By: Admin
Some stakeholders from Nembe Local Government Area, Bayelsa State, have accused the state’s Civil Service Commission of shortchanging their council in the just concluded recruitment of 1000 graduates into the civil service.
The stakeholders under the auspices of Nembe Se Congress (NSC) at the weekend, claimed that the exercise designed by the state Governor, Seriake Dickson, to lift embargo on employment by giving jobs to graduates, was a charade.
Presenting the group’s position in Yenagoa, the Chairman, NSC, Prof. Monday Godwin-Egein, said persons empanelled to anchor the selection process demonstrated gross incompetence.
Godwin-Egein said the state governor wanted the commission to work out sound criteria for an equitable distribution of the positions to all the local government areas.
“There seems to have been no such measure adopted to guide the recruitment process. Otherwise, the set standards or procedures were violated by the very people saddled with the responsibility of anchoring the process”, he said.
He alleged that the result of the recruitment showed fraud and gross insincerity tailored to shortchange the Bayelsa East Senatorial District especially Nembe and Brass local government areas.
A copy of the results presented by the group showed that Brass and Nembe had 86 employees each while Ekeremor had 143, Kolokuma-Opokuma 103, Ogbia 119, Sagbama 163, Southern Ijaw 164 and Yenagoa 154.
But Godwin-Egein said: “Nembe Se Congress takes exception to this abuse of process that casts our constituency as backward and behind other areas in the state in educational achievements.
“We condemn all tendencies of insincerity of one group to another as seem to have played out in this sad exercise of a lopsided, grossly abused and very provocative recruitment into our civil service.
“We hope our governor will look into the so-called recruitment result with the eyes of a statesman and with fairness and correct the errors. The governor should also summon the team empaneled to carry out this exercise and tell them that the Ijaw dream is prone to fractures and failures”.
Godwin-Egein said the group deliberately refused to draw comparisons on the basis of figures allocated to each local government, but wondered why the combine figures for Nembe and Brass were less than the figure for a small local government area.
Describing the outcome as clannish, he said: “It is like telling the world that while our children in Nembe Se slept, those of our brothers in other clans were up and toiling upward at night.
“Nembe does not need this backlash so carelessly inflicted on us. We want justice. We want fair play in the ordering of our collective destiny”, he said.
But the Chairman, Bayelsa Civil Service Commission, Dr. Peter Singabele, said the recruitment followed followed best practice.
However, speaking when Dickson presented appointment letters to the beneficiaries, Singabele insisted that the process was transparent adding that out of the 23,000 persons that sent in their applications, 21,000 persons qualified to write the job examination.
He said: “This is the very first time the governor is engaging in mass recruitment. The exercise is purely on merit. When the results were released few days ago there was jubilation in Swali market by the women who said they never knew that their children could get a job without knowing anybody in this state.
“The employment process was like a marathon race that started in June last year. Over 23,000 applications were received. At end of the screening exercise, about 21,000 were qualified to write the first exam and after that using 70 per cent as the cut off mark, 4,824 passed and went into the last stage of the exam.
“We hired the Niger Delta University (NDU) as the consultant and the number the governor directed were selected based on merit”.
