The Saturday’s Nigeria Immigration Service charade, called recruitment aptitude test for Nigeria youths looking for jobs, promoted and implemented by Mr. Abba Moro, a Nigeria’s minister of Interior was an ill wind in many respects that had come to blow away no fewer than 20 promising and productive Nigerian youths into their early graves.
The Immigration Service recruitment aptitude test, organized haphazardly and fatally executed, was actually done, from what one gathered from the grapevine, just so as to satisfy the official requirements, whereas the vacancies for which hundreds and thousands of applicants were made to converge at designated centres, have long been filled with privileged and well-connected Nigerians.
The Minister admitted that 520,000 applicants participated in the recruitment exercise across the country but that only 4,556 would be recruited at the end of the exercise, based on the available space.
Of course, despite what clearly looked a bleak prospect for getting the job, the Nigerian youths, determined to serve their fatherland and become useful and financially okay, allowed themselves to be blinded to the trap which the Abba Moro’s arrangement for the outing on Saturday had set up. The trap came in the form of cramming thousands of the applicants into designated centres and making the scrambling for space to breathe fresh air a gargantuan task.
As a matter of fact, about two days to the unfortunate Saturday, the minister had announced that applicants should go to the centres they chose in the online forms they filled for the aptitude test, contrary to the rumour that made the round before then that applicants had been asked to go for the test in their states of origin.
But, surprisingly, when applicants reported at the centres they filled in their online forms, they were asked to go to a centralized venue, and in the case of Abuja, to National Stadium.
One can imagine the financial, physical and psychological stresses that applicants who reported at, say, Gwagwalada where they filled in their forms, would encounter when they were suddenly redirected to travel again to the National Stadium for the test. As a matter of fact, quite a number of applicants who were not financially buoyant to travel to National Stadium from the original venues they chose, went back home while those who could afford it, “put heads” on the road, as an average African would say.
And after putting up such determination and bravery, most of such applicants fell into the Abba Moro trap and ended up not even getting the none existent immigration job and above all, they got deaths, injuries, bruised egos and unapologetic insults from Abba Moro.
Records show that in Abuja alone, eight Nigerians’ lives were wasted because over 65,000 applicants jampacked the Stadium which has total capacity of just 60,000 people. Not only that, information had it that it was only the pedestrian (tiny) gate in the stadium that was opened through where the multitudinous applicants were being ushered into the open stadium and that because of the slowness in the stream of applicants passing through the niddle’s eye (tiny gate), many others were jumping through the fence and other available openings.
Similar scenario played out in Edo state where two people died even with an unconfirmed report that as much as 20 applicants died in the Lagos centre. There were four deaths in Port Harcourt and three each in Minna, Niger state and Kano state, including a pregnant woman.
The first thing that came out of Abba Moro’s mouth when the report of deaths of the applicants filtered in was that they, 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.”
These statements coming from a man of minister’s calibre, smack of arrogance, foolishness, cruel, crude, irresponsibility, insensitivity, adult deliquence, mental derangement physical brigandage and criminal. How can Abba Moro be talking about “patience and orderliness” for Nigerians that have been jobless for years and when opportunity seemed to come, they were at best, being shoved aside and at worse, being technically locked out!!! Patience? Orderliness? How much do they cost in Abba Moro’s market of death?
As the events would continue to unfold, the minister was believed to have contracted the recruitment exercise to the wife of Senate President, with him supervising while the officers of the Nigeria Immigration Service just looked on.
This confirmed the notion in many quarters that the Interior Minister is completely out of tune with the modern system of conducting such a simple exercise. That because he is in a hurry to satisfy the financial gains of a single powerful soul, he sold out the lives of thousands of Nigerians, using his privileged position.
Hasn’t West African Examination Council (WAEC) been conducting almost similar exmination across even Africa for many years without a hitch? Hasn’t the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) been also conducting the same form of nationwide examination into the universities without a scene created? Why would Abba Moro and his blood thirsty group centralize a simple aptitude test for over 500,000 applicants in one day?
In deed, Abba Moro has shown, once more, how the government and its agents have been toying with the lives of unfortunate Nigerians, especially the youths, in the pursuit of some ends that are politically motivated, with evil designs.
