A major setback has just confronted the NPower application process. The website setup to take applications from 500,000 applicants has since crashed on Saturday few hours after the application was officially opened.
The site is now back online but the register button has been taken away from all the pages. NPower, is a social investment programme of the federal of Nigeria. In a nutshell:
N-Power teacher Corps is aimed at training teachers, health assistants, farmers and community educationists. They will get the needed training that they can then apply to either create jobs for themselves or seek employment. N-Power Knowledge programmes is targeted at creative and innovative youths. It will avail young people to acquire skills in creative related disciplines such as graphic design, script writing and post-production skills. Participants under the N-Power knowledge can also choose to learn software development and hardware skills.
The last part of the scheme is N-Power Build. This is directed at training builders for construction and housing sectors. Participants will get skills that will allow them to be relevant to construction firms, automotive, welding, oil and gas sector.
The crashing of the website might be connected to two possibilities. It can be malicious through a distributed denial of service, DDoS attack or basically the site received more traffic than its planned capacity. This same scenario characterised a recruitment exercise executed by Nigeria Police in March. The site received over 700,000 for 10,000 available positions.
Unemployment is a big issue for Nigeria. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, at least 30% of Nigerians are unemployed while close to 50% others are under-employed. The N-Power programme might just be scratching the problem on the surface.
It will be interesting to see how the team managing the NPower programme will manage the looming crisis that will surface.
