Media reports of a tragedy that befell seven young Nigerians whose only crime was to wake up this morning to search for a job. The Nigeria Immigration Service had publicized widely the fact that it is in the process of recruiting new employees. Earlier today an aptitude test was held for tens of thousands of Nigerians for infinitely fewer job positions at the NIS.
In the hustle to be employed by the NIS, seven young Nigerians lost their lives due to a poorly planned and managed recruitment exercise. Unemployment in Nigeria is at an astounding rate. In fact it is so bad that the International Monetary Fund doesn’t know what it is. Their research team conservatively places it at 23.9% but that is obviously far from the case. In a country of over 150 million people, when you conduct a recruitment exercise for a civil service position and over 75,000 people pack the National Stadium Abuja which has a capacity of 60,000. You also have more people at the Lagos exercise in their thousand and thousands also vying for the same positions, then you know something is seriously beyond wrong with the unemployment situation in Nigeria.
The Immigration Service which is under the leadership of the Minister of the Interior charged N1,000 for each applicant and it is estimated that over a 100,000 young Nigerians applied, that is N100,000,000. That money should be immediately paid as a first installment to the families of the seven people who lost their lives and the many that were injured in the stampede that caused it all. We need to ensure that funds lines not the government or any private individual’s pockets where it usually ends up anyway.
Julius Berger or whichever lush construction company that built the National Stadium must have obtained top dollar to build the complex, so why the collateral damage. People go to the Camp Nou to watch Lionel Messi and the rest of the Barca squad regularly in football season and people haven’t been reported dead. The Camp Nou has 50% more of the capacity than Nigeria’s national stadium so why the logistical nightmare, literally. Negligence, but the history of the negligence of Nigeria’s successive management teams is the stuff of legend, and not fully tackleable in any op-ed less than 10,000 words long.
Here are a lot of pictures from the traffic jams the exercise caused in Lagos on SaharaReporters and pictures of youth jumping the National Stadium in Abuja because it was filled to capacity can also be found on DailyPost.
This whole exercise makes a mockery of the educational system in Nigeria. Why go to school, if you have to go through a similar experience. In fact as a graduate in Nigeria, applying for a civil service job could be more deadly than a Boko Haram attack. The only reason this has not happened in the private sector is that the level of corporate governance is significantly more sophisticated than that of the public sector. In the public sector, people cannot account for billions like recently discovered in the Office of the Head of Service where a fresh N35 billion has gone AWOL or is it in the Defence Ministry where a clear chain of command cannot be established without present and former military generals squabbling like a bunch of kindergartners.
Before we digress, how do we the youth save ourselves from annihilation by the forces that prey on our economy. Firstly learn entrepreneurial skills, as much as a member of this administration may be to blame for the tragic happenings of today, we must also realize that the President has called on Nigerians to embrace entrepreneurship. A simple trade could have preserved seven lives today. Yes, agreed the enabling environment is more than challenging but there just has to be a way. Stories abound of many young Nigerians that have made it from nothing to something. We would be more than foolish to leave our economic progress at the mercy of a government that has not only been mismanaged for decades but that also cannot locate whopping sums of money like $20 billion today, N35 billion tomorrow. If you keep waiting for tomorrow’s number you may dither on the edge of insanity.
So whilst you’re undergraduate years are ticking, don’t waste those 4, 5 or six years trying to be cool or relevant, think of what awaits you upon graduation – the potential absence of a job market. If that is not enough to get and keep you busy with what industry to become engaged in, then goodluck to you, but remember most genuinely successful people make their luck.
May the unemployed seven rest in peace and may their experiences teach us to hustle whilst we wait in the hope that our enterprising may bring us some succor when the chips fall.