Scandal as Palm Oil of Politics
To posthumously paraphrase Chinua Achebe, scandal is the palm oil with which political words are eaten. Some Nigerians were surprised that a scandal landed rather early on President Bola Tinubu’s desk. He has been in office only seven months when a minister of his, a female one, the youngest one, a beautiful one, a professional one, an energetic one and a favourite one as well, was suddenly embroiled in scandal. She was in the President’s office days earlier to push for the suspension of a top agency head in her ministry, National Coordinator of the National Social Investment Program Agency [NSIPA], who was said to have transferred tens of billions into other accounts.
Papers soon surfaced that Minister Betta Edu was less than what US President Dwight Eisenhower described in 1952 as “to be clean as a hound’s tooth.” She herself had ordered N585million to be transferred to the personal account of a civil servant, said to be the Project Accountant of the Vulnerable Persons’ poverty alleviation scheme. The transfer apparently went ahead even after the Accountant General of the Federation warned that it was improper. Other papers were soon leaked, that Edu approved payment for air tickets for a trip to Lokoja, a city that has no airport. Compassionate commentators later said there is one [unused] airport nearby at Ajaokuta, so the minister probably aimed to land there.
The president quickly appeased restless opposition figures, media and civil society agitators by suspending the minister. Trouble is, newspapers quickly lurched on other leaked documents suggesting that Minister of Interior Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo’s private firm got a N487 million contract from Edu’s ministry. The minister’s defence that he resigned from running the firm four years earlier was quite shaky because he remained a shareholder and his wife still runs the firm while his children serve as its directors. Although some newspapers said the minister “was summoned to the Villa,” he was not suspended, either because the evidence against him was not convincing to the Villa, or because it feared even more official documents could yet leak and create a domino effect on top officials.
Look, will a time ever come in Nigeria when governance will proceed without one scandal or another? Right from my early school years in the 1970s when I used to sit on the doorsteps of our home and wait impatiently for my father to return from work with a sheaf of newspapers, I got the impression that scandal is the palm oil with which Nigerian political and governance words are eaten. Even during the military era when there were no parliaments, no opposition parties, no human rights