Four pregnant women and 15 other candidates who attended the recruitment exercise for the National Immigration Service yesterday are now dead as a result of the stampedes that were created by the mammoth crowds at testing centers nationwide.
The death toll included 3 pregnant women in Benin, 1 pregnant woman in Port Harcourt and 4 others, 3 in Minna, and 8 people in Abuja.
Reports of poor management of the exercise for which the applicants paid N1,000 each was widespread. For instance in Calabar, it was learned that security operatives flogged applicants as a form of crowd control. In Abuja over 70,000 people squeezed into the National Stadium, a venue designed for 60,000 at capacity.
Over 50 people were injured due to the stampede in Abuja alone. An applicant who attended the Abuja venue said, “I arrived this venue by exactly 5am and met a sea of other applicants already waiting for the officials to open the entrance gate. We waited until around 9am when the officials started trickling in.
“Instead of them to throw the whole gates open, they only managed to open one of them. But, with everybody eager to enter first, there was stampede and many found themselves on the ground. Others who were being pushed by those behind trampled on those on the ground.”
In Benin, the stampede was caused by overzealous security officials who began to shoot sporadically into the air as a form of crowd control. The over 28,000 applicants who had gathered at the Ogbemudia Stadium began to stampede and 3 pregnant women lost their lives as a result.
The crowd at the exercise in Lagos was extreme and caused a traffic gridlock that lasted for most of the day around the Surulere environs.
The story was largely the same around other states in Nigeria including Kano, Oyo, Osun, Bayelsa, Enugu and more. Officials are reported to have conducted the exercise in a shabby manner and the turn out shed a light on the dire state of unemployment in the country.
The Peoples Democratic Party sent condolence messages to the families of the dead yesterday.