DEATH OF UNEMPLOYED YOUTHS AT NIGERIA IMMIGRATION SERVICE APTITUDE TESTS: GOVT. IS CULPABLE
DEATH OF UNEMPLOYED YOUTHS AT NIGERIA IMMIGRATION SERVICE APTITUDE TESTS: GOVT. IS CULPABLE
ERC Demands Sack of Minister of Interior and NIS Comptroller General
Calls for a Day of Mourning and Mass Protests
The Education Rights Campaign (ERC) is outraged at the avoidable wastage of the lives of scores of unemployed Nigerian youths during the Nigeria Immigration Service’s recruitment test over the weekend. The promising youths had gone for the test to seek means of keeping body and soul together only for them to be forced into their early graves by the irresponsibility and callousness of Nigerian government.
At some centres where the tests were conducted, deaths and grievious injuries were recorded. Official sources have explained this to be a product of the impatience of the candidates to gain entry into the venues of the test. As usual victim-blaming and arms-wriggling is the default response of the Federal Government to any national calamity including those caused by its gross incompetence and the abject failure of its policies and projects.
In Abuja and many other centres, reports show that more applicants beyond what these venues could accommodate were invited to write the tests. For instance at the Abuja National Stadium which has a maximum seating capacity of 60,000, over 65,000 applicants were invited. To make matters worse, only a few of the about 30 entry points into the stadium were opened. The same stories exist in many other centres.
As far as we are concerned in the ERC, the blame for the death rests primarily on the shoulders of the Federal Government and particularly the Nigeria Immigration Service and the Ministry of Interior which appear to have turned the recruitment test to an opportunity to make quick money. According to reports, only 4,556 vacancies were advertised but the NIS accepted application fee of N1,000 each from over 500,000 applicants making a clean return of over N500 million! This is unconscionable! This is unacceptable!! The NIS and the President Jonathan’s capitalist government are preying on the misery of hapless Nigerian youths, especially graduates, who suffer years without gainful employment.
The ERC believes it is the social responsibility of the government as the custodian of society’s commonwealth to provide a decent job for every citizen. All talks about young graduates becoming employers of labour is nonsense especially in a society where public infrastructures like electricity supply, water supply and transportation infrastructures needed to support self-employment are lacking.
Actually, the crisis of chronic unemployment which plagues the nation is a product of the inherently unjust nature of the capitalist system which prioritises profit and privilege of a few over peoples’ needs. As a result of capitalism, Nigeria is locked in an absurd contradiction of such magnitude that even the Finance Minister Okonjo Iweala for all her famed qualifications as a foremost economist is left in a quandary.
It is not as if there are no jobs. There are actually more potential skilled job opportunities than the current number of unemployed graduates can fill. In the secondary and primary schools for instance, over 200,000 skilled teachers are needed to close the yawning gap in the teacher/pupil ratio. In the health sector, there are not enough doctors and other health professionals. In the tertiary institutions, there is a yawning need for more academic staff. We need more engineers and technicians to be employed to drive the nation’s industrialisation, so also do we need thousands of farmers, agricultural scientists, agronomists etc. to drive the much-needed agricultural revolution and food security. So there are jobs that need to be done. The fundamental cause of our predicament in this nation is the contradiction of capitalism, which prioritizes maximization of profits of a few superrich against welfare of the majority, coupled with legendary kleptocracy called governance in Nigeria. This explains the refusal of the government to invest in turning these potential job openings into actual jobs so that the army of unemployed youths can apply for them.
This is why the ERC, while staunchly advocating the rights for free and public-funded public education, never fails to call for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by an alternative socialist system as the only real way out of Nigeria’s seemingly insurmountable crisis. For as long as this unjust system of capitalism remains, the kind of unconscionable wastage of the lives of our youths while hunting for jobs which ordinarily is their right will continue to occur.
The public has been expressing outrage at this mindless wastage of the lives of the youth of the nation. We now demand that this outrage be turned into a flood of mass indignation and protest at an incompetent government and its unjust system of capitalism which has caused this wastage of the lives of our youth. We specifically call on the labour movement, civil society organizations and unemployed youths to organise a day of National mourning and mass processions to protest and demand the following: