Our national show of shame

Aliyu Musa


Last week we hit a new low at the ghastly Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) nationwide recruitment exercise. It was an accident waiting to happen, no doubt. But it, again, exposed just how valueless life is to us. Otherwise, why would anyone in this ICT age organise a job selection process involving such a large number of people as we saw in all the venues across the country without giving a thought to the likely implications? More so, why take advantage of the desperation of impoverished hundreds of thousands of Nigerians knowing full well only a small fraction will end up with a job?

There are lots of questions to be asked about what happened on that fateful day although answers may never come as handy. Nonetheless, one finds it almost impossible to stop wondering what the organisers hoped to achieve through the shabbily planned recruitment programme. But fact is they have deliberately taken the applicants through an exercise in futility, which tragically led to the death of 20 of them, while many more are left with injuries they may never fully recover from, including psychological trauma.

A look at the number of people crammed into some of the venues tells one that the whole organisation was based on our usual “I don’t care attitude” and in the belief that no matter what happens no one will pay any price. Take the National Stadium Abuja as an example. It has a sitting capacity of 60, 491. And although it was not expected that all of them would sit at the same time the fact that about 60,000 were shortlisted for interview in the stadium, which would require being there much of the day, the organisers should have been more proactive. They should have considered alternative ways to interview the applicants. Breaking the number into smaller bits would not have been a bad idea, especially as it would allow the interviews to be effectively done with, perhaps, fewer troubles.

But because the organisers wanted to hurriedly get the job done on a small budget even after pocketing millions of naira through sales of application forms plus whatever they may have appropriated as fund for the exercise, they brought everyone into the stadium without properly considering the logistics of managing the enormous crowd. 60, 000 is such a huge number that would require real planning. But the best they could do was to chaotically run through the process. And they hoped they would get away with it.

Ours is an age of technology that makes life much simpler. Some two decades ago one would excuse such a poor show of management skill, but not anymore. Not with the millions of Internet access and handiness of mobile technology that Nigeria boasts of.

If only the exercise had been organised in phases and some phases had been restricted to virtual spaces we would still have selected the right number of people that would progress to the next level and no one would feel cheated. But we either failed to think of this or simply ignored the option because it suited us to do it the way we did no matter the outcome.

Again, life really means nothing to us and that was why Abba Moro, the Interior Minister whose ministry supervises the NIS had no qualms casting a fixed stare at us while pointing accusing fingers at the dead for what befell them. How ironical!

But it is for real. In our world, an unfair realm where ‘blame the victim’ is not an unfamiliar tune, those who scammed 520,000 desperate jobseekers and heisted N520 million are entirely impeccable. They are as faultless as every bankrupt scheme in the system that robs the poorest of even the last of their valuables and mock them for being dumb enough to fall prey. They are as faultless as the subsidy scam cabal and those that ferried $20 billion dollars out of the federation account into private ones and many other known conspiracies that we would pretend they never happened.

So from our honourable minister to the NIS job scammers it is a vote of confidence. And life goes on.

But our listening president interjects as usual. He sets up another committee to investigate and come up with nothing as in the past. And the dead are offered posthumous jobs automatically. Again, we cheer and all goes quiet. And the scammers melt into the cheering crowd to mock the dead and the rest of us. Nobody asks any more questions. No heads ever roll here. Certainly not in our land!