Tinubu’s humanitarian affairs and poverty alleviation minister. Betta is not only drop-dead gorgeous; she is cerebral. A medical doctor whose resume barks big and loud. She was chairman of the Cross River State COVID-19 Task Force, Commissioner for Health in the same state and National Chairman of the Nigeria Health Commissioners Forum. She was the women leader of the ruling party, All Progressives Congress.
In her home state of Cross River, only a few must be better than Betta. But, right now, Betta is in trouble. The young woman is presently swirling in a vortex of volcanic eruption of corruption escapade allegation that is commonplace in the Nigerian veranda of power.
Word on the street is that Betta corralled a whooping sum of more than N585m ($640,000; £500,000) of public money meant for the poor into a personal bank account of another government apparatchik. But Betta is fighting, pushing back on any wrongdoing. “It was for the implementation of grants to vulnerable groups,” so said Betta. In a dispensation where clamours are clangorous for younger Nigerians to be accorded a vital and veritable space in the heart of political power and gully and gulch of government, is this young Betta the beauty also a corruption beast?
The thrust of my treatise this week, however, is beyond Betta and the allegation of corruption. I steady my magnifying glass on a systemic malodor that has sloughed off the fabrics of Nigeria, a nation that has all it takes to be in the category of the First World but running almost at the bottom as Third World because of corruption. The Nigerian political power room is drenched with filth and stench. In the country’s connecting skyways of power, corruption in different forms is the 600-ton egregious elephant in the room. Ministries are full of mega series of subterranean corruption effluvia. Parastatals have been paralysed by brazen thievery. And when these cases miraculously appear before a Nigerian judge for adjudication, that’s when you’ll be convinced that our judiciary too is brimmed with compromising jackleg judges. What have the eyes of Nigerians not seen, and ears not heard about authority stealing in a poverty-ravaged landscape like ours?
Betta was alleged to have diverted only N585m! She must be a kinder, gentler greed geek and a corruption neophyte. What is N500m purloining when the woman minister before her, Sadiya Umar Farouk, stands accused of money laundering to the whooping tune of N37bn? Although Farouk has since surrendered to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, it took her a while to own up to missing money under her purview. Betta has got to be a better bet. Halima Shehu is another virago baby-doll of corruption scandals storming the same department of government. Halima is a former National Coordinator of the National Social Investment Programme, a multi-billion naira body charged with poverty alleviation and other intervention schemes of the current government. The EFCC reportedly recovered about N39.8bn out of N44.8bn allegedly embezzled by Halima and her coteries. The sacked geek allegedly signed off N44bn from the government account in five days between December 27, 2023 and December 31, 2023. Fiscal irresponsibility is the hymnal sung in Nigeria’s corridors of political authority.
