Looking for work,” I wrote on this page more than five years ago, “has become one of the most dangerous occupations in Nigeria – a risky venture that is likely to cause harm or injury, even death.”
In that piece (August 19, 2008), I had employed term “occupation” not in a flippant or cynical sense, but to reflect what had become the painful reality for millions of our young men and women for whom looking for a job had become a full-time occupation in itself
As they pounded the streets and scoured the corporate offices and factories and farms and construction sites in search of work, I remarked, they were more likely to be swindled, mugged, kidnapped, sexually assaulted or exploited and abused in every conceivable manner by persons masquerading as prospective employers or their agents.
I was reacting to reports in the July 14, 2008, editions of the national newspapers that dozens had died the preceding weekend at various centres across Nigeria in recruitment exercises conducted by the Immigration Service and the Prisons Department.
Desperate applicants in various conditions of unfitness, many of whom probably had not eaten that day, were required to complete a 2.5 km race in 18 minutes (men) and 20 minutes (women). The recruiters had given no thought to setting up the emergency medical services that are routinely provided even in situations involving those whose physical fitness can be taken for granted.
For 43 of the 195, 000 applicants jostling for 3,000 vacancies, the race proved a fatal regimen, a journey of no return. A good many of them were trampled underfoot in the frenzied rush to gain a vantage position at the start; others died from sheer exhaustion. Hundreds sought hospital treatment for the injuries they suffered during the race.
This grisly scenario, slightly modified, was reenacted last week, again by the Immigration Service, at various locations across the country where it was scheduled to administer written tests to some 520, 000 applicants chasing 4, 556 openings..
The 2008 fitness test of a 2.5 km run was replaced with an obstacle requiring thousands of applicants who had converged on various locations several hours ahead of schedule to muscle, squeeze, elbow, and claw or otherwise find their way to the event through a single entrance.
They are still counting, but at least 19 persons, four of them pregnant women, were killed in the resulting stampedes. Hundreds suffered injuries. The luckier ones were horse-whipped (Calabar), tear-gassed (Port Harcourt), or sent into wild panic when Immigration officials and police shot into the air, they claimed, to control the surging crowds (Asaba and Abeokuta).
In some of the centres where they managed to administer the written test, the whole thing was a sham. The main bowl of the National Stadium, Surulere, in Lagos, was reportedly crammed to the rafters, with hardly any elbow room; there were no desks, and many had to sit on the bare floor to take the test, though each candidate had paid a fee of N1, 000 for the privilege. So chaotic was the atmosphere that the outcome cannot pass for a true measure of any candidate’s ability.
One has got to be practically unconscious not to have anticipated the bedlam that would claim so many innocent lives, or supinely indifferent to the pain and distress of others not to have thought of devising appropriate measures to avert it.
In a sane society, the responsible political official would have handed in his resignation even if the fiasco had not been compounded by so wanton a grim harvest. Elementary decency demands nothing less.
But ours is a society in which nothing succeeds like impunity, Abba Moro, the Minister of the Interior, who has the Immigration Service under his portfolio, is an authentic product thereof. So, instead of taking responsibility, or even showing empathy, he blamed the victims.
In one breath, he says this is not an occasion for apportioning blame. In the very next, he says the tragedy was all the fault of those who attempted to break into the stadium premises forcefully when they had not even applied for the advertised positions.
“Several unauthorised persons came in here, especially pregnant women,” he said. Then, as if for emphasis, he added: “I am surprised that pregnant women would want to come and partake in this exercise that involves physical exercises.”
It is almost as if a licence to talk without thought comes with being a political official in Nigeria. Still, Abba Moro’s statement has got to rank among the most unfeeling and indecent ever uttered by such a figure, on a par with Bauchi State Governor Isa Yuguda’s remark that the murder of 20 Youth Corpers doing election duties in state in 2011 was in keeping with their destiny.
Compounding indecency with obtuseness, Moro presumes to set up a committee to investigate the tragedy and recommend to him measures that will help “ameliorate the situation.” It does not occur to him that he is not a fit and proper person to authorise that kind of investigation, and that he cannot even stay in his present office or any public office while an inquiry lasts.
President Goodluck Jonathan must seize this moment to break the cycle of impunity that has been the hallmark of a good many of his Administration’s officials by dismissing Abba Moro and the head of the Immigration Service forthwith.
Far too many Nigerians who have every right to the protection of the state have died needless deaths on account of the incompetence, negligence and fecklessness of officials who have learned no lessons because no lessons were taught.
It is also time for the Administration to move beyond empty slogans to address unemployment forthrightly. It is nothing if not scandalous that an Administration which has made job creation a top priority for the past few years has not even made a dent on employment. Government officials don’t even have the true measure of the problem. Their estimates range between 35 and 50 percent of persons qualified, able and willing to work.
Every so often, a cabinet minister or state governor calls a news conference to announce that thousands of job openings had been filled in some unspecified establishment, or that a policy that had just been approved would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the very near future, if not immediately.
Some officials who have spent all their adult lives in cushy government jobs think nothing of admonishing the teeming armies of the unemployed not to look to the government for work but to seek their fortunes in the private sector or self- employment.
Such stunts must stop, and so must the ritual sloganeering. It is a grand illusion to think that transformation of any kind can occur in a situation of mass unemployment.
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