By Rotimi Fasan
THE morning of Saturday  March 15 met me outside Liberty Stadium, Ibadan, Oyo State, venue of the so-called test for young Nigerians applying for jobs with the Nigerian Immigration Service.

They had come from different states in the South West and environs in their thousands even though notice for the test had been issued only three days before. Short notices like this are common tricks by which recruitment agents and their officers ensure many miss out on recruitment tests or go for their test unprepared.

NIGERIA, Abuja : Job-seekers applying for work at the Nigerian immigration department scramble as their exam papers fly in the air, on the pitch of Abuja National Stadium, on March 15, 2014. AFP PHOTO

Either way it is a fraud to give some applicants unfair advantage over others. You wouldn’t expect it in a Federal Government agency. But then this is Nigeria. By 7am roads leading to Liberty Stadium and the entire neigbourhood of the Stadium were in a state of chaos as the applicants, garbed in different shades of white vests and shorts/trousers, over white tennis canvas anxiously rushed to the entrance to beat the 7 am deadline for them to report.

Friends and relations of the applicants who had either driven them to the venue or gone with them to provide other support all looked equally harassed. The mood was not the most appropriate for a test which was meant to be both intellectual and physical- a written test to be followed by an endurance race for people who had not been certified physically fit. By 2 pm, seven clear hours after the applicants were to have been accredited, the Ibadan venue of the test was still chaotic. People struggled to go in as the accreditation seemed to be taking forever.

In the end, the organisers abandoned all pretences to order and simply opened the gates to everybody around including, no doubt, common thieves and pickpockets who had come disguised as applicants for the test. Many applicants or mere touts in white clothing walked up and down the road, talking in leisurely groups and looking unconcerned or too tired and harassed to be bothered. There were many people making brisk business selling white vests, shoes, socks and other materials the unprepared applicants needed to be allowed into the test venue.

It was just crazy calling what went on in that place a test. Torture? Yes!

I left after spending several hours waiting but would later learn many were injured trying to get in even though no death was recorded. I had gone to the test venue with somebody very close to me who had responded to the call for application months before. I couldn’t really be bothered about the test and left to me the person I had accompanied to the test wouldn’t have applied.

I had known from past experience that such mass recruitment drives, either by banks or oil companies, are mere smokescreens to perpetrate unspeakable frauds on hapless Nigerians. The tests are means through which their organisers provide official cover for their under the table activities. Years ago after one such test conducted by the Nigerian Customs at their office close to the University of Lagos, the entire area, including Atan cemetery, had been littered with copies of educational certificates and other personal effects of the applicants.

I was then an undergraduate at Unilag and had witnessed the sham at the Harvey Road office of the Customs where Iaw enforcement agents had been invited to maintain order. They had shot into the air and released many canisters of tear gas which led to a stampede.

Many were trampled upon in the manner that led to the death of scores of Nigerian youths across different test centres on March 15. There were shoes, bags and writing materials everywhere days after the test. Which is to say that the latest incident involving the NIS was not in any way new. It’s been going on for many years.

But what’s baffling about it all is the casual manner with which these incidents and others like them involving loss of many lives are handled. The NIS that had made hundreds of millions of Naira, if not billions, from the applicants who had each paid N1000 to apply must have been aware of the number of applicants to say nothing of the available spaces which, it has been revealed, was between 2000 and 4000. They had the figures and could have made plans to conduct the test in manageable batches if they were being honest.

But what interested them was the money to be made from the applicants who had been made desperate by years of joblessness in spite of the ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ of high employment being released by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and her ilk in government. In years past, how many graduates cared for jobs in establishments like the NIS, Customs, the police or military? But desperation has turned Nigerian youths into avid applicants for jobs wherever they could be found.

From whatever angle the matter is viewed, the Nigerian youth is under siege, either in school, as undergraduates or graduates. They’ve become the cash cow and sacrificial lamb of the Nigerian society where a few older members of the society who have more than enough to take care of themselves and their families are given more while the younger elements of the society, the future of the country, have no one to meet their needs. The school system, from primary through to secondary and university, has been destroyed and those able to make it through the decayed system, even when they are eminently qualified, are hired as so-called contract staff and paid less for jobs for which people with lesser education had better pay and prospects in years past.

In the last few months hundreds of Nigerian children have been murdered in schools across the North Eeast of the country where Islamic terrorists opposed to so-called Western education have been in control. The entire school system has now been shut down, sending thousands of children back home in that region of Nigeria where less than 5% of school-going age children are in school. Who says the terrorists are not achieving their aim of mass illiteracy where all we hear from the government is rhetoric of victory?

Should it take the death of 20 Nigerian youths for government to realise that the tradition of mass recruitment exercise is a non-starter? Must the blood of young Nigerians be constantly spilled before government realises the injustice being perpetrated against this segment of the population? What type of foundation is being laid for the future of this country when the vast majority of Nigerian youths are alienated and shut out of the Nigerian future? Of what benefit to the deceased are the jobs and compensatory gestures now being extended to their families by politicians probably looking at the electoral value of these gestures? Rubbish!