The Central Bank of Nigeria has lately been enmeshed in a recruitment waiver scandal. A report that over 900 persons were “secretly” hired by the bank, bypassing laid-down procedures, is now being investigated by the House of Representatives. The probe should be the starting point of strong measures to end the perpetual abuse of waivers and exemptions in all official government activities.
If the allegations are eventually proved, it would be another cruel betrayal of public trust and of Nigerian youths. A country beset with double digit unemployment should stick to the rules and allow a level playing field when a few vacancies open. This, according to reports, was not the case when the CBN allegedly hired 909 persons over the last two years without following due process. Not only did the bank fail to advertise the vacancies as required by federal regulations, it was alleged, it also broke its own long-standing procedures of aptitude tests, written and oral interviews.
More damning is the revelation that the recent recruitments authorised by the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, favoured the children, wards and relatives of senior government and political figures. The new hires reportedly include nephews, daughters of prominent serving and former top officials.
Under a corrective administration, such vestiges of corruption, nepotism and impunity should be tackled with vigour and if confirmed, severely punished. This probe should not go the way of previous scandals where, after the headlines and posturing, the report attracts neither correction nor sanctions. First, the House committees on federal character and on banking/currency undertaking the enquiry should handle the assignment with efficiency and dispatch. Buhari should order an immediate halt to further recruitment until the current issue has been resolved.
Already, the response of the CBN is suspect. Its spokesperson, Isaac Okoroafor, defended its failure to advertise the vacancies on the grounds that it was recruiting “specialists.” Besides, he said some states did not have enough persons on the bank’s payroll, “and in this case, we focus on those states to recruit people of certain classes that we used to cover the shortfall in those states.” His response to aPremium Times request to confirm the hiring of the candidates of the privileged was evasive: “Is there any qualified Nigerian who does not have the right to work in the CBN?,” he was quoted as quipping. Our answer is: No. As the acting chairman of the Federal Character Commission, Shettima Abba, said, the fact they are children of a minister or president does not disqualify anyone from getting a job. We, like him, are more concerned with due process and constitutional requirements of equity, equal access and opportunity to all qualified Nigerians.
We are particularly concerned that the waivers may once more have been used to entrench corruption. The CBN’s defence that it obtained a waiver from the FCC to skip advertising in carrying out its “targeted recruitment,” has been challenged by the commission, which said it had not given the bank any such waivers since 2013. Besides, said Abba, such waivers lapse after three months and would require re-validation to become legal. Lawmakers should shun sentiment and partisanship to establish if, indeed, the CBN violated Sections 14 (3) and 17(1) of the constitution as claimed by a coalition of civil society groups.
Nigerian officials should be stopped from misusing and abusing waivers. We submit that since every part of the country lays claim to “specialists,” the CBN denied itself the opportunity of picking the very best by failing to throw open the process through public advertisements as stipulated. It thereby unfairly denied some qualified youths an opportunity to compete for the jobs and laid itself open to suspicions of favouritism.
With allegations that some officials hijacked the recruitment of 1,600 officers at the Nigeria Immigration Service, the betrayal of our unemployed youths is systemic. Latest figures collated by the International Monetary Fund show that when the official unemployed rate of 10.4 per cent in the last quarter of 2015 is added to the underemployment figure of 18.7 per cent, real unemployment is about 29.1 per cent, up from 23.9 per cent in 2011. This, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics, translates to 22.4 million Nigerians out of gainful work, a figure that many regard as conservative.
Buhari and his ministers should, henceforth, forbid granting of such waivers for vacancies in ministries, departments and agencies: all openings should be thrown open for competitive bidding by interested qualified Nigerians. Even the most specialised of skills will have more than one qualified candidate. As we have seen in import and export duty waivers, where a leaked Nigerian Customs Service document alleged that about N1.4 trillion was lost to dubious waivers, concessions and exemptions in the three years to 2013, waivers are routinely abused in this country.
The anti-graft agencies should demonstrate their independence by investigating. Officials; from the Presidency down to other top functionaries whose children, wards or relatives reportedly benefitted from this irregularity, should raise the bar of public morality by withdrawing them. Where it is established that, indeed, malfeasance has occurred, officials that orchestrated it should be kicked out, the recruitments cancelled and a fresh one undertaken in accordance with the rules.
