“If I Was The President, This Would Never Have Happened” – Chris Okotie Reacts To NIS Recruitment Stampede

Pastor Chris Okotie of the Household of God International Ministries has reacted to the stampede that occurred recently at the Nigeria Immigration Service recruitment centres across the country, stressing that if he was the nation’s president, such incident wouldn’t have happened.

He also rubbished the whooping N12million paid to delegates at the ongoing national conference.

The Pastor voiced his opinion on his Facebook page below:

The big news this week was the inauguration of the National Conference, but the deaths of more than 16 young applicants who died in Abuja and other venues, during the Nigerian Immigration Service, NIS recruitment exercise, overshadowed it. This tragedy mirrors the desperate situation of Nigeria.

One only hopes that this unfortunate loss of lives, coupled with the incessant Boko Haram killings and other youth-based violence, would serve as a wake-up call to the summiteers, that this country needs a new governance paradigm. If the conference cannot produce that, then the over N7 billion invested in it would amount to another colossal waste of our scarce national resources.

It is an irony that each delegate would earn a whopping N12 million for the 3-month duration of the conference. By conservative estimates, N12 million is enough to provide self-employment for 12 resourceful graduates, and N7 billion could do likewise for thousands, some of whom perished under chaotic conditions in stadia around the country, while waiting for a poorly organised aptitude test by the NIS. The young graduate job-seekers who turned out for the tests filled up many stadia around the country, as if they came to watch high-profile football matches.

These hapless chaps paid N1,000.00 (One Thousand Naira) processing fee each. So, the Nigerian Immigration Service must have made quite some money, considering that in Lagos and Abuja alone, over 125,000 applicants turned up. We may be looking at millions of Naira that this monetised recruitment exercise generated for the NIS. There was record turnout in each of the 34 states for just 4,5000 slots that the NIS advertised. The alarming job application horror is a clear evidence of the inability of our public institutions to manage events, resulting in poor crowd control and avoidable deaths through stampede. This is not an isolated case, it is a regular occurrence.

Daily Star