That scandalous recruitment exercise

The wickedness, carelessness, recklessness, thoughtlessness and planlessness with which the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) handled the recruitment test in all designated centers across the country and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) reveals how authorities at the NIS took Nigerians for granted. The very painful outcome of the ill-fated recruitment test further exposes government insensitivity to […]

The wickedness, carelessness, recklessness, thoughtlessness and planlessness with which the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) handled the recruitment test in all designated centers across the country and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) reveals how authorities at the NIS took Nigerians for granted. The very painful outcome of the ill-fated recruitment test further exposes government insensitivity to the crisis of unemployment in the country; confirming how less our present leaders care about critical issues that concern the survival and well-being of Nigerians.
Thousands of applicants turned up last week Saturday March 15, 2014 to attend the recruitment test in to the NIS at designated centers nationwide. Sadly, scores of candidates lost their lives as a result of stampede, which according to media reports, was occasioned by the large crowd of applicants at various centers. At the National Stadium in Abuja, ten were reported dead while over fifty others sustained injuries. Details of the death toll in other centers include four in Port Harcourt; three each in Minna, Kano and Benin. The death of 19 young men and women who lost their lives in the struggle for a livelihood in their father land is just too tragic to be left without sanctioning those responsible for all the failures or acts of negligence that led to the tragedy. The cancellation of the scandalous exercise is not good enough. But who will sanction who? To sanction an offender is a taboo in President Jonathan’s administration. Sacking whistleblowers and anointing corrupt public officers is a known hallmark of the Jonathan-led government.
Our lawmakers do not also help matters. It has become hypocritical of them that when national tragedies of this nature occur, all they say on the floor of the Senate or House of Representatives never go beyond the four walls of their chambers. You will hear them shout: ‘This must stop’; ‘we can no longer tolerate this’; ‘He/she must resign’; ‘We’ll conduct public hearing’; and that would be the end of the matter.
It is scandalous of the NIS or the consultant engaged for the exercise to have collected the sum of N1, 000 each from 743,000 applicants that applied for the job; knowing very well that only 4,500 vacancies exist. It is also wicked of the NIS to have invited everyone who applied including those the NIS authorities knew to be unqualified to come for the aptitude test. Qualifications, age limit and areas of specialization are some of the many criteria that could have been used to weed out some of the applicants. Similarly, it is the height of inadvertency on the part of the organizers to assemble a crowd of this magnitude without making adequate arrangements with medical institutions or organizations to provide first aid services at the various recruitment centers.
The huge numbers of applicants that turned up for this recruitment exercise suffices a strong warning to Nigerian leaders that unless some pragmatic and concrete measures are taken to address it, the country may be sitting on a time-bomb that could explode in our faces any day. In many countries, youths constitute between 45-50% of the population, while children and the aged share in the remaining percentage. It is the productive capacity of youths in various sectors of the economy that sustains the old as well as children who lack the physical strength to earn a living. Any country therefore that neglects the needs of its youths may as well be doomed.
Although Nigerian leaders are toying with the crisis of unemployment, such a phenomenon is but the wages of a country without a National Development Plan. There has been for nearly three decades now in Nigeria a complete disconnect between government policies, for instance, and its manpower needs. No correlation seems to exist, similarly, between government capital projects and the basic needs of Nigerians including access to clean water, improved healthcare, and quality education.
The last time Nigeria had a National Development plan was under President Shehu Shagari who launched the Fourth National Development Plan in 1981, which was expected to last till 1985. Unfortunately, it was affected by the change of government in 1983 and by yet another change in 1985. Of course, the country surely benefited from the previous National Development Plans. Notable achievements of the First National Development Plan of 1962 to 1968 (which later extended to 1970 because of the military intervention of 1966) included the Port Harcourt Refinery, Jebba Paper Mill, Sugar Mill in Bacita, and construction of some trunk ‘A’ roads. The first generation of Nigerian universities was also established in this period.
General Yakubu Gowon in 1970 launched the Second National Development Plan on behalf of the federal and the then twelve state governments. This Development plan which lasted till 1975 introduced among others the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme, federal scholarship and loans scheme for Nigerian students; all to cater for the higher education needs of Nigerian youths. The NYSC was designed to reduce the incidence of instantaneous redundancy that confronted youths immediately after graduation.
The Third National Development Plan was launched in April 1975 to focus among other objectives on even distribution of income, reduction in the level of unemployment, diversification of the economy and the indigenization of the country’s economic activities. I doubt if those in leadership positions in Nigeria today care to know what the needs of the country are. They don’t even have adequate statistics of what Nigeria owns or produces. Just ask those who manage our oil resources, for instance, of the quantity of crude oil drilled in the country per day. The answers you are likely to get may be as many the respondents because the figures from the minister of petroleum resources will differ from those to be given by the NNPC; PPPRA; Ministry of Finance and the CBN.
Today, we are complaining of inadequate number of trained teachers; yet, NCE graduates roam the streets in search of jobs. We are complaining of dearth of doctors in our hospitals; yet, Nigerian universities produce more accountants and political scientists than medical doctors. It is unfortunate that government programmes neither reflect national aspirations nor the country’s manpower needs.  Is it not absurd to find a trained biology or chemistry teacher working in the bank instead of being in his proper place, classroom; an agricultural scientist chasing jobs in oil companies; and a political scientist working as a farm manager? All these forms of misemployment or underemployment in addition to the critical issue of unemployment are, to a logical extent, the results of a lack of National Development Plan. May Allah (SWT) salvage Nigerian from the wicked intentions of its leaders, amin.