It does seem employment racketeering has become a lucrative pastime for some corrupt top brass in the nation’s civil service system, most times in collusion with scammers and fake job consultants.
Gone were the days when only rogue job syndicates defrauded and ridiculed job hunters. For, quite common in recent years are reports of the fleecing or outright duping of applicants seeking placement in the civil service before or during interviews.
Not surprising, therefore, is the recent report that some top civil servants were dismissed by the Federal Government for extorting money from 400 applicants and offering them illegal employment.
According to the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, who dropped the hint while on a working visit to Lagos, the crooks went as far as including the names of the ‘employed applicants’ in the Integrated Payroll and Personnel System (IPPIS) being operated by the service before the fraud was detected.
“The first scandal I met in one of the parastatals when I assumed office was the illegal employment of 400 people. This scandal started with very senior officers up to Level 17 in that department.
They sent out letters and text messages asking people to apply for jobs for a fee of N400, 000; and they were given letters of employment… They invited these people to go and be captured on the IPPIS… At the end of the day, the bubble burst. One of the victims told the officials: ‘You cannot take my money and still disengage me. I have a valid letter’.
That is how we got to know that there is a dedicated account these people pay to. Of course, we dismissed these officials and we even handed them over to the police”, Mohammed stated.
We have our doubts, however, that the Information and Culture Minister’s revelation would deter countless unscrupulous public servants now neck deep in employment scams; and our disillusion is not farfetched.
This stems from what appears government’s tacit support for extortion by its ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) in the recruitment processes. A good example still green in memory would be the ill-fated Saturday, March 15, 2014 tragic recruitment exercise by the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS).
The NIS reportedly had only about 4,000 job openings before advertising for applications from job seekers.
The Service demanded a non-refundable fee of N1000 from interested candidates for reasons that still remain suspect even as we write.
Despite NIS’ obvious extortionist misadventure, reports claimed over six million job seekers applied, and perhaps paid N1,000 each, out of which 526,650, according to the then Interior Minister, Abba Moro, were invited for the tragic test.
Even with a thousand naira extorted from just 526,650 applicants, NIS pocketed roughly N526, 650,000. But the Service failed woefully to organise decent and safe tests for the applicants. In the stampedes that trailed the tests, a total of 19 applicants, among them four pregnant women, died at various locations during the exercise conducted nationwide.
Reports said one of the victims, Mrs. Oyiza Yusuf, a 35-year-old mother of one, died in a stampede at Abuja National Stadium. It was alleged that the same Mrs. Yusuf was a year earlier defrauded of N150,000 by NIS crooks while looking for job in the same outfit. We also recall that early November last year, the Office of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation (OHCSF) disassociated itself from a purported Facebook account used by alleged fraudsters to advertise job vacancies.
A statement by Mr. Haruna Imrana, Director of Communications in the OHCSF, alerted the public that the account was false and dubious.
More than anything else, however, it is not unlikely that the penchant by the nation’s bureaucracy to shortchange job seekers in the guise of job application fees has exacerbated the perpetration of fraud against hapless applicants whose main ‘offence’ is their desperation to live decent lives.
It is inhuman that government that ought to extend social security to the unemployed is now complicit in defrauding them through dubious civil servants.
It is unethical and unfair for MDAs to persist in their dirty vocation of extorting money from poverty-stricken applicants, many of whom end up not having a whiff of any job at the end of the day.
This is daylight robbery. It is a heartless foray and should be stopped forthwith. The top civil servants the Information and Culture Minister said were caught in the act deserve not just dismissal.
The minister should insist on their diligent prosecution and punishment to deter their peers still lurking around.
