By
From SHR,
Desperate to redeem his image in the media following Saturday’s shoddily managed recruitment test that resulted in the death of scores of applicants, Minister of Interior, Abba Moro on Thursday dangled N500,000 each before a number of journalists to clean up his image.
At least 23 people died while many more sustained varying degrees of injury during a stampede at the National Stadium, Abuja and other venues across the country as well, in the test conducted by the Nigeria Immigrations Service (NIS).
This led to widespread calls for the sack of the interior minister, championed particularly by the likes of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).
However, Moro’s response on Thursday evening was to attempt to bribe some journalists into deflating the tension currently surrounding his name.
“Minister of Interior, Abba Moro is at this moment meeting with select group of journalists to burnish his image with a promise of N500,000 each at Nugget Hotel, behind Chisco Transport Company in Utako”, a highly placed sourced divulged to SaharaReporters.
“This is for your information, please. I am very ashamed at the conduct of our journalists. Thanks”.
Several thousands of job-seekers had thronged stadia across the country to write the test but poor crowd management meant stampedes were inevitable. At the 60,000-capacity Abuja National stadium, for example, only one entrance was made open to applicants whose sheer number was beyond the stadium’s capacity.
Minister Moro then shocked the whole of Nigeria when he blamed the tragedies on the impatience of the applicants.
“The applicants lost their lives due to impatience; they did not follow the laid-down procedures spelt out to them before the exercise”, he said in Jos, capital of Plateau State.
“Many of them jumped through the fences of affected centres and did not conduct themselves in an orderly manner to make the exercise a smooth one. This caused stampede and made the environment unsecured”.
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