The Nigerian Immigration Service (“Service”) advertised for job openings and demanded that poor, unemployed young men and women pay N1000 each to be part of the recruitment process. According to the Minister of Interior, Mr. Abba Moro, 520,000 applicants paid the money and participated in the recruitment exercise across the country last Saturday. Out of this number, only 4,556 would be recruited at the end of the exercise, based on the available space. Before the Saturday event, the Service had stated the venues for the exercise across the 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory on its website. Essentially, the Service had an idea of the number of persons it was dealing with across the federation. The first issue arising from this arrangement is that the Service organised a scam. N1000 from 520,000 persons amounts to N520million. This is insensitivity, greed and outright fleecing of fellow citizens. It is illegal, immoral and can never be justified in the imagination of right -thinking men and women that a government agency, funded from the public budget and maintained at tax payers’ expense, should be turned into an engine of fraud to get money out of the unemployed and the poorest of the poor. There is no indication as to what has happened to this huge sum of money. Has it been paid over to government coffers? Is this the new way government intends to raise revenue? Should money be raised through the blood of the innocent? Is this a form of taxation on the unemployed or is it a punishment for their being unemployed? Government exists to alleviate the burden of the people rather than increasing their burden. No, the Service thinks otherwise! The most critical matter arising from this recruitment fiasco is the fact that no fewer than 20 Nigerians have died and many more have been injured. The only offence of the dead and the injured was that they needed a job. There were reports of stampedes and struggles to get question papers, pushing and shoving, leading to deaths and injuries. To insult the sensibilities of Nigerians, the Minister of Interior was reported as saying that the applicants “lost their lives due to impatience; 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.” He stated that the Deputy Comptroller, Immigration Operations and Passport, told him that he cancelled the exercise in Lagos due to the unruly behaviour of applicants. Apparently, the Minister, Abba Moro, has been blinded by the money collected from the applicants that he cared no more about their humanity. They are expendable persons whose death can be explained away with a wave of the hand. He has no sense of sympathy, empathy and fellow feeling. And this is a man in a position of authority over reasonable and decent men and women. As the leader of the ministry, was he not supposed to shuttle between the “battlefronts” of Lagos and Abuja which recorded the highest number of applicants? Rather, he was in Jos; doing what? But these deaths and injuries were avoidable and raise a number of questions. What was the crowd control measures put in place for this exercise? What were these laid down instructions the minister referred to? Did the Service conduct crowd control drills before the exercise? What were the specific instructions to the applicants given to them before the exercise? Did the Service involve the Police and other security agencies knowing full well that they were likely to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of participants at the exercise? Individuals organise music concerts attended by thousands of persons and there are no stampedes. Football matches attract full capacity in a stadium and no one dies. All these happen because there is a plan and strategy for crowd control and this is implemented to the letter. The right to life is the most fundamental of all the fundamental rights and it is the fulcrum upon which other rights rotate. Rights are only for the living and dead persons have no cognisable rights. The Constitution forbids the taking of life except in accordance with the due process of law. It states that no one shall be deprived intentionally of his life, save in execution of the sentence of a court in respect of a criminal offence of which he has been found guilty in Nigeria. It further provides that a person shall not be regarded as having been deprived of his life in contravention of the law, if he dies as a result of the use, to such extent and in such circumstances as are permitted by law, of such force as is reasonably necessary – (a) for the defence of any person from unlawful violence or for the defence of property: (b) in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained; or (c) for the purpose of suppressing a riot, insurrection or mutiny. The deceased did not die under any of these lawful exceptions. A man or an agency is expected to anticipate the natural consequences of his actions and omission. The leadership of Service, gathering hundreds of thousands of young men and women without any regard to their lives and safety is guilty of murdering the deceased. The leadership of Service has the blood of the innocents on their hands and should be made to pay for this criminal act. The sheer numbers that applied for this job demonstrated the level of unemployment in the country. Government officials keep lying and deluding themselves on the number of jobs purportedly created under makeshift policies. But they are not in a position to show concrete examples beyond sweeping generalisations. The Service had to organise the recruitment exercise in stadia across the country to accommodate the number of persons attending. Where are the jobs created by YOU WIN and SURE-P? How long can this deceit last? There is a way forward. Abba Moro and the Controller General of Immigrations should resign. They should tender an unreserved apology to Nigerians, especially to the families of the victims. The Attorney General of the Federation must ensure the diligent prosecution of the crimes supportable by available facts. No cover-up this time. The money collected from the applicants must be returned to them. This is a huge lesson for young Nigerians whose future has been mortgaged and stolen by the mindless organised syndicate in government. For those who sit at home during rallies for change and and believe that manna will fall again from heaven, the message is clear. If things do not change, there are no jobs and you may never get one. You may even die in the search for one. But I do not wish you evil. It is the hard truth. The road map for our liberation is clear and we need collectively, to legally and legitimately fight for our rights.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 04:22:18 +0000
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