LABEL HAS WRITTEN AGAIN! Of Immigration and Hopelessness of the Future : A View of a Soon - To - Be Graduate by Rildwan Olayemi BELLO Totally preoccupied with a job on Saturday 15th March, 2014, never did I know anything was happening across various capital cities in the country. Unibadan students would understand that this is a moment of social euphoria, dinners and venues, music and décor, food and photography all make up the whole event. So, seated with my friend at this particular dinner still oblivious of what is happening around me, he browsed through his phone and showed me some pictures. At first, I couldnt figure out whats going on. I said which political rally or event is that because I couldnt have given it a thought that its going to be what I eventually found out. He bursted into laughter and I was like whats funny? He said thats thousands of people in Abuja for Nigeria Immigration aptitude test; and thats not to talk of Lagos, Kano, Ibadan, Enugu and some other places like that. I was emotionally shocked and get very bitter, not just for the government and applicants but for every necessary consideration. It is a moment of tears, blood and sorrow; I couldn’t believe that we can boast of this ground breaking population of jobless youths. It was surely a moment that defines Nigeria as a country with no Hope! No apologies for that. Perhaps, I should just also join numerous others that have been calling for the sack of the D.G Nigeria Immigration Service, his Human Resources Experts and every single person involved in the recruitment process from the sales of form desk to the least and most imaginable office. The stampede and death of job seekers is direct implication of a complete administrative failure. It only shows one thing that eventually leads to other, poor planning knowledge which is indispensable to any organization or establishment. In the 21st Century, it is a complete embarrassment to the intellectual masses that ordinary sorting out of prospective candidates for the aptitude test via screening of Curriculum Vitae cannot be conducted by a critical sector of the country at this moment of insurgency. Little wonder Boko Haram is tagged more sophisticated than the whole of our security outlets. Their operations depict proper and tactical planning better than you could have imagined from someone less educated herdsmen as the media painted them. If the so called agency shows this alone, it transmits into a lot of things about our preparedness to live in the century we are currently in. Recruitment experts can go ahead and assist me to do justice to the open discussion on the Critical Analysis of Recruitment Process; coin it the way you like. Back to the Reality! A lot of articles and commentaries are already in circulation criticizing the whole process and asking questions; and at the same time I wonder if there will ever be a hope for this country if that population cannot turn into a revolutionary movement to ask our government why things are not working and about the missing (20 Billion US Dollars). Nigeria as a country with the present crop of leaders and followers has little or, better said, nothing to offer. So the question of what can I do to make a difference should be the only thing that should run in the mind of every youth and old. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people are like dried fish that cannot be straightened and a reference to a verse in the Quran reminds of the essential point that “Not until we change that which is in our heart, Allah will never change it” (Quran 13:11). So if we failed to yearn for change and challenge the status quo, the future will be worse than the present situation, not a curse. From our citadels of learning, am not sorry to say virtually all of them churn out irrelevant graduates of this century to the world every year. Many academic staffs of the University still teach with the last century material which to a large extent is irrelevant in this century again. They are not cognizant of the situation and present matters arising. And with this, many students still lives in the euphoria of once I graduate with first class or second class upper, I will get a job (Yinmu). In fact, our theoretical approach is so poor that not even a mere comprehension of instructional materials can be understood by some Universities first class graduate because it is a system of “la cram la pour” This present century is marked by significant growth in human capacity development, perhaps in the developed nation and some other developing nation with a clear and sincere agenda to pursue the development of their populace. Technological inventors and the current set of young entrepreneurs are between their teen ages and twenties, the same age category or even younger to those that died from the stampede. These are people that have grown out of the problem of having to submit their CVs. In fact, our best brains (First Class and Second Class Upper graduate) will submit their CVs to work under them not with them because the system here does not support the intellectual acumen required for them. Rather than face the problem squarely, our political views and myopic reasons won’t permit many people, especially my contemporaries to realize that the issue of No Job, doesn’t have to do with politics alone but a global phenomenon which will continue to happen as long as more inventions are being made by the technological gurus with problem-solving minds. If we all reason to this matter, in the last century, an appointment as a graduate automatically gets you a Secretary that types the memos and letters one might have to prepare, but today, with laptop on everyone’s desk, you can be sure that you ain’t getting any secretary. This, by default, makes someone that is into Secretarial Studies irrelevant to a large extent wherein they were taught with typewriter except the person ups her status. Displacement of this person and other people in the line of correspondence and mail delivery as an example leads to job unemployment. Also to be mindful, is the fact that everything is getting privatized and so the job specification unto one person now is much more than what a single person does before because every establishment wants to cut cost and maximize profit, why would I employ more when I can get a device that would provide better, faster and more reliable result than when used by a single competent person? This technically means less people will be absorbed into the system. We can continue creating lot of scenarios about the present situation and we may never stop; but not until we act within our capacity, things will never get better. And like I say: nurture an idea, think through it, forget the government and face the reality because it is only by divine intervention that the government can be less corrupt to think about you and me genuinely. Very soon, the Premier University (University of Ibadan) that prides itself as first and the best in Nigeria will churn out another set of graduates which, of course, include me to the world. “Can we go out and make the change needed?” is only a test of time as the true status and ranking of any citadel of learning is in the feats of her graduates in the outside world.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 03:42:42 +0000
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