Immigration haram!

Boko was the most infamous Haram that we all knew until last Saturday when the Immigration Department decided to contribute its quota to the depopulation spree via an incompetently organised recruiting exercise which harvested the lives of seven graduate applicants in Abuja, four in Port-Harcourt, two in Minna and three in Benin and Kano respectively.  […]

Boko was the most infamous Haram that we all knew until last Saturday when the Immigration Department decided to contribute its quota to the depopulation spree via an incompetently organised recruiting exercise which harvested the lives of seven graduate applicants in Abuja, four in Port-Harcourt, two in Minna and three in Benin and Kano respectively.  I personally had a taste of the Abuja end of the confusion as I beheld a sea of confused humanity around the Abuja National Stadium. From the top of the bridge after the junction to the National Hospital on the Airport Road, hundreds of cars were sprawled all over the place, disturbing the flow of traffic. Tens of thousands of young men and women could be seen in white shorts and t-shirts, the uniform in which the unfortunate among them were eventually transported to the morgue.
As usual, we have heard that the Immigration officials who had advertised 7am as commencement time for the exercise did not show up until after 9am, and even then opened only one gate out of perhaps twelve possible gates. In the ensuing stampede, seven applicants died. That was not the first time such tragedy would attend Immigration recruitment. It had happened before and promises were made that it would never happen again. Last Saturday, the same thing recurred. If there is another exercise next year more people will die because those at the helm of affairs never learn from their mistakes. Incompetent officials are never punished. Inconsolable parents are left to bury their children.
In a decent system, Interior Minister Abba Moro and the Comptroller-General of Immigration would have been fired by now. Instead of hiding his head in shame the incompetent minister came out to blame the dead and injured for impatience! He said 520,000 applicants participated in the recruitment exercise across the country out of which 4,556 would eventually be employed. That disclosure itself shows how bad our unemployment situation has become.
“The applicants lost their lives due to impatience”, said Moro; “they did not follow the laid down procedures spelt out to them before the exercise. Many of them jumped through the fences of affected centres and did not conduct themselves in an orderly manner to make the exercise a smooth one. This caused stampede and made the environment unsecured.”
Mr. Moro, it is your job to organise the exercise in such a way that orderliness would be guaranteed. It is the duty of the Comptroller-General of Immigration and his staff to ensure that advertised times were adhered to, and all gates thrown open to allow easy access. When you create a needle’s eye situation as has always happened in such situations in this country, there will be many deaths. You now compound your incompetence with the wickedness of blaming the dead and other victims.
Of course, Moro can say what he likes. His children wouldn’t queue for such jobs. It is the practice for vacancies in government establishments to be shared among the top elite. Traditional rulers have their slots; so do ministers, legislators, state governors, permanent secretaries and other heads of federal parastatals. Recruitment exercises are usually held to fulfil all righteousness. Usually the list of those to be employed would already have been compiled following the afore-mentioned patronage formula.
 It is the children of the poor who pay application fees online, travel many kilometres to examination centres that are fully padlocked, stay in endless queues under temperatures averaging 40 degrees Celsius and die in the ensuing stampede when one lone gate is eventually thrown open.
Whoever decided that only one gate should be used for the Abuja exercise ought to be charged with murder. Same goes for all the other incompetent operatives who replicated the Abuja tragedy in other parts of the country.
National Kung-Fu
If the posturing of the various interest groups jostling for reckoning in the National Conference which is scheduled to be inaugurated today by President Jonathan is anything to go by, we may be in for historically interesting times that may eventually enter the record books as National Kung-Fu. All over the place, it is a game of the elites. The same people who brought us to this sorry pass are saddled with the task of fashioning a way out of the self-constructed maze. Judging by the way many of our otherwise educated and politically-conscious elite react to issues, there is no prize for guessing that most of the members are not going there to achieve consensus on anything but to ram their views down the throats of others.
In a nation as diverse as we have on our hands one would have thought that we would make use of every opportunity to understand one another better and secure the best deal for the generality of our people. As I have often had occasion to say, there is no Yoruba poverty, Hausa destitution or Igbo penury. The masses of our people are attired in rags from Badagry to Maiduguri, from Port-Harcourt to Sokoto. If the conference is not to end up as yet another jamboree, let it deliver on at least some principal items – true federalism and the whittling down of the power at the centre to devolve more resources to the zones/states so that we can do much more for the 85 percent of our people who till the ground. Each zone has come with a shopping list. That shouldn’t bother anyone as long as the conference members agree ab initio that their style would be to disagree with others in a civilised manner without being disagreeable.
Did I hear amen?