Betta Edu affair presents difficult options

Right from the creation of the Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation ministry in August 2019, Nigeria never got the social safety net matter right. Mired in controversy about misapplied funds, and marred by official incompetence, the ministry wobbled on until early this year when it finally imploded, beginning with the sacking of Halima Shehu, head of the National Social Investment Programme Agency (NSIPA). There were allegations of misappropriated funds totaling some N37bn from a pool of over N40bn reportedly intercepted before it was fiddled. A little later, even before the corpse of the former wrongdoer, Mrs Shehu, was embalmed, her legatee, Betta Edu, the now suspended Humanitarian Affairs minister, was also accused of fiddling N585m through shady contracts and malfeasant payments in league with the Internal Affairs minister, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, a former national lawmaker and brilliant and eloquent technocrat.

Sadly, the Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation ministry has become a cesspit of thievery and a seething cauldron of controversy. Draining that waste pipe now appears impossible. Worse, and far more than the complicated and sometimes unresponsive Nigerian economy, the ministry and its incorrigible officials may be presenting President Bola Tinubu the biggest test of his presidency so far. He has begun to deal with the seedy reports coming from the controversial ministry by suspending the minister, Dr Edu, and ordering the anti-graft agencies to probe some of the ministry’s former officials as well as the ministry itself. It is unlikely the anti-graft agencies will find anything palatable. More crucially, the public will watch with keen interest how the president handles the entire affair. They will use whatever he does as both a barometer to measure the tensile stress of his administration’s moral fibre and an indication of the fabled courage he is thought to possess. Will he pass muster?

Commentators, particularly from the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP), have been trenchant. But analysts sympathetic to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), and who appreciate that the president has been taking the matter methodically, will continue to be restrained in their commentaries. However, the president’s attention will ineluctably be drawn more to the fulminations of the opposition, even though, given his steely interior, he will likely refuse to be stampeded. In short, he is today confronting three major nightmares: what to do with the offending and recalcitrant ministry; how to handle the naïve and hapless Dr Edu; and how to treat the associated scandal involving the high-flying Internal Affairs minister, Mr Tunji-Ojo.

The ministry is barely five years old, while Dr Edu is 37, and Mr Tunji-Ojo is 41. The president will eventually resolve the matter, and he will probably do the right thing, but his administration will not go unscathed. The reasons are legion.

Unlike his predecessor, ex-president Muhammadu Buhari, who was generally inured to scandals, scornful of being dictated to by the public, and generally uninterested in sacking erring appointees, President Tinubu sets store by strict public moral code. The Humanitarian Affairs ministry scandals call upon him to put his money where his mouth is. He must already be wondering whether the so-called juicy ministry with about five agencies under it is worth keeping, for it seems designed to birth, nurture and promote scandal. Not only is the ministry riddled with foundational and ethical issues, as far as the civil service is concerned, it is generally superfluous. Disaster management and poverty alleviation can be domiciled elsewhere and structured to promote efficiency and scrupulous financial management. The ministry is already being investigated by the Co-ordinating Minister of the Economy. He will probably link the financial malfeasance in the ministry to the failure to respect financial rules and regulations, the complicity or cowardice of officials, and the weakness of standards that has nurtured a culture of abuse and exploitation of payment loopholes in the civil service. These anomalies are exposed only when internal disagreements break into the open.

The case of Dr Edu seems all but settled. The president will be unable to keep her, even though he will be sorry to see her go. The 37-year-old is a bundle of talent. No one qualifies as a medical practitioner without having brains. More importantly, she brought to everything she did an uncommon passion and drive. She proved her intellectual and elocutionary mettle during the campaigns when she chaired the women wing of the APC.

Pretty, fair complexioned, and brainy, she was the closest thing to the ideal. Imbued with the strength of youth and eager to prove herself in any group, Dr Edu was neither bashful nor boastful. Alas, that was the exterior the public saw. It is not clear whether she deliberately projected and marketed that meretricious exterior, but that was what the public saw and reveled in. Months into her appointment as minister, however, her meteoric rise dimmed to a dismal and despairing low glow. She was reportedly unloved in her ministry, where she was said to have ridden roughshod over senior and critical ministry staff who could have helped to prevent the catastrophe that befell her. That fatal flaw of tactlessness and poor judgement finally undid her in a little over four months after her appointment.

Dr Edu will likely drag Mr Tunji-Ojo down with her. But more accurately, it is the more exposed and crafty Interior minister that will drag her down. He is another brilliant apparatchik with a string of enviable qualifications before he scaled his mid-20s. A dapper young man, he was a precocious lawmaker who came into wealth very early on the wings of his eloquence, self-confidence, and can-do spirit. He proved himself in the House of Representatives where he cleverly positioned himself under the wing of former Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, and became chairman of the House Committee on the juicy Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). But as far back as that time, signs of his overweening ambition and unscrupulousness had begun to emerge. He carried the whole feistiness into the Interior ministry where with Midas touch he dished out one brilliant and impactful policy after another, and seemed set to churn out many more engaging policies. Without doubt, it was obvious he hit the ground running and did not seem like a minister whose zeal would soon flag. Even though he had enjoyed some kind of relationship with Dr Edu before their appointments, which some interpreted to be trysts of the most captivating kind, his brilliance probably led to the suspended minister depending on him to energise her ministry. It is unlikely the president can keep him, even if he wants to. Similar to the case of Dr Edu, many Nigerians will be sorry to see Mr Tunji-Ojo go. He holds so much promise.

In the end what failed the two scandalised ministers is not their intellectual endowment or passion for the job, or even loyalty, or impetuousness. Indeed, both had likeable personalities, and both are pleasant to look at. What undid them is something far more sinister, something few people can boast of, something so nuanced and ethereal that it is sometimes difficult to define: their lack of character. Character may be difficult to define, but it is not impossible. The dictionary definition paints character as ‘the group of qualities that make an individual’, but it is far deeper than that. It cannot be extricated from sound judgement, intuition, ability to know and do what is right, and capacity to die in the defence of what one believes. As a matter of fact, it is even much deeper. Both Dr Edu and Mr Tunji-Ojo were on their way to becoming the poster children of the Tinubu administration, unfortunately for reasons almost entirely superficial. The former lacked social and political tact, and the latter had little strength of character. While the Interior minister rushed to the television and attempted to bamboozle the public with half truths, the Humanitarian Affairs minister told brazen lies about being blackmailed. They forgot that they represented the youth population in the cabinet, a status Dr Edu boasted about in her testimonies to anyone who cared to listen. Now, they have left the president, who obviously holds them in high esteem, little choice but to let them go in order not to damage the administration irreparably.

President Tinubu is a clever and tested politician. He won’t be deterred from staffing his cabinet with youths, and he will probably look for equally brilliant and passionate candidates to fill the posts that will soon be vacant. He knows there is little he can do to save both ministers, if his administration is not to be tarred with the same brush. But despite throwing caviar to the general on youth appointments, the president may by now have come to the understanding that there is a lot wrong with Nigeria’s political and leadership recruitment methods. It will not be his priority to institute reforms to ensure the training in learning and character of the next generation of leaders, but he will bear it in mind and wait for opportune moment to trigger the movement to retrain, realign and deepen the character of Nigerian youths. Nigerian youths are stupendously endowed in learning, and can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best in the world; but they are almost, like the rest of the world’s youths, bereft of the character that conduces to calm, sturdy, and visionary leadership. The October 2020 EndSARS movement indicated that problem in graphic and ugly details, but most Nigerians either failed or refused to see it. The last elections, largely distorted by youths angry for the wrong reasons and against the wrong people, were also early warnings that Nigeria was not preparing its youths for leadership. The consolation, however, is that most people have difficulty with character. What will be intolerable is if the country’s leadership cadre is populated by such vacuums.

President Tinubu can do little to save Dr Edu and Mr Tunji-Ojo. He should not attempt it; indeed, he should encourage their exit. It is regrettable both have come to this sorry pass, given their enormous talents, but it is inevitable that they must leave. Though it will be difficult, the president should do his best to find excellent replacements. When he does, he must then turn his gaze to the scheming and grasping civil service that ambushes hated ministers, especially ministers averse to team play. He should also try to institute some kind of informal mentorship programme for youthful ministers, assuming he can find mentors able to give what they have. Then, as perhaps a lasting bequest to Nigeria, the president must find ways of creating a system where leaders are trained, and from which pool the next generation of leaders would be selected. Presidential system does a very poor job of preparing and ennobling such leaders with character, as the United States of America is finding out.