RECENTLY, following public outcry over recent developments within her ministry, President Bola Tinubu suspended the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, Dr. Betta Edu, from office with immediate effect. The president, who conveyed this decision in a statement by his spokesman, Ajuri Ngelale, said the decision was in line with his avowed commitment to uphold the highest standards of integrity, transparency and accountability in the management of the commonwealth of Nigerians. The president asked the executive chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, to conduct a thorough investigation into all aspects of the financial transactions involving Edu’s ministry, as well as the agencies thereunder.
The minister was suspended over a December 20, 2023 memo which indicated that she requested the Accountant General of the Federation, Oluwatoyin Madein, to transfer the sum of N585.2 million into the private account of an official in her ministry. The fund in question was reportedly transferred from the National Social Investment office account and was meant for disbursement to vulnerable Nigerians in Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Lagos and Ogun states, under the Federal Government’s poverty intervention project called Grants for Vulnerable Groups. The transfer contravenes various sections of Nigeria’s Financial Regulations 2009, but the minister, Mrs Edu, said the payment was legal, while the Accountant General insisted that her office did not honour the request, but instead advised the minister on the appropriate course of action. Edu’s suspension came just as her predecessor in office, Mrs Sadiya Umar-Farouq, underwent interrogation at the EFCC headquarters in Abuja. The former Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Social Development, who claimed to have fed school children who were home during the COVID-19 pandemic, is facing a probe over an alleged laundering of N37.1 billion.
To say the least, the optics from the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation are disconcerting. The ministry is supposed to care for the poorest of the poor but has been in the news for the wrong reasons, mostly having to do with alleged corruption. For quite some time, Nigerians had been complaining about the operations of the ministry whose so-called poverty alleviation schemes were mired in mysticism and scandals. Instructively, shortly after the Tinubu government came on board, it had to trash the National Social Register that the Muhammadu Buhari administration said it used to distribute money to vulnerable Nigerians, with the state governments agreeing with the Presidency’s observation that the register was not based on any scientific background. Recent developments, including the steady, astronomical rise in the sheer number of Nigerians trapped in poverty, show how rotten the system has been all along. Rather than being alleviated, poverty has been elevated with criminal consistency. This is no doubt a tragedy, especially given that the entire edifice called government itself should ideally be a humanitarian ministry, a means of actualising a higher quality of life for the people.
Ordinarily, before certain documents get to a minister, they ought to have passed through a number of layers, such that questionable documents ought not to be signed by the minister at all. But the whole system seems to be about corruption and frankly, we do not see how the suspension of the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Social Development in the wake of the furore generated by the leaked memo, ostensibly to make for unfettered investigation into the case, will concretely address the issue of corruption that underlies the running of the public service system, as exemplified by the current controversy. It ought to be clear that the current case would not even have been known if not for the leakage of the memo in question, suggesting that there could be many others like it that the system in itself did not expose or flag. In that case, suspending and investigating the minister will not necessarily expose other memos in the same category even as it would seem that the anomaly is most likely common within the public service given the way the minister and her supporters initially came out to defend the memo as having followed due process and received proper authorisation.
The case for a corruption-ridden public service is not difficult to make. This case illustrates the normalcy of corruption even at the level of the leadership of the ministries. We do not know whether the government itself is equipped to change the corrupt system given that it did not have the wherewithal to prevent or expose such anomaly on its own outside of the leakage of the memo by a whistle-blower and the adamant, negative comments on it on the social media. Unfortunately, a corrupt system is doomed even for those in government as it is incapable of delivering democratic goodies in any meaningful sense to anybody in the final analysis. It is therefore in the interest of all for the government to go beyond the current suspension of the minister and direct a comprehensive, critical overhaul of the system. Nothing really can be gained outside of a comprehensive change of the corrupt structure.
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