By Somefun Oluwaseun Ayodeji
Looking at the recent turn of events in this country God has blessed so so(intentional repetition) much, I think a caption in English Language wouldn’t have expressed my rage enough and even my pen was boiling as I wrote (because it refused to write again at a point).
I was going to write about this funny Centenary lottery going on but now that this NIS Recruitment sham has happened, I cannot but help fuse it with another job hunting experience/interview that happened to a friend. Really what madness is going on here? Is lottery the solution to the poverty Nigerians are going through? I see this Centenary lottery as rubbish and lack of vision from our so called leaders and I am not apologetic about that. I laugh when I remember the folly in this country, cars; phones and so on are doled out timely for a period. Will this increase GDP or improve our standard of living I ask? This country is just increasingly annoying. Imagine this NIS Recruitment where 520,000 people wrote an exam for 4,556 slots! Isn’t it crazy? Where in the world does this craze happen? Where a total of about 16-21 people died in different venues of the exam and people sandwiched like rams in a truck in these venues. It shows the extent to which the government values the masses here.
You finish your compulsory Youth Service as a graduate and instead of you being happy you are caught in “webs of thoughts” on how the next stage of your life will be like because those up there care less about you- whether you live or die. But before then Entrepreneurship though good, would have been introduced as a substitute for the no-job situation forgetting that there was a time when graduates had access to instant employment and a car immediately after graduation-cum-youth service.
A good friend of mine had her own fair share of this job hunting experience where she spent almost all of the meagre sum left of her savings from NYSC on transportation for a “networking job” she didn’t like in her own words. They tossed her among themselves as she moved from venue to venue thinking she was going for “interviews” all caused because she applied to a no-name company online. Thank God, her eyes opened early enough but she had already paid #500 aforetime for “confirmation” as they told her to do and some people even paid #1,000. When she told me, I made her know no firm in its “right senses” will ever ask a mere job seeker(except in few cases like NIS, NSCDC and co.) to pay for a job application and she noted that.
Though Abba Moro was to an extent right when he said the applicants’ impatience led to those casualties. But come to think of it, isn’t that where Nigeria has pushed them to- the frustration? Where you have already gotten a mind-set that if you are not “sharp” by shunting and shoving others you may lose your slot.
Where Robert Mugabe could now use Nigeria to make negative comparisons like “Are we now like Nigeria that we have to reach down to our pockets to get anything done?” Imagine that corrupt old man and sit-tight leader of a country like Zimbabwe using Nigeria as a negative comparison! As usual and as I wrote in my last article APC have started throwing tantrums and calling for heads but if they are wise they should know that all this happenings should be room for them to showcase genuinely what they say they have for Nigerians.
I pity all these guys in power because with the way this country is going it might degenerate into a situation where non-privileged Nigerians will start to attack privileged ones and I hear a God forbid from someone. You know well we have been forbidding everything and see where it has gotten us to today.
Before I sign out, my heart goes out to all those who lost loved ones and friends in the NIS Recruitment exam and I pray it will never happen again. Lastly, my final word is from a saying attributed to Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala that only Nigerians can stand up to fight the corruption in their country, and if we do not who will?
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© CC BY-NC-ND 2014