Immigration Fall-out: Throwing The Baby With The Bath To us, a scapegoat must avail himself to take all our blames whether merited or ummerited- Mazi Ekegbu As I sit watching the English Premier League match between Aston Villa and Chelsea, I took a sharp perusal of my Facebook feed and I saw comments about the recently concluded Immigration recruitment exercise across the various stadia of the federation. The comments I read were as usual laced with emotions, hatred, half-truths and outright falsehood. The other leg of the feed showed comments that were appropriate (that is, gave a factual analysis of the event) and are worth contemplating. First of all, the usual scapegoat is President Jonathan. He must at all times avail himself for criticism. He might not be the President to give us the breath of fresh air he promised us but I believe dropping every woes of this country at his door step shows unplaced frustration and misery on our part. How is it the Presidents fault that the immigration exercise fell out this way? If we can answer that quickly, then I think we should answer this one too: how is it the fault of the President of Malaysia that the Malaysia Airline plane is yet to be located? The President of Malaysia will have so many questions to answer if he sits undisturbed at this trying moment for his country. Jonathan too will have many questions too to answer if he does not get down in details in the charade called recruitment exercise and take appropriate action. As in every government, people have roles assigned to them so that when issues come up, proper action can be taken by those whom these issues fall within their scope of duty. In this light, I believe the Minister of Interior who has oversight function over the parastatal organizing the recruitment exercise should be questioned and also discharged from his post. We need to ask him some questions. It is unprecedented in the history of Nigeria that Nigerian graduates are asked to pay a fee for employment opportunities. When the legislature took them (the immigration parastatal)on on the payment of a thousand naira, they told the whole world that it was meant simply for logistics and seamless planning. Few would dispute with me if I say there was nothing like planning. The usual Nigerian style of leadership, fire brigade approach- lets go there and do things as we see them- was evidently in display. How do they plan to access over 20 000 applicants (not to talk of 50 000 or more) in a given day and all at once? What happened to common sense? What happened to the various 1000 naira paid for such? If we take a simple calculation of the fee paid, we will be running into the region of billions of naira. A modest estimate will be a billion naira if we assume that only a million applicant applied. A billion naira is just too much to organize a standard recruitment exercise. Why isnt the exercise outsourced to recruitment agencies? A billion naira is just too much to pay these recruitment agencies. The area I expected people to blame the president was on the snail-rate progress of the various infrastructural projects around the country. If we had stable electricity, few persons would have gone for that exercise. If our banks were willing to give out loans to small-scale entrepreneurs, few people would have gone. It should be noted that it is just impossible to source loan, even as little as 10 000 naira, from our banks. In fact, our banks lend to the big players -the controllers of industries- and not to those agents of growth- small scale entrepreneurs.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 19:29:37 +0000
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