Earlier in the month of January this year, the Federal Airport Authority in Nigeria made a well pronounced publication about a massive recruitment exercise to some available positions. A lot of unemployed graduates expressed their happiness. Recruitment exercises in general gives a sense of belonging to unemployed graduates. It is an indication of the fact that the government is still very much responsive and proactive but on the contrary, most of the government jobs showcased on online portals, job sites, radio and tv programmes as well as newspapers are for publicity purposes.
The job is thrown open for all manners of applications but the recruitment exercise ends with the absorption of just a minute size of the population who get employment letters over beer parlours and dining tables or social gatherings on the basis of favouritism.
FAAN recruitment has been characterized by inefficiency from the first day. According to a hurting applicant who has expended so much cash at cyber cafes trying to battle with the registration and online examination process, he claimed FAAN at first launched a website that demanded for almost all the applicant’s lifetime documents and history.
Speaking to Nigeriana.org, he said ” I went to the cyber cafe for an overnight browsing session the first day the job notice was posted due to the faster nature of the internet at night. I filled the several registration pages and uploaded a whole lot of documents. Finally I got to the submission page, as I was about doing this, the website went offline! I couldn’t cry. It took almost 5 days for it to come back online and was so unstable. I wonder why we have to suffer this much in Nigeria to get jobs”
That’s so pitiful but the story doesn’t end there for FAAN applicants who registered two weeks later after the site was reviewed. The drama continued with FAAN proposing the technological idea of you sitting back to write the exam in the comfort of your house online which is timed in such a way that you only have a few seconds to spend on a question to deter cheating I suppose. They sent text messages to qualified candidates without any prior known standard of disqualifying the rest of the applicants, to notify them of the examination schedule. The first day was another tearful dramatic experience as the cyber cafes were crowded by those without computers connected to the internet in their homes. After so many studies at the library, applicants couldn’t log on to the website to gain access to the exam questions. It kept denying their access.
Nigeriana.org through their correspondent also gathered from other aggrieved applicants that FAAN lightened their moods with a text message the following day to fix a new schedule for their online examination but funny enough, it was all the same. It was either the website was constantly going offline or applicants were painfully denied access to the website.
This experience is quite frustrating. It tends to raise the question of why so much inefficiency looms around the public sector, Nigerian Breweries conducted an online test successfully in no time but all recruitment processes into the public sector have been a showcase of loopholes in the system. The Nigerian Immigration recruitment exercise that led to several deaths of applicants is still fresh in our memories. Can this be attributed to corruption or the poor quality of labour in the civil service? Or do we say FAAN is probably cash-strapped that it can’t employ the services of competent web designers or IT professionals? May be this would make a great project research topic for a scholar in the nearest future.
The Nigeriana team promises to give you updates on the progress of the FAAN recruitment exercise as we gather more facts. We sincerely hope it ends successfully so that pained applicants can have at least one thing to smile about in this current dispensation.
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