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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.
Corruption means nothing to the Nigerian powerful. It is a normal way of life. The mortars and bricks of our government are hewn with corruption. Betta was only 13 years old when Olusegun Obasanjo was president. When Baba reigned, there were corruption allegations all the way against OBJ. The former President’s aides and some senators were alleged to have connived and took huge sums of money in oil and commissions from defence contracts. It was also alleged that the hostels and sports complex at OBJ’s Bells Secondary School and university were constructed by Strabag Construction Company with taxpayers’ money. Obasanjo was also accused of diversion into a private account N6.5bn proceeds realised from the appeal fund for the construction of his Presidential Library in Abeokuta. Let us peruse a low-lung summary of the noxious absurdities and fetid excrescences called corruption by our big men and women. These stories and many more make Nigeria look like a crime scene!
Once upon a time, the EFCC traced a whooping sum of N34bn to Allison Maduekwe; Nigeria’s former petroleum minister. Her hidden $37.5m mansion was also uncovered. A few years ago, $9.8m and £74,000 were recovered from one Andrew Yakubu, ex-NNPC GMD; and a man we learnt was warming up to become governor of Kaduna State. A former governor of Adamawa State, Bala Ngilari, was sent to five years in jail for procurement fraud totalling N167m. Former Director General of NIMASA, Temisan Omatseye, was sentenced to five years in prison for N1.5bn contract fraud. A former local government chairman in Kogi State, Gabriel Daudu, was jailed for five years for N1.4bn fraud. Seventeen exotic vehicles were recovered from ex-Comptroller-General of Customs, Abdullahi Dikko, N50m on former Enugu CJ’S bank accounts was forfeited, N49m in five large black 150kg was uncovered at the Kaduna airport; owner/owners unknown. Also, $50m found in a Lagos house: owner/owners unknown. We heard many different versions of stories; all still tangled up within the wired fence of the National Intelligence Agency. The characters I just mentioned are not from just one political party. They all belong to a network of deception. Nigeria is a hotbed of heinous hogwash. Despite the Fiscal Responsibility Act entrenched as guiding and guarding laws for government workers, there is no delineation between government funds and private accounts. Civil servants and political appointees freely co-mingle public and personal funds without respect for fiscal controls. It is all corruption. It is in the Nigerian spine. And it will not die because nobody has the courage to pull the trigger against it. I recall these words spoken by the current EFCC chairman, Ola Olukoyede, during his nomination hearing: “If you’re fighting corruption, you become the enemy of everybody.”  What Olukoyede was alluding to was fighting corruption in Nigeria is fighting the powerful. Fighting the powerful is a tough business in a landscape of corruption like Nigeria. Debating corruption in Nigeria has become so ridiculously redundant. Unfortunately, any expected abundant and abounding progress for the country may be locked up in the redundant talk that must bring an end to the cruelty called corruption.
Oh, poor Nigerians! Where is your messiah with milk and honey who will deliver you from these corruption troubles in the hands of big men you entrust with absolute power? The Good Book records that after Saul was anointed king over the people, those who knew him well enough saw him among prophets prophesying and then asked: “Is Saul also among the prophets?” That prompts me to ask a similar question: Is Betta the beauty also the beast of corruption?
X(formerly Twitter): @FolaOjotweet

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