Nigerians had not received any explanation for the employment scams orchestrated by Godwin Emefiele’s Central Bank of Nigeria and Babatunde Fowler’s Federal Inland Revenue Service when their sensibilities were again assaulted by another unprofessional recruitment process, also done in the dark, by the Nigerian Prisons Service.
And when an explanation finally came, it not only struck as embarrassing, but undermined intelligence of Nigerians.Responding to reports and evidences of employment scams in FIRS, CBN and NPS, the Presidency, through the Vice President’s media handler, Laolu Akande, described them as false and our observations flawed. There are no secret recruitments,” he said in a July 7 report by the Vanguard newspaper. What’s happening, according to him, is the government’s commitment to “sanitis(ing) the recruitment process”, and ensuring “transparency”.
Like any sensible Nigerian, I took the excuse as an assault on our collective sensibility. If undermining the intelligence of Nigerians was what the Presidency vetted for release to the outraged public as an explanation for its institutional corruption, then our government is yet to be morally conscious and deviate from the system we thought we had already ousted.
What it costs to reverse employment scam is, well, nothing. Just the President’s instruction and the strike of a N20 pen. Achievable in 30 seconds. But this simple decision isn’t considered because it may frustrate the interests of a particular class – the politically privileged of whom the President and his family are long-established members.
I’ve furiously observed that the President stopped being a part of us on May 29, 2015, on being sworn into Office to, in his own words, “belong to everybody, and belong to nobody.” Not that he was a part of the masses. He is, and has always been, a variable of the ruling elite. Only that his outward asceticism made him exceptional and star of the oppressed class. So, there’s no better time for the President to prove that he actually belongs to everybody than this, for this privilege to work at “lucrative” agencies previously dominated by children and relatives of heads of political institutions and private industries.
The President’s sincerest advisers may have to remind him that corruption comes in various forms, and that institutional corruption as found in CBN and FIRS is actually worse than the political corruption that seems to be the only he understands.
Funds were looted easily in the past because our institutions were allowed to be hijacked by gangs of elites who offered their children and relatives these plum jobs to serve as accomplices in mismanaging public trust, as though those public agencies were their family’s enterprises.
It’s futile fighting political corruption while its parent – which goes by various names, including nepotism and favouritism – is allowed to thrive and destroy your efforts. It’s like filling a basket with water. Futile. Ill-advised.
But what I found even more amusing is the legion of defenders that emerged to justify the underground recruitments. It’s understandable when already gainfully employed people don’t see anything wrong with employment scams, of which CBN and FIRS have been found evidently guilty.
What I do not understand are the job-seekers from a disadvantaged class who don’t see anything wrong with children and relatives of powerful politicians and compliant industrialists getting jobs meant for all, with the primary criterion for employment being “connection” – recommendation. And then a mock test and screening to make it seem legitimate!
My explanation for this Stockholm Syndrome is the people’s partisan allegiance, that faulting a position of the government they fought to elect ridicules their electoral choices. But it’s not, it actually means you’re not indoctrinated by an insidious political ideology. It’s Civics!
On WhatsApp messenger a few days ago, I had a chat with a friend, a job-seeker whose justification of the nepotistic recruitments astonished me. He graduated with small fraction short of a First Class in Economics, and then started Masters he abandoned for lack of funds.
I reminded him of our mutual friend, a less qualified and uninspiring character who got a job in one of the scams as a part of a certain politician’s slots. Since he’s from the same Local Government Area as the beneficiary, I said, if a test is conducted for the people of their locality,there’s no way he wouldn’t be selected over the fortunate fellow.
At the end of our discussion, frustrated, I annoyed my friend by attributing his inability to secure a decent job these past years to his reasoning. No serious organisation will appreciate the intellect of someone who exhibits such poor sense of reasoning and evaluation and ridiculous symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome.
As we seek answers from the government, it must be understood that favouring the “candidates” of politically advantaged “senior citizens” by heads of public institution has been a long tradition of cronyism and classism in Nigeria, where an undergraduate student with an important surname or powerful relative may have a position “reserved” for him by family years before graduation. Only that the heads of this government rode to power on the back of promises to “change” this system.
The nation’s anger index grows every day, like the prices of commodities. If inflation doesn’t push Nigerians to react, being undermined in these processes of unprofessional recruitments may deflate their patience soon. So much for the President who once said, “(W)e shall never take you for granted…”. If this isn’t being taken for granted, let it be added to the President’s list of unexplained things. May God save us from us!
No comments