Betta Edu, the National Women leader of the All Progressive Congress, is not a novice in politics. Her political journey started when she was a student at the University of Calabar. She was the Vice President of the Student Union Government at the university in 2007-2008. She also served as the president of the female leadership forum, University of Calabar and so her emergence as the National Women Leader of the party did not come as a surprise to many. She is the youngest Women leader to ever occupy the position at 35 years-old.
Before her emergence, she was a special adviser to Governor Benedict Ayade on community and primary health care in 2015 and she rose to become the Director General of Cross River State Primary Health Care Agency and eventually became the Commissioner for Health in the State. She was also the chairman of the National Chairman of Nigeria Health Commissioners Forum.
Edu was a card carrying member of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP before her defection in 2021, following her principal, Ayade’s defection to APC in May 2021, in apparent solidarity and loyalty to him. Her tenure as the Commissioner of Health in the state was riddled with controversy. She was involved in a photo scam as alleged by a human right lawyer, James Ibor who accused her of presenting fake ventilator images, which were not visible at the state isolation centre.
She was also criticised for erecting an isolation hall which could only accommodate five beds at the heat of the pandemic in Nigeria. As a result of the controversy the isolation centre generated, the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) later vowed to sanction her for unethical handling of COVID-19 related issues in the state. She was accused of meddling in COVID-19 testing, surveillance, treatment and information which could jeopardize the lives of people in the State. Even before her emergence as the Women leader of her party, many were apprehensive that her involvement in the #EndSARS protest of 2020 while she was still in PDP would be revisited.
Edu had tweeted back in 2020 that the Lekki tollgate be taken down permanently and thus lent her voice to the movement. But a group known as “The Buharists Hang Out” (BHO) opposed her emergence as the Women leader because of those tweets. They requested the convention planning committee to disqualify her due to her unpatriotic disposition to APC and for endorsing violence as a way of expressing grievances. The medical practitioner, who had deleted the tweets when it became apparent that she would be occupying the position of Women leader, denied she ever made them, but when it was culled, she apologised for the lies, saying she made the tweets out of ignorance and pledged absolute loyalty to her new party.
Edu also faced more opposition before being fully accepted to her new position. Ahead of the convention, President Muhammadu Buhari had stated that consensus candidates be adopted before the convention. Of the other two women who signified their interest to occupy the position, Helen Boco Effiong and Mary Ekpere, the latter offered to step down, but not Effiong who insisted on slugging it out for the position. Edu eventually emerged victorious. Beyond the controversies, Edu has contributed her quota to the indigenes of her local government area through her philanthropic acts. Edu grew up in a strict Christian background. She is married and has two children but she has kept her family away from the prying eye of the media.
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