The House of Representatives Ad hoc Committee probing employment racketeering in Federal Government agencies has said it will propose the elimination of waivers that allow agencies to bypass advertising employment opportunities.
The Committee Chairman, Yusuf Gagdi, made this known during the resumption of the investigative hearing on Monday.
He accused the Registrar of the National Postgraduate Medical College, Prof. Fatiu Arogundade, of lop-sidedness in their recruitment, citing the agency’s presentation at the hearing.
earing.
Gagdi expressed concern that almost all the government agencies that had appeared before the committee so far had been carrying out their recruitment secretly, as they had always applied for waivers to avoid advertising for various frivolous reasons.
Gagdi noted that the abolition of waivers for employment advertisements would be beneficial to the country.
He said, “We will abolish the use of waivers because waiver is not for the good of this country. It is an abuse of the citizens of Nigeria. When they give you waivers, you share the slots among Directors in the agencies and the political masters that superintend over those agencies. Whether it is the National Assembly, I don’t care. But whenever waiver is given, you do not advertise and give opportunity to citizens of this country to have access to recruitment.”
Lawmaker Ahmadu Jaha, a member of the committee, pointed out that the agency’s recruitment process did not include anyone from the entire Northeast region.
He said that this was a major contributing factor to the upsurge of insurgency in the region, as it denied people the opportunity to find gainful employment.
He said, “We are all aware of what happened as a result of the Boko Haram insurgency and I don’t want to believe you that nobody applied in the whole of the North-East if advertisements were properly done. In my local government alone, Gwoza, we have more than 100 medical doctors, more than 50 consultants, and more than 20 professors in medicine.”
“There is no way you can look at us as if we do not know what we are doing saying that nobody applied. Let me tell you one thing. If they are searching for sponsors of Boko Haram, if they are searching for the main causes of Boko Haram, your organization is one of them. This is because one of the main reasons why people join Boko Haram is because they are being short-changed.”
“One of the reasons people join Boko Haram is because they do not have anything to do for a living. Somebody cannot go to school and spend years and go to Ibadan and write examinations and become a consultant and now you say you advertise a position and he is there doing nothing for a living and he did not apply?”
“How do you expect peace in the country if in the whole region, six states, there is no single employee of your organization? This is to tell you that if we can peruse all the more than 700 or 1000 MDAs in the country, we may hardly have less than five percent from the North East and you expect to have peace. So we are not happy. We are saying this before the camera and we expect everybody to know.”