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The unwholesome practice of what is now widely called ‘fee-for-job’ by many government agencies has come under sharp criticism by a cross section of Nigerians.
The criticism comes in the wake of a recent fatal recruitment exercise by the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) for which the unfortunate applicants paid N1,000 for application forms, outside of exam kits they were forced to buy.
Twent-one applicants lost their lives in stampedes in the NIS employment exercises in centres across the country last weekend.
The NIS incident only brought to light what has now become a common practice by federal, state and local government agencies and parastatals, including the Nigerian Prisons Service (NIPS) the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), the Nigeria Customs Service, the Civil Defence , now more widely known as ‘My Oga At The Top’ service, among others.
BusinessDay’s investigations show that the practice has become so infectious that even the military, which in the past begged young Nigerians to put their lives and limbs at risk in the service of the country by enlisting, now routinely demands payments for application forms for such enlistments.
Those who spoke with our correspondent, particularly condemned government agencies and parastatals’ penchant for fleecing hapless job-seekers for elusive vacancies.
An economist, who made a statistic of the exercise and the aftermath, said: “The number of applicants,522,650, represents 1 percent of Nigerians within 18-35 years of age. The number of job openings being competed for is 5,000, representing a ratio of 105 applicants for each opening. The application fee N1000 (($6 or £3.5) per applicant amounted to a total income of N522,650,000 ($3,135,900 or £1,829,275) to NIS.
A pundit who spoke with BusinessDay on condition of anonymity, said bad governance had done incalculable harm to the conscience of most Nigerians, so much that many people have lost their human reasoning.
“If you have been out of a job for one month, you would agree with me that the pang of joblessness is so strong. Now, you can imagine what people who have been jobless for over four to five years are suffering.
“ For a government agency to have called these vulnerable citizens and subjected them to payment of huge sums of money for a job not guaranteed, is not only wicked, but satanic. In sane societies, heads would have started rolling by now, but I assure you that with all the threats from the Federal Government, nothing is going to happen to any of those responsible for the ugly incident of Saturday,” the analyst said.
With regard to last weekend’s incident, those who spoke to BusinessDay, flayed the method adopted by the ministry and the NIS, saying the organisers ought to have taken sufficient caution, considering the fact that a similar exercise in 2008 ended in disaster.
Henry Nwagbara, CEO, Hencova Limited (an IT-based company), said the fee-for-job practice should not even be mentioned by any government agency or parastatal.
“It is expected of government to create jobs for the citizens or create the enabling environment for people to decide on what to do for themselves. It is unfortunate that successive administrations in Nigeria have continued to fail the people.
“There are no jobs, there is no enabling environment and everybody is on his or her own. As if the situation is not bad enough, agencies of government that should create jobs are hiding under the high unemployment rate in the country to perpetrate all manner of evil, and to enrich themselves.
“How can NIS demand N1,000 from each applicant for an elusive job? I urge the Federal Government to go beyond threat and ensure that perpetrators of this heinous crime against the country are not only relieved of their posts, but tried for the death of the youth,” Nwagbara said.
Onyema Ugochukwu, former Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) gubernatorial candidate in Abia State, and former chairman of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) said the method employed by the Interior Ministry and NIS was condemnable, alleging that it could only have been motivated by corruption.
“How can any sensible person or persons not know that gathering 520,000 people for a recruitment exercise of ‘employment’ not ‘merriment’ in a day, is a risky exercise? In other words, in each 36 states of our federation, an average of 14,444 applicants (persons / human beings) were gathered at each stadium by the immigration office for this ‘obnoxious’ exercise.
“It is only madness and absolute imbecility, if not corruption, that can inform this kind of arrangement,” Ugochukwu said.
“For God’s sake, why should the organisers of this interview gather all these people in one day and at a place? Why didn’t the organisers arrange this interview in batches? Why didn’t they spread the interview across many days?
“ Why didn’t they conduct this interview in smaller groups and in different locations like LGAs? Why didn’t they deploy the use of internet to screen down the number of eligible candidates? Can they interview 14,444persons in a day? Did they deliberately create a market for themselves for economic gain at the expense of the applicants and our nation?”
Recounting some similar ugly experience in the past, the former NNDC chairman said: “We all heard similar stories when (I think) the Prison officials’ recruitment occurred; when the Road safety officials and INEC Staff recruitments occurred.”
Zebulon Agomuo
