By Femi Ogunshola, NAN
Nigeria currently has one of the highest unemployment rates in Africa. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the country’s unemployment rate stood at 33.3% in the last quarter of 2020, with youth unemployment even higher at 42.5%.
The NBS further reports that at the time these figures were released, underemployment stood at 22.8%, while youth unemployment was at 21.0%.
However, multinational consulting firm KPMG predicts that Nigeria’s unemployment rate will rise to 40.6% by 2023.
“Although the National Bureau of Statistics recorded an increase in the national unemployment rate from 23.1% in 2018 to 33.3% in 2020,
“We estimate that this rate has increased to 37.7% in 2022 and will rise further to 40.6% in 2023,” said KPMG in its Global Economy Outlook report for the first half of 2023.
Nigeria’s unemployment figure is shockingly high compared to Ghana’s, which, according to a BBC report, was 13.7% in the third quarter of 2022.
The scarcity of jobs means that unemployed people can go to great lengths to secure employment, and this has created an opportunity for top officials in Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) to exploit job applicants financially and morally.
In some instances, job seekers are allegedly offered fake jobs and enrolled in the Integrated Payroll Personnel Information System (IPPIS), the centralized Federal Government salary payment platform, to collect salaries.
Concerned about this situation, the House of Representatives established an Ad hoc Committee to investigate job racketeering in MDAs. The reports from the committee’s hearings so far have been mind-boggling.
In one session, witnesses Abdulmalik Ahmed and Ali Yaro shared their experiences of being swindled by individuals posing as intermediaries for an agency.
The two witnesses appeared before the committee on Aug. 8 and testified about how a former staff of the Federal Character Commission (FCC), Mr. Haruna Kolo, who doubled as the IPPIS desk officer and ex-protocol person to the Commission’s chairman, Mrs. Farida Dankaka, swindled unsuspecting job seekers.
Kolo, who is now a staff of the Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON), stated in his submission before the committee that his movement to AMCON was facilitated by Dankaka and three others, including the FCC chairman’s 51-year-old sister.
He alleged that the chairman’s sister was rejected at AMCON due to her age, and he claimed that Dankaka blamed him for not doing enough to convince AMCON management to accept her.
On his part, Ahmed, an indigene of Adamawa and the only graduate in his family of 21, said he was prepared to pay any amount to secure a job in any Federal Government agency when presented with the opportunity.
He stated that the driver to the Federal Commissioner, representing Taraba, took him to Kolo, the protocol officer to the chairman of the commission, into whose account he paid N1 million in the hope of getting a job at the commission.
Yaro, also from Adamawa, paid even more, depositing N2 million into Kolo’s account in an attempt to secure a federal government job.
“I graduated 11 years ago without a job. I had the opportunity to join the dreaded Boko Haram, but I chose to be a law-abiding citizen. So, I thought it was better to pay the N2 million to secure a job than offering myself as a tool for Boko Haram,” he told the committee.
Rep. Yusuf Gagdi, the chairman of the committee, pledged that no stone would be left unturned to deliver justice for the victims of job racketeering.
A visibly angry Gagdi expressed his disappointment that one of the heads of an MDA resorted to secret recruitment after obtaining recruitment waivers.
Gagdi said MDAs use waivers to bypass recruitment guidelines, sell jobs to the highest bidders, and engage in fraudulent activities. He added that they perpetrate job racketeering, which undermines the principles of fairness and transparency in the recruitment process.
He described this act as a deliberate effort to engage cronies and sell job slots to willing graduates. He also mentioned that some highly placed officials move their children from one MDA to another depending on which MDA offers more lucrative opportunities.
Some of the MDAs considered lucrative include the Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigeria National Petroleum Company Ltd., and Nigeria Communication Commission.
During the investigative hearing, one of the FCC Commissioners representing Delta State, Mr. Moses Anaughe, accused the commission’s chairman of moving her children from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to the Downstream Regulatory Commission, a subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), where the salaries are higher.
She did not deny the allegation.
Several FCC Commissioners, including those from Lagos, Delta, Osun, Rivers, Enugu, and Dankaka’s home state of Kwara, are up in arms against her, accusing her of selling job slots for dollars using Kolo and her sister as receiving agents.
Account details where job seekers made payments were provided to the committee, including names and beneficiaries, but Dankaka denied any wrongdoing.
Swearing on the Holy Quran, she stated that she had carried out her duties to the best of her abilities and never collected money from any applicant personally or through any proxy.
Pundits believe that if the allegations from the Ad hoc committee hearings are true, the Bola Tinubu administration has a lot of work to do in cleaning up the civil service.
They also call for similar investigations to be extended to other MDAs to determine the extent of corruption and bring the culprits to justice.
NAN Features
