Opinion: NIS recruitment and the woe of Nigerian job seekers

by Ahanonu Kingsley

Abuja NIS stampede

 

With the veracity of the above claim, however, it would be plainly unfair to chide the young school leavers alone, for the woes in being jobless and unemployed; it would become a heavily tilted truth, which by itself would have defeated the very essence of right judgment.
In Nigeria, the events of the days have shown it to be a crime to complete a programme of study and hope for a job placement. The high hopes that stir the teeming young population to fervidly yearn for acceptance into institutions of higher learning; together with the rousing zeal that keeps them fully engaged, when eventually they’re allotted spaces, fritter away gradually with the reality which a post-school life presents.
The circumstance that should have fortified and enlivened the embedded hope, being the long-awaited moment to galvanize its essence, turns out to be, instead, the visible antagonist to its pursuant. The resultant effect is that most of the graduates for unspecified reasons are heavily tracked into the stack of unemployed, jobless youths.
Many reasons have been adduced for the mounting height in the unemployment pedestal in the Nigerian state. Most of the graduates, in the effort to race through the process of education and subsequently land into ‘non-existing’ jobs, forgot to painstakingly subject themselves to the rigors and commitment required of the training process; to come out fully prepared and ready for the expectations. The effect of which is observably the churning out of half-baked, casual graduates, who could only boast of completing the mandatory years and examinational requirements of their institutions.
With the veracity of the above claim, however, it would be plainly unfair to chide the young school leavers alone, for the woes in being jobless and unemployed; it would become a heavily tilted truth, which by itself would have defeated the very essence of right judgment. Hence, it is absolutely necessary to posit that the government, as well bears culpability for this scenery of shame and disgust, albeit abysmally.
The government, by its inability to provide the necessary environment for the thriving of a productive, purposeful educational process is a key contributor to the shambles in our educational system and its effect on its products. The failure of government in this regard has being the subject of discourse in different forums; hence, I would spare the inconvenience in not having to revisit them again.
But to say the least, these evinced inefficiencies of the state in arming fully its human resources for the challenges of a reality that revolves around the effective application of learned academic principles, have become continuously revealed in the ineptitude of its paper-studded graduates to do the needful. Nevertheless, would it be outright fair to blame the ‘bright’ graduate, who has been fed with theories, whose workability he’s bereft of and has been adjudged good when the demands of the ‘real’ world turn enigmatic?
It has been established that in the capacity of its [tertiary] education lies the growth of any society, economically and otherwise. It is also averred that countries grow through the strident application of science and technology; and these are elements that rest heavily on practical exertion. Nations seldom grow by the extrapolation of theoretical knowledge without the indispensable alliance provided by practical. But unfortunately, this has become the bane of our educational system; the universities and polytechnics pride of more markers and chalks than instruments and apparatuses.
We could not deny that even in the face of the ‘theory-founded’ school system, we still have those that fall short of its basic requirement. Yet more pathetic is the fact that even the bright ones have been muddled in the indistinguishable concoction-cauldron of the unemployable because of the scars, which they’ve been inflicted upon by the inability to correspondingly relate paper ability with the more realistic practical potency. This is evidently, in part, the resultant consequence of the surging number of the jobless.
It is therefore no surprise the unprecedented number that trailed the paltry spaces the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) threw open.
Amidst the adduced concerns, it still remains the statutory responsibility of the government to provide jobs for its eligible youths. Though, with the reality of the ‘unemployableness’ of most youths, which the government cannot deny a hand in, it would be stark deception to continue relying on that as an excuse for not providing jobs; for there are oodles of qualified persons still gripped. And more of facade it is to subject myriads of people to insensitivity for a paltry opening in the guise of providing them with the avenue for job.
This is the grouse I have on the recent jiggery-pokery of a recruitment carried out by the Nigeria Immigration Service. The express deficiency in managerial ability exuded by the management of NIS, not only subjected this multitude of young Nigerian school leavers for the exercise into dehumanization and mockery, but also took away some of these precious lives; 19 young lives with flying hopes crushed to death.
The tumultuous crowd that thronged each of the state’s venues and the stampede that followed the last Saturday’s scrum-for-screening, exposed not only the depravity in coordination by the NIS; it grossly unmasked the weakness of government in fighting the log-jam of unemployment and also made an sharp highlight of the woes of the job-seekers in massively pursuing for elusive jobs. What could be more horrible where more than 500,000 people fight for meager 5000 spaces?
Moreover, it would be more pathetic to learn that the same process that had murdered some and for which many more were undignified, has been subtly manipulated and reeled over by the ‘high and mighty’ in their comforts.  How else would the fate of the expectant multitude, who had enthusiastically brought themselves out to be screened and eventually subjected to demeaning conditions; with the hope of being shortlisted, to discover that what they had laboriously pursued has long being circumvented, in the name of ‘quota system,’ to the powerful and influential?
The shabbiness by which the whole process was organized smacks of a blatant incompetence on the side of a government paramilitary agency that should hold discipline, coordination and effectiveness in high regard; their failures cannot be efficiently put down. Beginning with their disregard for the value of time and to their stacking of throngs into limited spaces, the Nigerian Immigration Service has proved that they immaterial to their essence. For it is their inability to recourse to mere common sense in this regard that led to the horrific but unavoidable deaths of these Nigerians.

The shame of the scathing recruitment exercise writhed out some facts; facts which, though, acerbic are real. That in the search of job has the Nigerian youths being shown their belated status as slaves; it is in this search for job that young souls with high hopes had to pay the ultimate prize. In the search for possible employment has the ineptitude of the government to provide same exposed; in the search for job are the woes of the Nigerian school leaver. has the stake for employment be heightened to demand for life? But for how long shall the stultifying deceit linger? in the government lies the answers.

———————————

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cool good eh love2 cute confused notgood numb disgusting fail