Even before she became a minister of the Federal Republic, Betta Chioma Edu had become a public face. She was all over the place, mingling with the right people in the right political cycle. She came to national life shortly after her tour of duty in Cross River State, where she served as Commissioner for Health.
Those who claimed to know said she got the job on a platter. The wife of former Governor Ben Ayade was said to have influenced her appointment. She was said to have sold Betta to her husband as not only beautiful but also brainy. Talk about beauty, brain and brawn! She is beautuful, no doubt. That is visible. She may also be brainy, but that is not to say she is street smart.
To be brainy is one thing in politics, but how that brain is applied matters. We have seen many brainy people fall by the wayside and this is what is happening to Betta too now. Betta became Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation Minister after President Bola Tinubu came to office last May 29. As a trained medical doctor, she would have loved to be health minister, but in politics, you do not always get what you want.
The humanitatian ministry has the same elements as the health portfolio – they are about taking care of the needs and well-being of the people. Her antecedents as a health commissioner was therefore expected to stand her in good stead in her discharge of her ministerial duties. She worked to be in the Federal Executive Council (FEC). As women leader of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC), she was in the frontline of the party’s presidential campaign.
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She spoke, sang and danced with the President and others during the campaign. Her reward was the ministerial job which she confessed to her pastor, Bishop David Oyedepo, was her only prayer request at last year’s annual Shiloh programme of the Living Faith Church, popularly known as Winners Chapel. According to reports, on being asked by papa as Winners faithful call Oyedepo, what she wanted from God, she responded: “to be a minister of the Federal Republic”. “It is done”, Oyedepo was said to have prophesied.
Indeed, the prophecy came to pass. But Betta seemed not to have handled her good fortune well. At 37, she is probably the envy of her peers, political associates and many others who may look at her as just another beautiful face who got to where she is through her connections. Knowing where she is coming from, she was expected to tread with caution and apply wisdom in everything she did.
In the slippery environment she found herself, she was even expected to be more careful to avoid tripping. From time immemorial, the civil service has been known as the graveyard of pushful politicians. The civil service operates like a cult. It is a bureaucracy that prides itself in following rules and regulations to the letter. At the same time, the workers breach these rules with impunity. They know the ways and means of cutting corners within the system and to survive, any discerning politician must play along with them.
Any politician who shuns them does so at his own peril. You do not get to a ministry and start strutting all over the place like the lord of the manor (ko ma tele shuashua, as they say in Yoruba). You have to open your ears and eyes to hear and see how things work before you do anything. The civil service was not created to be a problem for public officials but to help them in the running of government. But the tussle for power between career civil servants and public officials have changed all that.
This is why ministers are seen as enemies and not partners in progress for the greater good of the country. As a retired Justice of the Court of Appeal, who is now dead, often said when he was a high court judge in Lagos, “the civil service is a curse to this nation”. His lordship should know because he was in the civil service before he got to the Bench. Betta was not well schooled in the ways of the civil service despite having served as commissioner at a time. The civil service is a complex bureaucracy. It consumes anyone in its way, no matter their status.
Betta might have run into trouble because she did not take time to study the system, especially the civil service financial regulations. Civil servants guard these regulations jealously. They know what documents to raise in support of allocated funds, under which headings the cash should go, who to sign what papers and how to pay the beneficiaries.
Civil servants will never allow anybody, especially those they consider outsiders like politicians to operate these guidelines. Betta’s case should be a lesson to her colleagues. Their survival in office depends on following the civil service rules as stipulated. To avoid the Betta treatment, they must always watch their backs while dealing with civil servants.
Who knows? She may yet survive and return to her job, if she is cleared of any wrongdoing by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). This may be a long shot though. It is just unfortunate that things turned out like this for her. But the President must be commended for doing the right thing by suspending her.
