President Jonathan has queried the Minister of Interior, Mr. Abba Moro; and the Comptroller-General of the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS), Mr. David Paradang, over the loss of 20 lives at the different test centers of the NIS recruitment exercises on Saturday. In what was a most shoddy head hunting exercise, several persons were trampled to death and many more sustained injuries or passed out as the NIS sought to fill 4,556 vacancies by asking over 520,000 applicants to physically turn up at the different test centers.
President Jonathan had before the arrival of the duo, had an audience with the Inspector General of Police, Muhammed Abubakar with talks centered around the immigration recruitment mess.
The Minister and the Comptroller General were summoned to the Presidential Villa on Monday and conferred with the Chief of Staff to the President, Brig.-Gen. Jones Arogbofa (retd.), in his office before meeting with President Jonathan for over an hour. They exited the President’s office at about 2pm, a source in the Presidency said.
As they filed out of the President’s office into a battery of reporters, mum was the word.
Before flagging the National Conference open yesterday, President Jonathan had asked for a minute’s silence from delegates with a promise to investigate the recruitment exercise gone sour.
“As we are preparing for this inauguration, a sad incident happened on Saturday. We are looking into the circumstances of the sad event. I won’t bore you with the details of that event that left some innocent youths dead,” the President had said. In a related development, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has condemned the NIS recruitment exercise, describing same as a “heartless scam.”
In a statement by its President, Abdulwaheed Omar, the NLC said the Minister’s explanations for inviting over five hundred thousand persons to fill a few job slots were untenable and unconscionable.
“The explanation by the Minister of Interior, Abba Morro, that 520,000 applicants were invited for screening for 4,556 spaces and that the applicants died in a stampede due to impatience and non-adherence to laid-down orderly procedure, is rather weak and untenable. To invite so many applicants for such few spaces, in all sense of administration, was a call to anarchy and highly irresponsible of the immigration service,” the NLC said. The NLC also said the whole exercised reeked of an extortionist scheme and stopped short of asking for the Minister’s head; “We condemn in the strongest terms possible, the recruitment protocol adopted by the immigration department. It is grossly unfair for the immigration department to have invited several thousands of our youths to physically present themselves to compete to fill a miserly four thousand vacancies.
“Nothing but crass opportunism can explain this heartless scam. A more rational and discerning recruitment process could easily have reduced the numbers by insisting on raising minimum standards. “The immigration department refused to employ this option in order to maximise the opportunity to bleed the applicants, each of whom, was asked to pay N1, 000. “The spectre of over 80,000 youths in a stadium in Abuja, assembled, not to watch an A- list football match, but rather, challenged by an epic hunger to have something to do, must break all hearts,” the statement from Labour, read.
The Minister of Interior, Abba Moro, has however said calls for his resignation were premature until investigations were concluded. He told the BBC that the applicants were impatient and forced themselves through a single entrance in numbers. He said some of the persons who broke through the fence of the Abuja National Stadium, were “unauthorized” persons.
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