After the immediate past Comptroller-General of Nigeria Immigration Service, David Parradang, was quizzed recently by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission over the job interview scam of 2014, which led to the death of 23 applicants in stadia stampedes across the country, Nigerians eagerly await what follows. The tragedy was a rank howler in public service delivery. Its exhumation by the anti-graft agency should not end as a publicity stunt.
A total of 520,000 applicants participated in the sham recruitment to fill 4,556 vacancies, after each of them was made to pay N1,000 for an online registration. Arithmetically, this translates to N520 million generated by the NIS. Curiously, it reportedly declared only N45 million. But the EFCC wants to know what happened to the balance of over N475 million.
Following national outrage that attended the tragedy, former President Goodluck Jonathan directed that the applicants be refunded their money. But this never happened, while three family members of each of those that lost their lives were given compensatory job offers by government.
Appallingly, it was all that Jonathan’s administration could do, amid nationwide demand that Parradang and Abba Moro – the then Minister of Interior – be sacked, and everyone in the syndicate that masterminded the fraud brought to book. The Senate, under the leadership of David Mark, in pretending to align with the public mood, empanelled a committee to investigate the matter. And what were the findings? Ask Mark.
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While in service, Parradang reportedly washed his hands of the scam, as he insisted that the shambolic project was inspired by forces above him. Who then are these characters? And why was a consultancy firm hired to organise a recruitment that the NIS personnel scattered nationwide are paid with tax payers’ money to do? Resolving these puzzles holds the key to understanding what transpired. Parradang may have made useful statements to the EFCC along these lines. We urge the commission to follow through his lead without much delay.
The Immigration job scam and the refuge the Jonathan administration provided for the suspects find expression in impunity and irresponsibility that often characterise the conduct of government business. Such exploitation and criminal negligence of the matter only foster propitious grounds for more abuse in future. A government that derives its legitimacy from the mandate of the people cannot condone this. We find it difficult to ignore this tragedy.
This is why we call on the Muhammadu Buhari administration to get to the root of the matter. We must put an end to this seemingly endless official approval to government’s agencies fleecing our job-seeking youths. Apparently, it was government’s failure to prosecute the NIS and Nigerian Prisons Service officials who caused the death of 17 youths in a similar incident in 2008 that laid the foundation for the disaster of 2014. The EFCC inquiry should not be aimed at just recovering funds, but should be focused on identifying the perpetrators of the scam and punishing them accordingly.
What is so cruel and most unnerving about this saga and similar recruitments in other public institutions is that they serve as smokescreen, as the available job slots are shared among ministers, federal lawmakers, bureaucrats, top politicians, as well as those in the Presidency. There must be openness and accountability in the way government’s business is run. We need to exploit the new political atmosphere to entrench these ethical imperatives in our system. Moro, whose ministry superintended over the NIS, has a lot of explanations to offer on that tragedy.
In societies governed by the rule of law, errant officials are brought to book for any infraction. In India, a former Haryana State Chief Minister, Om Prakash Chautala, and his son, Ajay, were convicted along with 53 others in a teachers’ recruitment scam in 2013. He, his son and eight others were each handed 10 years jail term, while 44 others were sentenced to between four and five years’ imprisonment.
Life is sacrosanct and irreplaceable when lost. That is why governments all over the world go the extra mile in protecting their citizens. When a South Korean ferry carrying 300 pupils sank in April 2014, leaving 126 people dead, the authorities did not look the other way. They swiftly arrested the 15 persons involved in navigating the ferry for prosecution. Investigations showed that the vessel carried about 3,608 tons of cargo, more than three times what it could safely carry. More instructively, the country’s Prime Minister, Chung Hong, took a moral responsibility for the tragedy and resigned.
Since no Nigerian public official had the decency to do so in respect of the 2014 Immigration recruitment farce, it is, therefore, appropriate that the resurrected case be thoroughly investigated and the culprits fished out and punished. By so doing, a strong message would have been sent to government agencies that, indeed, there are consequences for bad behaviour.
