Just as PageOne predicted when the Nigeria Police recruitment site crashed, not less than 500 000 people applied to join the Police for an available position of just 10 000, within 12 days of the application opening.
In an interview granted to Guardian, the Spokesman of the Police Service Commission, said, “as at this morning (yesterday 11th April,) 9:20 am (local time), more than 487,000 applications were received successfully, so we are saying that at the close of the day, more than 500,000 must have applied. I can confirm that from the technical people.”
This means the exercise exceeded its application targets by 5000%. While this is a supposed success to the web and database team, the event has once again unearthed Nigeria’s biggest monster-unemployment.
With varied figures preferred by the National Bureau of Statistics and other social sources, at least about 20% of Nigerian youths are officially employed. Another 40% are either partially employed or underemployed. This means that, close to 70% of Nigerian youths still fall under the employment bracket.
This malaise has made Nigeria one of the country with the lowest human development index, HDI, high youth dependency ratio and resurgence of violent crimes such as kidnapping, drug trafficking and in the northeast of the country, such youths have over time, being co-opted into terrorist groups such as Boko Haram.
While the zest seen in SME development and entrepreneurship drive has shown some traction in tech, ICT and business services, there is still a huge gap to be covered. If subsequent recruitment processes are conducted using the Internet, Nigerians and its government will be able to mine serious data not just to see how bad the problem is but deeper insights into the geography, age, gender disparity, competence and other useful information that can be used by the labour and youth development ministries for planning.
It is also instructive that Nigerian government totally abolish the use of analogue and physical application. If using the Internet can easily rake 500k applicants, then it is sensible for the government to fully embrace the digital age and prepare itself for more advanced ways of doing things. How about conducting interview online via video chats?
