The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) has described Saturday’s Immigration recruitment exercise where about 19 people lost their lives as unacceptable and against the best employment practices.
The union pointed out that the incident also violates the tenets contained in Nigeria’s Labour Act and relevant conventions and resolutions of International Labour Organization (ILO) guiding decent work as subscribed to by Nigeria.
Addressing journalists in Kaduna on Sunday, NLC Vice President, Isa Aremu, said: “For a country that just marked the International Women’s Day with fun-fare, the deaths of the female applicants during the exercise violates the Federal and States’ government claim to respect human and women’s rights, and also dent the image of Nigeria as a country in which lives are being casually wasted at will”.
He demanded for direct government actions to ensure that no life of an applicant would be further wasted at any recruitment centre while urging President Goodluck Jonathan to take preventive actions against what it called shameless exhibition of incompetence and non-service delivery by some of his ministers.
“Nigerians do not need another probe panel on this tragedy. In 2008, under Y’Adua’s administration, a similar recruitment exercise by the Nigeria immigration Service, the Federal Government instituted a probe into the circumstance which led to the death of scores of applicants nationwide. The outcome of this probe was known. Nigerians are, therefore, legitimately tired of probes. In fact, Nigerians are probe fatigue,” he stressed
Mr Aremu tasked the Minister of Interior, Abba Moro, to investigate the death of the innocent applicants, failing which he must resign from administering a Ministry that is increasingly notorious for employment scandals and employment tragedies.
He also faulted the Minister for blaming the victims for their own deaths.
“The Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) must be blamed for not putting appropriate mechanisms for genuine aptitude tests and applicants crowd control even after collecting over six billion Naira from the applicants.
“What the nation needs urgently is a far reaching new labour market policy that will put an end to this serial primitive recruitment exercise which, leaves in its trail despair, tears and dead bodies rather than living employed applicants,” he emphasised.