RECENTLY, the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) embarked on online recruitment of citizens into its service. By police projections, application forms for the recruitment cost N2,000 each and the expected monetary dividend from the exercise is put at N2 billion. Of this amount, a consultancy firm engaged by the police for the recruitment exercise has N1.2 billion while NPF retains the balance of N800 million. We view the online recruitment by the police as not only innovative but an attempt to embrace the fast-growing Information Technology (IT) culture that has turned the whole world into a global village.. We are equally glad that the embargo on some Federal Government departments and agencies such as the customs, prisons, immigration and the police has been lifted as part of the efforts to tackle unemployment in the country. Ordinarily, online recruitment enables applicants to obtain the forms, process and submit same without necessarily encountering the bureaucratic bottlenecks associated with such exercise. For instance, hoarding of recruitment forms by unscrupulous police personnel to the detriment of applicants is rendered meaningless as applicants can get the forms from the internet. Be that as it may, we are not totally comfortable with the police online recruitment exercise. To begin with, to ask applicants to cough out N2,000 as payment for recruitment forms, is tantamount to commercializing the recruitment exercise. While to the affluent this amount is certainly meagre, the same cannot, in all honesty, be said of the unemployed especially those from lowly estates. We also view the cost of the recruitment forms as a tacit move to exclude the average citizens who could not afford such amount but are able and willing to render services to the fatherland, from benefiting from the recruitment exercise We vehemently condemn any attempt by any person or group of persons to exploit the unemployed with a view to achieving their inordinate ambition. Beside, we find the payment of N1.2 billion as fees to a firm for services of online recruitment by the police (compared to the police taking N800 million for the exercise), worrisome and totally unacceptable The Police force is funded from the tax-payers’ money and citizens should not and must not be subjected to asphyxiating monetary demands before they can enlist in it. That we agree entirely with the House of Representatives Committee on Police Affairs that restricting the recruitment exercise or a large chunk of it to online mode has the tendency to deprive many citizens from participating in the exercise, especially those who have no access to the world wide web. We therefore, call on the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Mike Okiro and the Nigeria Police Service Commission to jettison, without further delay, the online recruitment exercise. We believe that the best hands can only be harnessed from the recruitment exercise if unnecessary encumbrances such as being online savvy are not put on the way of citizens, particularly at this time in our history when not too many Nigerians have access to the internet. Contracting recruitment to consultants at such whopping cost as the police did, is questionable and should be discarded forthwith. Recruitment should not constitute a rip-off of citizens. This will add to our problems, rather than solving any.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 15:26:13 +0000
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