Last Friday, the Senate Committee on Interior rounded off a two-day public hearing on the death of 16 Nigerian youths during the e-recruitment exercise by the Nigerian Immigration Service on March 15. SUNDAY ABORISADE reports that buck-passing marks much of the proceedings
Tension and anxiety enveloped the large hall in the new Senate wing, venue of the two-day public hearing of the Senate Committee on Interior probing the unfortunate incidents of March 15, in which 16 job seekers lost their lives during the recruitment exercise into the Nigerian Immigration Service. Interested parties — including the Minister of Interior, Mr. Abba Moro; Comptroller-General of the NIS, Mr. David Parradang; representatives of the firm that conducted the ill-fated exercise, and officials of the Federal Character Commission, Office of the Head of Service and heads of agencies under the supervision of the Ministry of Interior, among others — were seated as early as 9:30am, expecting the Senate President, David Mark, to declare the event open.
Mark was represented on the occasion by the Senate Leader, Senator Victor Ndoma-Egba. After Ndoma-Egba delivered the Senate President’s speech, the stage was set for a six-hour stormy session that was full of suspense and anxiety.
The representative of the Head of Service, who simply introduced himself as, Yemi, gives a background to the entire saga when he said the NIS applied to his office for waivers to fill vacant positions in the service sometime in 2011.
According to Yemi, the NIS provided credible justification, particularly the need to expand the scope of its operations, responsibilities and involvement in various task forces to counter insecurity and insurgency in the country.
Based on this and in particular, the ability of the NIS to pay the remuneration of those to be employed, the office of the HoS granted waivers to fill 2,050 positions and 4,556 positions in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
The NIS, after securing the waivers, was required to conduct the employment exercise in line with the official guidelines through its board, in accordance with the provisions in the Act that established the board.
Yemi points out, “The role of the Head of Civil Service of the Federation ends here, as he has no statutory role in the recruitment exercise of any ministry, department or agency once they have satisfied the criteria for the granting of the waiver to fill vacancies in their establishments.”
The representative of the Chairman, Federal Character Commission, Mr. Uche Diogu, notes that the FCC is empowered by Section 4 (1) G (I) of the FCC Establishment Act, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004, to ensure that all MDAs have clear criteria indicating the conditions to be fulfilled and comprehensive guidelines on the procedure for employment.
Diogu says, “In a letter dated July 21, 2011, the NIS wrote the FCC, informing it of a waiver granted to it by the Office of the HoS for them to fill total vacancies of 1,750 urgently in view of the Boko Haram threat to security in the north axis.”
He says the NIS therefore requested the Commission to grant it permission to conduct the exercise and for the new employees to resume work by September 2011. The request, he says, was granted and the approval was communicated to the NIS in a letter dated July 25, 2011, stating that the NIS should forward the list of the candidates to be invited for interview, indicating their states of origin, sex, age, posts, and so on.
Diogu claims that more than four months after the request was granted, NIS became incommunicado; adding that the FCC therefore, in a letter dated December 12, 2011, drew the attention of the NIS to the non compliance and reminded it to comply accordingly.
In addition, Diogu says, the Executive Chairman directed that the NIS Comptroller-General be summoned to an interactive session on the recruitment exercise in a meeting scheduled for Friday, December 16, 2011.
The then NIS Comptroller-General, Mrs. Rose Uzoma, he claims, did not attend the meeting, nor was there any further information on the scheduled recruitment drive. This prompted the Executive Chairman to send another invitation to the CG for a meeting with the Committee on Defence and Foreign Affairs of the FCC.
The meeting was scheduled for Tuesday, August 8, 2012. Again, Diogu says, the CG could not attend due to other official engagements.
Instead, she asked for a rescheduling, which was granted and slated for October 4, 2012. Uzoma, alongside one Mr. S.O. Olowa, were present. Uzoma denied the involvement of the NIS in any recruitment exercise.
The NIS later wrote another letter dated October 11, 2012, requesting certificate of compliance in respect of the recruitment exercise. In the letter, the NIS allegedly referred to an earlier letter purportedly written on February 20, 2011 requesting the certificate of compliance.Diogu says no such letter was received by the FCC and that the FCC, because of that, did not oblige the certificate of compliance as requested in the NIS letter under reference because the agency did not forward the list of successful candidates, as required by the FCC, to ascertain the level of compliance.
On December 13, 2012, he says, the NIS wrote to request a waiver not to publicise the scheduled recruitment exercise for security reasons. Diogu says the waiver was granted but the approval had not been communicated to the NIS before the exercise was put on hold.
He says, “On December 24, 2012, the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on FCC also wrote to inform the Commission of the suspension of the recruitment exercise. On March 5, 2013, the Commission wrote to invite the Comptroller-General of the NIS, Mr. David Parradang to an interactive meeting scheduled for March 20, 2013.
“The meeting was held on March 26, 2013 and the CG was represented by the Acting DCG, Mr. Bakare Benson. The meeting was called to discuss the suspended recruitment exercise and to advise the NIS appropriately. “On March 27, 2013, the Commission held another meeting with the Director/Secretary of the Civil Defence, Fire, Immigration and Prison Services Board. This was a follow-up to the meeting held with the NIS the previous day.
“The Commission was informed on the occasion that the Minister of Interior, Abba Moro, had given a go-ahead for the conduct of the recruitment exercise which was earlier put on hold. On June 4, 2013, the Commission held another meeting with the Acting CG, Mr. Bewas Musa, and the DCG, Bakare Benson.
“The FCC was informed of the opening of an official website for on-line registration for the recruitment exercise. The issue of logistics and need to improve upon past exercises was emphasised. In a letter dated September 13, 2013, the Commission invited the CG for another meeting scheduled for September 19, 2013.
“The meeting could not hold because the CG was said to have been invited for a similar meeting by the Minister of Interior.”
Diogu reveals that the need for openness, fairness and justice in the exercise formed the centre of a courtesy call the FCC later paid to the Interior Minister. In the interim, he says, the meeting with the Acting CG was rescheduled for September 26, 2013 through a letter dated, September 2013. The meeting also centred on the exercise and the need to follow due process and federal character principles.
On March 12, 2014, the FCC received information that the recruitment exercise had been rescheduled for March 15, 2014; following which the Commission invited the board for an emergency meeting on March 13, 2014. The meeting, Diogu claims, was attended by the Civil Defence, Fire, Immigration and Prison Services Board.
The FCC reportedly raised a couple of observations, in particular about the short notice and advised the board to suspend the exercise to a later date to give it enough publicity and put proper logistics in place.Diogu adds that it was also suggested that the exercise be held on separate days for different cadres.
However, he claims, the Secretary to the Board maintained that the exercise would take place nationwide on March 15 because the board chairman, who is also the interior minister, had already made a commitment before the National Assembly.
“We believe that the exercise was impromptu because, two days to the exercise, on March 13, we had yet to be informed about the number of people they wanted to employ. We had not been officially informed,” Diogu notes.
The Secretary of the NIS board, Mr. Sylvanus Tapgun, however shocked the audience when he said he also got to know of the plan to recruit to the NIS through a newspaper advertisement.
He says he was officially informed of the subsisting agreement between the ministry and the consultant, Messrs Drexel Technology Nigeria Limited on the e-recruitment exercise when his attention was drawn to the newspaper advertisement.
Tapgun says, “After a thorough study of the agreement, it became clear to me that the consultant had the responsibility of deploying the portal and collection of N1,000 from each applicant. The portal, which was opened for six weeks, closed on October 27, 2013 after a week extension due to a national holiday.
“At the closure of the portal, the consultant submitted to the board an initial enrolment figure of 693,015 applications. Later, the consultant submitted another figure of 710,110, which they attributed to certain applications whose processing had not been completed before the portal shut down.”
Tapgun says the secretariat later made a proposal to the minister, requesting the criteria for short-listing the applicants, but the minister responded that it was the responsibility of the consultant to produce it.
“Consequently, the consultant produced the short list of 522,652 candidates made up of 283,485 applicants for the Assistant Superintendent II; 108,911 for Asst. Superintendent/Asst. Inspectors; and 130,256 Immigration Assistants,” Tapgun discloses.
He says on January 22, 2014, he received instructions to deal with the consultant’s request to conduct the aptitude test for the shortlisted candidates. Drexel had, in their proposal, requested approval to conduct the aptitude test and to provide personnel for the NIS to handle the physical fitness test.
Tapgun continues, “The secretariat then invited the consultant, the CG Immigration and the legal adviser of the ministry to a meeting on the consultant’s request. The CG suggested that candidates should go to their states of origin to write the test because of the huge numbers of applicants, which would not only make for an even spread, but it would also make it manageable.
“At the second meeting on February 7, 2014, the detailed budget and tentative date for the examination were carried out, agreed upon and conveyed to the chairman for approval. Following the approval, the consultants were requested to provide funding for the exercise. The consultant declined on the grounds that that it was not their responsibility.”Tapgun adds that the secretariat held a meeting with the NIS on how to actualise the date; and that options like the staggering of the exercise were considered.
He says, “It was proposed that the physical exercise should hold on March 29, and the aptitude test, postponed to between April 5 and 19, taking the groups separately. However, the minister did not approve the proposal because he said the pronouncement had been made that the exercise should hold on March 15.”
Tapgun reveals that the minister also directed that applicants should write the examination in the centres they had indicated in their applications, which was contrary to the proposal of the steering committee that they should go to their states of origin in order to reduce huge population in some centres.
The consultants eventually released N45m on March 12, as against the earlier approved budget of N210m. Worse still, the candidates were far in excess of the figure supplied by the consultant. Stampede was recorded in Abuja, Benin, Port Harcourt and Minna, where some applicants lost their lives.And, as if to exonerate the NIS, Tapgun declares that the NIS board does not have an independent way of monitoring the portal because it doesn’t have a functional IT section.
“We do not have a means of monitoring how many applications were collected and the amount of money received from the applicants. We relied on the consultant to give us the figure,” Tapgun informs.
The Senate committee expresses shock about Tapgun’s claims and concluded that the non insistence of the steering committee on spreading the exercise over some days, as well as its non insistence on the N210m requested from the consultants to conduct the exercise partly led to the disaster recorded on March 15.
The chairman declares, “This is a shoddy arrangement, since you have been planning the exercise, yet you did not know where the funding would come from.”The committee got more revelations when the Permanent Member of the Board of Civil Defence, Fire, Immigration and Prisons Services, Mr. Mustapha Zakariya, alleged that the exercise was not approved by the board because members had not met this year.
He reveals, “Even at a meeting we held last year, we did not discuss the recruitment exercise though it was listed as one of the agenda, it was skipped.”Zakariya, who said he had been a member of the board since 2008, also told the committee that the decision to hire the consultant was unilaterally taken by the minister, who is also the chairman of the board.
Zakariya further alleged that the signature of the former Secretary of the board, Dr. R. K. Attahiru, on the agreement between the consultants and the board, was actually forged because the man who purportedly appended his signature had denied it.
The firm that developed the electronic platform for the ill-fated recruitment exercise, Messrs Drexel Technologies Nigeria Limited, however drew the ire of the Senate committee when its representative, Company Secretary/Legal Adviser, Mr. Theodore Maiyaki, disclosed that the Ministry of Interior did not advertise the multi-million naira contract for competitive bidding by the public.
The committee faulted the award of the contract to Drexel, which it says does not qualify to win such a job going by its Memorandum of the Articles of Association.Bagudu says Drexel’s Memorandum of Articles of Association shows that it was incorporated in 2011 to carry out business of general contract, import financing and marketing of all kinds of electrical appliances. It’s also licensed to provide business of mechanised agriculture.
In its defence, Maiyaki says the company was incorporated in 2011 and immediately bought the majority shares into SW Global, which had been in existence for over 10 years and doing the same business as the contract awarded to it.
He urged the committee to look at the statement of share capital and return of the lodgment of SW Global in which Drexel has 80 million shares.
The committee faults this and insists that the contract was not in order because it was not signed between the ministry and SW Global which had the proficiency to execute it.
Asked whether the job was advertised before he got the contract, Maiyaki said no. He explains, “It was an unsolicited proposal built around the experiences of 2011 and 2012. We found out that there was a recruitment crisis in the NIS at the time. Because we have a solution which resolves that kind of problem, we quickly sent in a proposal. It was on the basis of our experience and presentation that the ministry considered us worthy of the contract.”
He adds that the company had provided similar services in the past to the Nigerian Air Force and the Navy. The committee also faulted the N1,000 each of the 710,000 applicants paid as application fee, which amounted to N612m gain in one single contract.
A member, Senator Hosea Agboola, notes, “Your company collected N710.1m and you spent N98m as the project cost. Are you now saying that your company gained N612m in one business?
Maiyaki responds that out of the N710m generated from the applicants, Drexel engaged payment processors which had an agreement to deduct N250 per applicant as processing charges. It turned out that Drexel’s initial projection was to capture an application base of about 50,000 applicants, but the deluge of the applications led to the crash of website on more than three occasions.
Maiyaki further reveals that Section 321 of the agreement provided the N1,000 as a cover in the event that the projected number was exceeded, “because the infrastructure we were using could not have been limited to N98m.”
The committee therefore asked the consultant to forward to it the breakdown of all additional expenditure they incurred in the course of expanding its infrastructure to accommodate extra applications, apart from their initial target of 50,000.In their separate presentations of the NIS commanders in the Federal Capital Territory, Edo, Rivers, Niger, and Bauchi states, claim that they were paid N300,000 each for the conduct of the exercise.
They disclosed that those that were not shortlisted for the exercise were thrice the number of official candidates, and that that was what led to the tragedy.
In his testimony before the committee, Parradang, the Comptroller-General of the NIS, faults the exercise and claims that he was not carried along in the entire process. He stresses that he only got to know about the date of the exercise on the day the Interior Minister, appeared before the Senate committee on the Interior to defend the 2014 budget of his ministry.
Parradang maintains that since the exercise was planned by the office of the minister and Drexel Technologies Nigeria Limited on April 30, 2013, it wasn’t possible for the Federal Budget Office to capture it in the 2014 Federal Government Appropriation.
But the minister faults this deposition, insisting that an agreement was reached and executed with the vendor, Drexel Technologies Nigeria Limited. He says the ministerial tender’s board subsequently conveyed its approval of the award of the e-recruitment platform to the NIS board.
Moro however apologised to Nigerians over the circumstances that led to the death of 16 people, in eight centres across the country, insisting that adequate arrangement was put in place by his ministry, the board and the NIS to conduct a credible electronic recruitment into the NIS in order to save the agency from the negative image of job racketeering which had plagued it over the years.
The Senate committee is expected to submit its report within the next one week.
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