Nigeria: When A Rose Fades

By ANTHONY EGBE

Mrs. Rose Uzoma retires as Comptroller-General of Nigerian Immigration Service amid controversy

Last week’s announcement of the retirement of Mrs. Rose Uzoma as the Comptroller-General of Nigerian Immigration Service, NIS, did not catch many Nigerians by surprise. In recent weeks she had been contending with a welter of criticism over alleged irregularities in the recruitment of staff into the service. Uzoma, who is from the South-East, was said to have not only unduly influenced the recruitment of hundreds of her kinsmen into NIS, but also offered hundreds of job slots to nominees of top government functionaries and influential Nigerians.

Uzoma’s woes started when a strong protest letter from the supervising Ministry of Internal Affairs was forwarded to Present Goodluck Jonathan complaining about glaring irregularities in the service’s recruitment exercise of November 2012.

The petition read in part: “The most recent posting of Men and Officers of the Service in which due process was initially followed with all required parties involved, including the Minister of Internal Affairs, Mr. Abba Moro, has been reversed by the comptroller.

“Three weeks after the resumption/reporting [of successful applicants] to their new beats, the CG of Immigration unilaterally prepared an impromptu circular (without the knowledge of the Minister of Internal Affairs and other stakeholders) to remove some of the newly posted officers and replace them with her loyalists.”

It was learnt that Mrs. Uzoma secretly offered employment to no fewer than 4,560 Nigerians, which the Interior Ministry described as ‘backyard’ recruitment into the service.

When whiff of the employment saga first broke, Uzoma denied any wrongdoing, particularly, of favouring certain states. But appearing before the National Assembly, she argued that the recruitment was meant to ‘correct an existing anomaly’ whereby 12 states lagged in the number of  officers they had in the NIS workforce. But she caused a stir when she attempted to explain the secrecy enveloping the recruitment by saying the jobs were not advertised because she wanted to avoid recruiting bad eggs into the service.

Records, however, showed that Uzoma was being economical with the truth as regards righting an alleged imbalance which put some states at a disadvantage. For instance, Imo State, where Uzoma comes from and which had the highest number of newly appointed officers, already had the highest number of immigration staff (1,187) in the country.

Perhaps most scandalous was the parameters she adopted in the new recruitment. She is said to have alloted 250 slots to the Presidency, 40 to President Jonathan’s mother, and 100 each to the First Lady and the Interior Minister, Alhaji  Abba Moro. Two commissioners on the Immigration board were allocated 30 slots each, while the Federal Character Commission got 250 slots.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rilwan Bala Musa, a Deputy Comptroller-General who is said to be the most senior officer in the service, has been appointed in acting capacity to replace Uzoma. He assumed duties last Wednesday.

.This article originally appeared in TheNEWS magazine of 28 January 2013