Moro takes the blame for immigration jobs tragedy

Minister of Interior, Mr. Abba Moro

The embattled Minister of the Interior,  Mr. Abba Moro, on Thursday, apologised to Nigerians over the circumstances that led to the death of 16 people during  the March 15  ill-fated recruitment exercise into the Nigerian Immigration Service.

He accepted responsibility for the tragedy which he said could have been averted if the exercise had been attended by only those that registered online for it.

The minister stated this when he appeared before the Atiku Bagudu-led  Senate Committee on Interior  probing the  fatal exercise.

Before he spoke, the Comptroller-General of the NIS, Mr.  David Parradang and the Secretary of the Civil Defence, Fire, Immigration and Prisons Services Board, Mr. Sylvanus, Tapgun, had told the committee   that they were not properly carried along by the ministry in the  planning  of the exercise.

Although Parradang said that no money was made available by the Interior Ministry to the NIS  for the screening of the 710,000  applicants,  Tapgun said that only about N45m was provided as  ‘discretionary contribution’  for the screening by the consultant, Drexel Technical Nigeria Limited.

Moro, who appeared last before the committee, however, said that  adequate arrangements  were  made by the Interior ministry, the Civil Defence, Fire, Immigration and Prisons Services Board and the NIS to conduct a credible electronic recruitment into the  Immigration service.

According to him, all the efforts  were to save the  NIS  from the negative image of job racketeering which had plagued it over the years.

He  said, “Mr chairman and distinguished senators, we are deeply grieved and saddened by the way events turned out. We express our sincere regrets once again.

“However, permit me to state that our patriotic desire was the pursuit of a more honest, a more transparent, a more cost effective, a more efficient and equitable platform.

“We sincerely made appropriate and adequate preparations for a hitch -free exercise, but as most things in administrative and human conditions, the yield curve of expected outcome is mostly undefined.

“My heart goes out to the families of those who have lost their dear loved ones. I sincerely sympathise with those injured. I share in their grief. I share in their pains. May I, at this juncture, assure you, distinguished senators and Nigerians, of my respect for  the sanctity of human life.

“The loss of these young Nigerians, who are needed as a critical human resource factor for nation building is most regrettable. As the Minister of Interior, under whose purview this unfortunate exercise took place, I cannot abdicate my responsibility. The buck stops here.”

Moro clarified that   the  ministry, the NIS  and  the board, were not  involved in the collection of electronic processing fees of N1, 000 charged on each of the 710 applicants.

He said the incident  fatality  would have been avoided if only those who were shortlisted for the exercise were the ones who turned up  at the various centres across the country.

• Recruitment not okayed by board – Parradang

Parradang and a   permanent member of the  board of Civil Defence, Fire, Immigration and Prisons Services, Mr. Mustapha Zakariya,  claimed that the  recruitment exercise was not approved by the board.

Parradang, in his presentation faulted the entire exercise and claimed that he was not carried along in the entire process.

He told the committee  that he got to know about the date of the exercise on the day Moro  appeared before the Senate committee on Interior to defend the 2014 budget of his ministry.

The NIS boss  maintained that, the fact that the exercise was   planned by  the office of the minister and Messrs Drexel Technical Nigeria Limited on  April 30 in 2013,  did not make it possible for the  Budget Office  of the Federation to capture it in the 2014   budget.

He said, “On   September 9, 2013,  the Civil Defence, Fire, Immigration and Prison Services Board placed advertisements in some national dailies for appointments into the Superintendent, Inspectorate
and Immigration Assistant cadre signed
by the then board Secretary, Dr. Attahiru.

“I immediately placed a call to the then  secretary that I am not aware that the board met on this issue. I immediately placed a call to the the Permanent Secretary too asking  whether there was any decision of the board to place an advert in the newspapers or not.

“I also placed a call to the two commissioners that are seated before you here  today whether they were aware that the board met and agreed for a publication to be made for    recruitment into  the service, but they all answered in the negative.

“I immediately wrote a letter to the then secretary  of the board in which I expressed my dismay that as a stakeholder and  as the head of the NIS,  that is supposed to  do the  recruitment, I was not aware of the exercise.

“He pleaded with me that I should understand with him that he was under immense pressure to put that advert up. He said I should not write the letter but I said no;  this is an official matter and that  it is not an issue to do with   Parradang but with the NIS.

“So, I wrote him a letter that I was not given any benefit of a reply till way back in October when he had been removed from the ministry. Along the line, we were asked to look for funding and I had to look for funding for this exercise from the     Budget office.

“I wrote the  Director-General  a letter that we have waiver from the Federal Civil Service Commission to recruit 4,556 operatives of the NIS . He told me categorically that the Federal  Government was very conscious of overheads and there would be no money made available for it. I thought he was just being reluctant.

“So I kept pressurising him. I went to that office practically  every day for the whole of   that week  and    subsequent weeks. The last concession I got from him  was that I should wait and anticipate that   it would be captured in the 2014 budget.

“So,  along the line, the committee of the board met, we discussed this issue of Drexel,  being the service provider.   I said look, I am not in support of anybody collecting money for recruitment.

“I remember very clearly during that meeting that  I told them that I read in the papers   that in Niger State,  there was a recruitment like that and people were meant to pay and there was a lot of outcry  and the governor of the state  had to step in and cancel it.

“I said look,  we may go  this  way  if we don’t take time. But we kept going and we had no other board meeting to my knowledge till when the then  secretary called us to the Steering Committee meeting in January. I told  them that it  was advisable for us to stagger the exercise and to go by states of origin.

“But when we appeared before this committee of the  Senate,    we got to know that we would be conducting recruitment exams on   March 15.

“That was the first day I heard that. I did not hear from any board; there was no board meeting to that effect. As a  man in uniform,   you must  follow the last order. Subsequently,  if anyone asked me  when  Immigration recruitment would take place,   I used to tell them that I don’t know. Sometimes, I would say the  minister has declared categorically that we will recruit on  March 15.

“Then, I sent the DCG, Human Resources, to attend all subsequent meetings and when it came to the issue of funding, he told me that they had  made a budget of N212m to be used for that exercise.

“I asked him where the money was going to come from since  Immigration does not have such money. He said it  was expected that the consultant   should provide  it. I said okay, go and take representatives of the service provider to the minister   maybe he would have funding for the exercise.

“He told me there was none till about   March 13  when N45million was made available for him to carry out that exercise. We were left with the option of having to mobilise all our officers in the state commands to attend to the recruitment exercise. We sent bulk SMS to all of them saying, ‘look gentlemen this is the day we have to work with.’

“All of them kept calling me to ask how they were going to get money to do this exercise? I told them if any money is given to me, I will make it available to you. No money was made available to the NIS  and the exercise was supposed to be conducted. If you notice too,  there was no advertisement giving clear guidelines on how to go about it until     March 14  that people were asked to go to the various centres for the tests.

“I will like to state that on a state by state basis, the NIS  is deeply pained by  the events that led to the loss of   16  lives. I want the figures to be corrected. We had seven people that died in the Federal Capital Territory.

“We had five that died in Rivers State. We had two that died in Niger State. We had one in Bauchi State. We had one in Edo State . Those are the exact figures.

When asked why the NIS could not stop the fatal exercise,   the NIS boss  replied,  “We were not the drivers of this process at all. So the decision to stop it would never have one from  us.

“I was not the the driver of this process and my position had been very clear on this.

On  why he did not see the tragedy coming, Parradang said, “Of all the capacities that God has given human beings,  nobody knows what is going to happen tomorrow.”

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 Moro, 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   forged because the man who purportedly appended his signature, had denied it.

His claim  was  however  faulted by   Tapgun, who explained that the agreement was properly signed but that the non-release of funds for the exrecise, was part of the reasons for the fatality.

• Only N45m released for exercise

Tapgun argued that the management of Drexel   released N45m out of N201m which the board requested for the conduct of the exercise, a situation he argued, caused serious logistics problems on the day of the exercise.

His submissions were however, punctured by the separate presentations of the NIS commanders in Edo, Rivers, Niger, and Bauchi states  as well as the FCT.

The commanders lamented the unfortunate incident   in their    zones and attributed it  to the influx of uninvited people.

They also  claimed that  that the number of those not shortlisted for the exercise   was three times higher than the legitimately invited applicants.