Second year into my journalism career, I received a phone call from a Mortgage Bank located at Abuja requesting that I respond to some series of questions as part of the first stage of an interview for the position of corporate communication officer.
After about 30 minutes of the interview, I was informed the following day to fly to Abuja from Lagos for the final stage of the interview with all expenses to be reimbursed by the company.
Things have now changed in Nigeria, as employers not only requested job seekers to bear the financial burden of transporting themselves to the venue of interview, but are also made to pay before being considered for the available jobs.
Private companies and Government agencies now asked job seekers for application fees before their applications could be considered. They are now feeding fat and taking advantage of the high unemployment rate in the country to fraudulently collect money from job seekers.
Imagine a job opening where over 700,000 people applied, with each applicants paying the sum of N1,000. That translates to N700 million.
Applicants will be made to go through the rigour of screening, interview and will at the end be thrown back to the labour market. One of the fraudulent methods is the use of Administrative Staff College Of Nigeria (ASCON) to compel civil servants and new entrants into State’s Civil service to pay for inter cadre transfer or get new job.
The practice has now been institutionalised with clear impunity and strategies of improving on the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) of Federal and State Government Agencies.#MoneyForJob
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NIS job scam of 2014 comes to mind