Betta Edu and the Winners Church

There must be very few Nigerians who don't know Dr. Betta Edu now, Tinubu's minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management, and Poverty Alleviation. She is all over social media for the wrong reasons. She is alleged to have transferred about three billion naira into different private accounts. Betta Edu is a 37-year-old lady from the Niger Delta region of the country. Her first public mention was when she was named by the president among the many who are lucky to be so named as ministers of the federal republic. Why are they so lucky? Because we are about 200 million in Nigeria and only 50 out of us were named as ministers which means they have unrestrained access to government money. With access comes the opportunity to have wealth without doing any work. "Don't you know;" a friend who is a a politician told this essayist many years ago, "that government money is the easiest to spend." That politician friend was regaling us his friends with the account of how he and his crowd of Tinubu supporters had visited the Bourdillon road, Ikoyi, house of Tinubu and how the godfather of Lagos politics had thrown wads of uncountable naira up in the air and how that had led to a most deadly scramble among the visitors as each person fought to make the most of that opportunity. Tinubu is not throwing money in the air now, he probably has more than enough now, but he has appointed ministers whose aspiration looks like wanting to accumulate money such that they will also be able to throw uncountable naira in the air for poor Nigerians to trample themselves over. Of the money Edu allegedly kept in a private account, another minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo who is said to be performing in the Interior Ministry is said to have also taken a contract for over 400 million naira for a job done in a month. Tunji-Ojo has refuted the allegations saying he resigned from the company in 2019 having won the election into the House of Representatives. Some commentators are alleging that there’s a personal relationship between Tunji-Ojo and Betta Edu.

Betta Edu has been suspended by the president who has called the nation's anti-graft agency, EFCC to look into the allegations. How did Betta Edu's travail start? Betta Edu recommended the director of the National Social Investment Agency, NASIPA, Halima Shehu for suspension because she had transferred about 44 billion naira of the agency into a private account. The recommendation was accepted and Halima Shehu was suspended. But drowning Halima would not go down alone, she fired back that she had transferred the money to a private account to keep it away from the "stealing" eyes of the minister. She alleged that the minister had stolen 3 billion naira within three months. Betta Edu denied it. Some commentators saw Halima's defence as that of a drowning woman who was looking for who to drown with. But no sooner than she was suspended than Minister Betta Edu too was asked to go on suspension and EFCC invited in to look into the alleged fraud.

But Betta Edu becomes more interesting to those of us in the Church because it may signal the move of God to expose the dirty monies that have been laundered in the Church and have been responsible for the flamboyant lifestyle of our pastors. In December 2023, during the annual Shiloh program of the Winners Church, Betta Edu caught the attention of the media who reported her testimony. She had testified that in the preceding year's Shiloh she had prayed that God would make her minister in Nigeria. As she finished she went to see "Papa" meaning Bishop Oyedepo (Papa is the title by which many leaders of the Church in Nigeria are called contrary to the teaching of Christ) and she whispered to his ear that she wanted to be a minister. Oyedepo laid his hand on her and said It is done." She was therefore back in the 2023 Shiloh to return glory to God that she was now, despite many oppositions a minister of the federal republic. A thunderous applause rent the cool evening air but something did not go down with me. I felt her prayer was an abuse of the reason Jesus died and rose. Why she wanted to be a minister in a wobbly Nigeria could not have been for the emancipation of hapless Nigerians who had been pauperized by generations of politicians. She wanted to be a minister for very selfish reasons, which must be to loot the public treasury, a motive with which all that goes into public office has been associated. I put my thoughts into a sentence in a WhatsApp group that "Betta Edu" was unlikely to be a successful minister from the perspective of the citizens of Nigeria. I felt she was too religious. I felt also that Oyedepo's approach to the issue was not right. Why did Oyedepo not ask for her motives for wanting to be a minister? Has the Church become a cult centre where anybody can come and have their will done or is the church to get its members to secure the will of God and go for it? The Bible from page after page teach that God does everything after the counsel of his will. Betta Edu would have better approached a juju man to get that kind of thing. Of course, many in Nigeria attend both the church and the occult. The Church now is deep into the occult.

I reckoned that Oyedepo's reputation went a notch higher that evening as a man whose prayers are answered and whom anybody can approach to help them get their wish fulfilled. That is always the posture of Nigerian Church leaders. They can pray and they can answer the prayer. They like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time will not go into the kingdom and will not allow those who want to go into the kingdom of God to go. On that day, Oyedepo was more popular than Jesus in his Church. Oyedepo took all the glory. But it was clear to me that if anybody answered Edu's prayer, it was not God, it must be Satan. The manner of the prayer and all the attitude that attended it bore the signature of Satan. Betta Edu was not the first in the Church, there was Femi Osibona, the young man whose21-storey Ikoyi apartments under construction collapsed killing him and many others who were trapped in the building. Femi Osibona had similarly gone after Mathew Ashimolowo, the pastor of Kingsway Church with headquarters in London, who had similarly laid hand on him as Osibona caught up with him on a highway in Canada. Ashimolowo ordered him to go to Nigeria and bless "your country" after Osibona had similarly secured Ashimolowo's prayer and led him to go to South Africa and prosper by building estates there. Femi Osibona obeyed his god, Ashimolowo and came to Nigeria and was prospering. But the project failed and he died with the project. Nigerians who watched with keen interest had linked Ashimolowo's regular visits to a sorcerer near his home town of Odeomu in Osun State to the success of his church in London where he has the biggest church in terms of worshippers and church facilities. A Christian woman who once met him in the place of the sorcerer confided in this essayist. Ashimolowo, when he saw this woman who said she had driven a friend there in her car but refused at first to enter the house of the sorcerer, greeted her: Soo eyi’’n na de bi" ( So you also patronize this place). Ashimolowo was driven there in a car marked in the name of their church. Later when by revelation the woman was asked to be fetched into the house of the sorcerer; as confirmation of the greatness of his powers, the sorcerer boasted to her that he was behind the success of Ashimolowo in London. The woman confirmed that all the prophecies the sorcerer gave her that day were fulfilled to the hilt.

Now just as Ashimolowo prayed for Femi Osibona and he experienced a sudden success but later a failure took his life, Oyedepo had similarly prayed for Betta Edu. When Edu was made minister by Tinubu, she boasted that it was rare for people of her age to be made minister in Nigeria. But now, barely six months into her job she has been fingered in a financial crisis to which the EFCC has been invited. If Tinubu does not renege on his promise to wage war on corruption and with the new EFCC chairman, Ola Olukoyede who is also a Christian from the Redeemed Christian Church of God who may want to demonstrate his Christian virtue, Betta Edu may be on her way to prison. To get out of this problem she may have to return to Oyedepo for another round of witchcraft prayer. It can't be imagined that Oyedepo will have any influence with Tinubu whom he opposed at the 2023 election giving his support to Peter Obi of the Labour Party. Possibly God has begun to expose all the dirty criminal monies sourced from the government and other criminal activities like drug dealings and human organ trafficking and laundered through the churches.

It is not only Oyedepo and Ashimolowo that are in this attitude. Tinubu himself confirmed to a group of journalists many years ago that he was the financier of Tunde Bakare's convened Save Nigeria Group, SNG, it was alleged that he had sent a full "Ghana must go bag" loaded with naira which at first Bakare's church secretary refused to take it. He later took it after Bakare was persuaded to accept it by an influential political activist in their church who is now dead. Some members of that church also alleged that a member of the church who chaired a bank that eventually failed also contributed about one billion naira to SNG and another 4 billion naira to APC in the time of Buhari when Bakare was his running mate. Tongues are wagging that 1 billion naira supposedly given by somebody in Winners and announced publicly may be by Betta Edu. Perhaps the EFCC investigation will exhume that.

Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master’s degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Metro's editorial stance.