Sadiya Farouq’s lopsided, corrupt legacy assails Nigeria’s new humanitarian minister Betta Edu

On August 16, the federal cabinet secretary’s office released a circular announcing the portfolios for the 45 confirmed ministerial nominees. The ministers were sworn into office on August 21 by President Bola Tinubu.

 

Number 41 on the list was Betta Edu, who was asked to take charge of the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation.

While it may carry a somewhat benign name, the job itself might not be so amiable: Ms Edu is to assume responsibility for one of the most controversial and corrupt ministries under the government of former President Muhammadu Buhari.

Established by Mr Buhari in August 2019 as the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and Social Development, it oversees six agencies that span different sectors across the country. The National Commission for Refugees, Migrants, and Internally Displaced Persons (NCFRMI), the North East Development Commission (NEDC), are just some of the departments under the ministry.

Others are the National Senior Citizens Centre (NSCC), National Commission for Persons with Disabilities (NCPD), National Agency for Prohibition and Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).

The ministry is also in charge of the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP), a federal government intervention programme launched in 2015 to combat poverty.

However, Nigeria’s humanitarian crisis has worsened despite the ministry overseeing mega-budget agencies and intervention programmes.

Olanrewaju Suraj, Head of the Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA), said Ms Edu’s predecessor and pioneer humanitarian minister, Sadiya Farouq, underperformed and has called for her time at the ministry to be investigated.

Mr Suraj told Peoples Gazette that the new government “cannot do anything satisfactory without interrogating, probing and investigating what happened under that ministry.”

This report highlights some of the scandals and allegations of corruption that the new humanitarian minister, Ms Edu, inherits from Ms Farouq and why experts like Mr Suraj want a total overhaul of the ministry’s operations to ensure proper accountability.

Ms Farouq’s history of corruption

Ms Farouq’s long history of scandals, abuse of office, and allegations of corruption — some of which followed her from when she was chairman of NCFRMI from October 2016 until August 2019 — dogged her time at the humanitarian ministry.

She was NCFRMI chairman in 2017 when Saudi Arabia donated about 200 tonnes of date fruits to Nigerian Muslims displaced by Boko Haram. The fruits, intended for breaking the Ramadan fast, were instead sold on the streets and markets of Abuja and Borno.

Following the scandal, the Nigerian foreign ministry apologised to Saudi Arabia and promised to investigate the matter. However, the investigation into the scandal grew cold, and Ms Farouq, whose NCFRMI was said to have distributed the fruits, would become a minister.

Married to Sadique Abubakar, a former chief of air staff, who ran and lost in the March 18, 2023, Bauchi governorship elections under the All Progressives Congress (APC), Ms Farouq ran her husband’s campaign and was again accused of diverting and sharing food and other palliatives from her ministry to sway and induce voters for her husband.

Bauchi State Governor Bala Mohammed, an opponent of Ms Farouq’s husband in the governorship election, accused the former minister of diverting the federal government-funded food items meant for poor Nigerians as handouts for alleged vote-buying.

Ms Farouq, through her media adviser, Nneka Anibeze, denied the allegation, describing it as false and a misrepresentation of the facts, adding that the palliatives shared during the Bauchi election were part of the federal government intervention programmes for the state.

“We have these programmes in all the 36 states of the federation and the FCT. It’s not just Bauchi. Because it’s Bauchi and her husband is contesting, that makes it vote-buying?” Ms Farouq’s then-media adviser queried.

Squabble over control of SIP

After being appointed minister, Ms Farouq had a fallout with Maryam Uwais, the former Presidential Special Adviser and pioneer administrator of the Social Investment Programme (SIP), in a manner considered by several stakeholders as a tussle for authority over the controversial enormous N500 billion annual SIP’s intervention fund.

The duo sparred over the exit package for disengaged N-Power volunteers as each party traded blame on who was responsible for the delay in disengaging the beneficiaries.

To settle their quarrel Mr Buhari’s then Chief of Staff, the late Abba Kyari, was said to have asked Mrs Uwais to relinquish control of the SIP initiative to Ms Farouq.

With the programme under her control, Ms Farouq still couldn’t resolve the N-Power volunteer exit problem. Instead, she recruited new volunteers for the batch C programme, leaving the exited Batch A and B volunteers with a never-ending list of failed promises.

The controversial “Nexit programme,” which promised volunteers from the two batches a loan to start a business and the promise to absorb them into the federal civil service, became false hopes meant to string the volunteers along until she left office.

Although the minister acknowledged that the fund had been approved by the then-president for distribution to the beneficiaries, at least 15 volunteers from Kano, Adamawa, and Katsina told this reporter that they hadn’t received any money or other benefits from the ministry.

Describing Ms Farouq as a “colossal failure”, an NSIP official in Yola, who is also a project beneficiary, said, “That Nexit of a thing was a total scam. They just scammed everyone, which is unfortunate. I was not surprised about the D’banj controversies.”

Over 200,000 Nigerians from the first batch (A), which commenced the programme in 2016, were to have exited the scheme in December 2018. As the 2019 general elections approached, the federal government extended the programme to May that year. Without a viable plan, this led to an indefinite extension which ended in June 2020.

About 300,000 recipients from the second batch (B), which began in August 2018, were also expected to finish the scheme in July 2020.

The N-Power initiative is Nigeria’s work-for-cash social assistance programme. It was launched in 2016 by former President Buhari, and it has thousands of direct beneficiaries working in the programme’s primary target industries: agriculture, health, education, and tax.

Other programmes under the SIPs include school feeding, cash transfer, TraderMoni, MarketMoni and FarmerMoni, and until 2019 were previously under the vice-president’s supervision and then moved to the humanitarian ministry.

Experts want an objective evaluation of the humanitarian ministry carried out to determine the damage done by Ms Farouq. Their reasons are that months after she assumed office, not just the N-Power, but all the SIPs were marred with controversies, with persistent concerns of corruption and nepotism that affected the goodwill of the programme.

As the humanitarian minister, Ms Farouq’s unnecessary meddling in intervention programmes stalled their progress.

In March 2020, during the COVID-19-induced lockdown, ex-President Buhari had to intervene, forcing the ministry to pay a three-month moratorium on loans to all TraderMoni, MarketMoni, and FarmerMoni beneficiaries to mitigate the impact of the lockdown on the economy.

School-feeding scandal 

Under Ms Farouq’s supervision, the federal government’s school-feeding programme was also not spared from scandals, controversies and allegations of corruption.

During the nationwide school shutdown and following former President Buhari’s directive to the ministry that the school-feeding programme continued in the two most impacted COVID-19 states of Lagos, Ogun, and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Ms Farouq compiled and supervised the distribution of food items to students in their respective homes.

Critics questioned the procedure used to determine where the students lived and how the ministry identified the pupils who should benefit from the initiative.

Months later, at the Presidential Task-force briefing on COVID-19 in Abuja, Ms Farouq claimed that the ministry spent over N523.3 million to feed 382,765 pupils during the lockdown.

The announcement elicited reactions and calls for investigation into the process by which the ministry was able to feed pupils who were at home at such a humongous amount.

Ms Farouq had first claimed to have distributed “uncooked foods”. However, when the Kingdom Human Rights Foundation International (KHRFI), a civil society group, sued her and the ministry to account for the over N500 million in public funds, she changed her story, claiming that “5,000 cooks were employed” for the 20-day programme in Abuja and the two states.

During her ministerial review in March this year, Ms Farouq claimed that the ministry was feeding 10 million pupils in over 66,000 public schools across Nigeria.

Reacting to Ms Farouq’s claim of feeding students during the lockdown, Mr Suraj said it was a “red flag that needs to be pursued, not just because of accountability but in the benefit of the interest of the victims of the corruption that pervaded their poverty situation.”

Cash stealing scheme 

Following the economic hardship caused by the coronavirus, former President Buhari directed that one million more households, up from 2.6 million, be added to the National Social Register (NSR), an initiative under the National Social Safety Net Coordinating Office (NASSCO).

NASSCO, in collaboration with the World Bank-funded Youth Employment and Support Operation (YESSO), identifies the poorest households in given communities across 34 states.

Ms Farouq claimed that for months she distributed N20,000 in cash to 5,000 beneficiaries throughout many states and had enlisted the help of the State Security Service (SSS) and anti-corruption agencies like EFCC, ICPC and Code of Conduct Bureau.

Her admittance that 25 per cent of the almost three million poor Nigerians identified in the NSR received the social award was criticised, with many stakeholders again questioning the procedures used in determining the beneficiaries and demanding accountability.

The cash transfer scheme is well-funded. It benefits from a fund created by the 2017 deal with Switzerland on the return and supervision of the $322 million Abacha loot and a $500 million credit from the World Bank to fund the initiative for six years, from 2016 to 2022.

The programme also enjoys revenue from the N500 billion for NSIP, included in federal government budgets since 2016.

In March 2023, Ms Farouq claimed that about 1.9 million vulnerable Nigerians were each receiving N5,000 cash gifts every month from the federal government.

There are unresolved controversies and questions regarding how vulnerable persons in the NSR are identified and selected, with specific questions regarding their ethnicity.

The controversies surrounding the school feeding programme during the lockdown persist. Also, according to interviews with several volunteers, the N-Power exit incentives for outgoing beneficiaries are yet to be resolved and have left them impoverished.

UN SDG scam

The SDG, promoted by the UN, aims to achieve established objectives on essential topics like gender equality, inclusive economy, health and well-being, education, and poverty.

Months after she assumed office, Ms Farouq said her ministry would prioritise data collection on SDGs to help former President Buhari lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty.

She failed to achieve that, and the SDG, an office operating under the humanitarian ministry, is being investigated by EFCC for corruption and allegations of contract scams.

The Lagos command of the anti-graft agency had written to the SDG office that it was investigating it for abuse of office, money laundering, contract award scam and fraud.

Ex-presidential adviser on SDGs, Adejoke Orelope-Adefulire, who was deputy governor of Lagos from 2011 to 2015, was appointed the SDG office administrator in 2016 and 2019.

Ms Orelope-Adefulire has denied allegations of missing N23 billion in the SDGs office.

New minister should consider

There is a continuous increase in the percentage of Nigeria’s Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). In 2022, the number of IDPs in the country rose to 3.6 million from about 2.2 million IDPs in December 2019, representing an increase of 38.9 per cent. Of this figure, 1.9 million suffer prolonged displacement in the northeastern state of Borno.

The country also has the highest overall projected risk in terms of socioeconomic vulnerability, inequality and food insecurity, according to the 2019 Global Risk Index.

A 2018 UNICEF study indicates that Nigeria has over 10 million out-of-school children (the highest in the world), with 69 per cent of children aged six to 14 residing in the north.

The KPMG, in its International Global Economy Outlook report for H1 2023, projects an increase in Nigeria’s unemployment rate from 37.7 per cent in 2022 to 40.6 per cent this year.

Nigeria has a high poverty rate, with nearly 25 million of its over 200 million population at risk of food insecurity due to continued conflict, inflation, rising food prices and climate change.

Ms Edu may not control the number of Nigerians displaced by the Boko Haram conflict, banditry, and other security challenges facing the country. However, effectively managing the resources of the humanitarian and poverty alleviation ministry can help drive down these figures.