There isn’t much to say here, just scroll down and read Pastor Okotie’s big big grammar on the Immigration crisis.
This tragedy mirrors the desperate situation of Nigeria.
One only hopes that this unfortunate loss of lives, coupled with the incessant Boko Haram killings and other youth-based violence, would serve as a wake-up call to the summiteers, that this country needs a new governance paradigm. If the conference cannot produce that, then the over N7 billion invested in it would amount to another colossal waste of our scarce national resources.
It is an irony that each delegate would earn a whopping N12 million for the 3-month duration of the conference. By conservative estimates, N12 million is enough to provide self-employment for 12 resourceful graduates, and N7 billion could do likewise for thousands, some of whom perished under chaotic conditions in stadia around the country, while waiting for a poorly organised aptitude test by the NIS. The young graduate job-seekers who turned out for the tests filled up many stadia around the country, as if they came to watch high-profile football matches.
These hapless chaps paid N1,000.00 (One Thousand Naira) processing fee each. So, the Nigerian Immigration Service must have made quite some money, considering that in Lagos and Abuja alone, over 125,000 applicants turned up. We may be looking at millions of Naira that this monetised recruitment exercise generated for the NIS. There was record turnout in each of the 34 states for just 45,000 slots that the NIS advertised. The alarming job application horror is a clear evidence of the inability of our public institutions to manage events, resulting in poor crowd control and avoidable deaths through stampede. This is not an isolated case, it is a regular occurrence.
When things go wrong, our leaders seldom take responsibility. The NIS has tried to duck charges of culpability, by claiming that it outsourced the recruitment exercise to a private firm which actually collected the N1,000.00 levy. As usual, a panel would be setup to investigate this incident, followed by a white paper, and then, the report may end up gathering dust in a cabinet somewhere in Abuja, while government officials focus on the more important 2015 general elections in a country where competition for political power is about resource control, not the promotion of the general good of the people.
