The All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Organization has asked President Goodluck Jonathan to tell Nigerians what his government has done to the victims of some hapless job applicants who were assembled at the National Stadium for enlistment into non existing jobs at the Nigeria Immigration Service which led to a stampede and deaths, six months after the incidence.
APC expressed regret that six months after, the Jonathan-led federal government is yet to bring the culprits to book or provide succour to the victims of the job scam.
A statement signed by the APC Director of Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu today said that it is even more confounding that the Minister of Interior under whose watch thousands of Nigerian youths were compelled to pay N1000 for the job application, and which proceeds run into hundreds of millions of Naira, is busy campaigning for PDP and President Jonathan’s re-election, whereas the applicants who lost their lives have been forgotten, and their parents and relations left to bemoan their fate.
Garba Shehu said that it is even more shocking that despite the uproar which the scandal generated across the country and beyond, “neither the Nigeria Immigration Service, Ministry of Interior or the Federal Government has given any satisfactory answer to the posers as to why thousands of Nigerian youths were assembled in major cities for few job vacancies which have already been allocated to children of powerful people in government.”
The APC Campaign said that despite the tragedy of this unfortunate incident, the Jonathan administration did not deem it fit to set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the immediate and remote causes of the stampede, and neither was any official held to account for the loss of lives of the innocent Nigerians who for no fault of theirs fell victim to the ignominious official scam.
“It is more disturbing that the Minister of Finance. Dr. Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala keeps bandying unverified figures of jobs created by this administration, but the reality on ground does not in any way support the statistics. Recently, she released a figure of 1.4 million jobs that have been created as a result of the policies the Jonathan Administration executed, yet the suffering and pain young Nigerian graduates undergo daily in search of non-existent jobs has become scandalous to say the least.”
Garba Shehu then called on President Jonathan and the PDP to render account to Nigerians of what led to the stampede at the Nigeria Immigration Service job recruitment exercise, adding that failure to do so will amount to insensitivity to the bereaved families of the dead applicants as well as the scam that led to thousands of job applicants losing their money to a certain consultant of the Nigeria Immigration Service. [myad]
