The 60,000 capacity stadium in Abuja was filled to the rafters and seven persons had died from a stampede before the exercise had run its course. At the PortHarcourt Liberation Stadium where 35,000 persons had gathered to seek employment, five persons reportedly died after yet another stampede and many more sustained varying degrees of injuries. Among the dead was a pregnant woman. The Punch reports a lady called Blessing as saying; “Five persons died. One of them, a pregnant woman, jumped the fence and hit her stomach on the ground. She was taken to the hospital. When we started leaving, we learnt that the woman had died. “The other gates were locked and everybody struggled through the only available gate. Not everybody took the examination because there was no space; there was no space for those with HND and O’level. There was space for those with B.Sc.” At the decrepit and untidy National Stadium in Surulere, Lagos, thousands of people had started converging at the edifice as early as 7:00am for a test that had not started at 1:00pm when our correspondent visited the venue of the exercise. More than 30,000 persons crammed the National Stadium in Lagos yesterday. A woman slumped at the Obafemi Awolowo Stadium in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital and a few others had to require emergency medical services after enduring the scorching sun and the heat from several bodies. More than 22,500 applicants turned up in Oyo State. 10 persons fainted in Jos, the Plateau State capital, from exhaustion. At the Women Day Secondary school in Minna, Niger State, where 11,000 applicants had showed up, three had died after overwhelmed security agencies fired tear gas canisters at applicants in a bid to deal with the surging crowd. A few other persons also collapsed from exhaustion and were revived. Two persons reportedly slumped and died in Kaduna and Jigawa during the examinations. At the Sani Abacha stadium in Kano and the Aper Aku stadium in Benue, organisers had a hard time dealing with the thousands of persons who had stormed the grounds to be tested. More than 15,000 persons turned up in Kano and close to 18,000 showed up in Benue. Nationwide, the applicants were asked to turn up in white T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks and tennis shoes for the exercise and were tested in logical reasoning, English language and mathematics. Every candidate paid a sum of N1000 (one thousand naira) to obtain the form that qualified one to join the crowd at different venues. The crowds at the different test centers yesterday underscores Nigeria’s grim unemployment situation and partly explains why terrorist sects and criminal gangs have had conveyor belts of jobless young people ready to take up the places of those who have been reined in by the law enforcement agencies, one analyst told Ekekeee yesterday. Several commentators in the social media terrain berated the Presidency and the Minister of Interior, Comrade Abba Moro ( whose ministry put together the exercise) for not working out the modalities for dealing with the crowd before the exercise date. Several persons also suggested that the tests should have held on different dates and in batches to deal with the crowds that were expected to turn up. Several respondents also held that the deaths from the test centers could have been avoided if the Ministry of Interior did not have to sell forms in far excess of the number required for employment, while demanding that the whole NIS exercise be probed and punishment meted out where applicable. Only 4,556 persons were needed to fill in the available vacancies at the Immigration Service but more than 500,000 persons were called to show up at the different test centers.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 05:19:08 +0000
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