Yes, companies can seek consultancy of an employment industry to help get qualified candidates for employment purposes. It is scandalously unacceptable that after that consultancy firm has finished the job of getting qualified employees the employers continue to hold the affairs of the employees to them to the extent that they pay their salaries indirectly through the consultants, who then slash and give the employees peanut they call balance. It is wrong. If it is the Nigerian law that legalizes this, that law must be reviewed immediately because any law that is not for the good of citizenry is not a law.
Most of the causes of the problems that Nigerians have locally and globally stem from emotions, which many have blamed on both the Nigerian people and their media. This attitude, therefore, has made it almost impossible to immediately get to the root of the problems talk less that solution can come handy beforehand. It is however hoped that Nigerians will change attitude so that their problems will become easily diagnosable for solution to come so they begin to have a handshake with better life.
This exactly, I begin to agree, is the reason every Nigerian, professional or particularly media and security person, must truly embrace the Change programme of the current government in the country per adventure there will be a stop to situation where everything that is synonymous with negative and sadness happens only or largely to citizens of Nigerian skins.
The news media have been awash for some times now with stories of how Libyans treat Nigerians. The stories have been that Libyans kill, maim, rape, maltreat Nigerians in their country. The latest now being that Nigerians are being taken into slavery in the same country that had remained peaceful centre for greener pastures for other African citizens especially Nigerians, until the Libyans themselves, viewing their country’s destiny from the dictated design of the United States of America, took their Leader, Mammar Gaddafi to the slaughter slab in a very humiliating manner. Libya has never known peace since then.
The question now is: Are Nigerians the only ones tasting the after-effect of the Gaddafi’s wrongful martyrdom or the citizens themselves sharing of same? No Libyan citizen ever knew suffering while Gaddafi’s administration lasted – whether he came through military means notwithstanding – but they now do. Yes, some kind of extremism that now spread over other African countries including Boko Haram insurgency and ISIS and the rest of them, Al-Shabbab, have been traced to Libya. All of these were never let loose while Libya was Libya. So, Libyans, who are white and Arab in colour and tongues, also experience varieties of suffering.
As a Nigerian, who has chosen from onset to stay at home until my own greener pastures come handy, one was touched to know that citizens of our country have been subjected to varied degrees of persecution and maltreatment in that North African country. There has been media hype resulting from such report as we were made to understand not only by Nigerians through social media but even the Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the Nigeria’s President on Foreign Affairs and Diaspora Matters, Hon. Abike Dabiri-Erewa. Many Nigerians over there have therefore been repatriated to their country of birth – Nigeria; at least, as an effort by government of the people to show the people that their voices have been heard and acted upon.
It is however disheartening to know that, at the end of it all, Nigerians themselves are guilty, I am not court anyway, of the evils that have been heard of, having been perpetrated against Nigerians in that country. At the point of latest development regarding slavery, they have been joined by their Ghanaian counterparts in the act. And many Nigerians had been made to take this dummy as an evil by Libyans against Nigerians until a returnee from one of the Libya’s slavery camp revealed that runners of the evil camps are, in actual fact, Nigerians and Ghanaians.
I had therefore waited for a little longer to know what Nigerians at home, who have carried abroad the sentiment of Libyans’ evil against Nigerians, would have to say when it became obvious that what they had used against Libyans – making it look like the once-upon-a-time peaceful, loving, accommodating people are now suddenly intolerant wicked people – are simply the direct opposite of the information being peddled around here. Instead of correcting that misinformation, our peoples of Nigeria kept their cool now and have remained speechless. We will be better off as a people and as a nation the very moment we stop being lorded by our own emotions.
In a nutshell, we should begin to ask ourselves; why are Nigerians so evil-minded, so wicked in the spirit to be identified with most of the evils that we see or hear befall Nigerians leaving abroad? This is so because, having understudied some of these occurrences for years, I am now confident to come in the open to say that for every negative thing that happens to any Nigerian outside the shores of Nigeria, one Nigerian, at least, is connected to it. The story is just getting clearer with the newly discovered Libya’s slavery camps.
Again, there is another story that is not yet in the open because – and we believe – it has not affected relations of an important person in Nigeria. This happens in Ikoyi, Lagos, Nigeria where a particular guy we will represent as Mr. A for the purpose of this article was instrumental to the employment of some technicians by the same Lebanese company he worked for. This story remained in cooler because the company has handled it by sacking him. But what did he do?
Each of the technicians he got for the company where he, himself, was a staff, had N100,000 to himself as monthly salary. Mr. A had given those technicians the impression that they do not need employment letters and that their salaries would be channeled through him and that their respective salaries would be N50,000 each meaning that he takes half of each person’s salary (N50,000) added to his own salary which is higher than N100,000.
All the victims were good with their conspiracy of silence until one of them burst out to the one of the Lebanese official that, “Sir, I cannot continue to do this job as N50,000 is not enough for me to continue to be effective at work.” The Lebanese official, I had gathered, said, “What?! Every technician is paid N100,000 and so I do not understand the story of N50,000 that you are talking about.” It was after investigation by the Managing Director of the company that it was discovered that Mr. A was the drain pipe that was draining N50,000 away from the N100,000 that was considered to be comfortable enough for any worker of that category to be effective at work. He was consequently sacked. That Mr. A in question is a Nigerian.
Talking straight I would say that both Mr. A and the company are guilty. And I have my reasons. The reason being that most of the foreign investors who come to invest in Nigeria in a disguise that they are supporting our economy end up not making any impact in individual person’s economy because they hand the affairs of their workers – particularly junior and casual – over to the kind of people they call contractors. These contractors help them to employ workers. Before they employ those workers, they have charged them between N2,000 and N5,000 yet not all that pay such amount get jobs. At the end of the day, even those who get employed, their salaries or allowances are paid through the contractors.
What then do you have? You have a situation where the contractors (a single person) takes, for instance, 40, 50, even 60 percent of total salary and hands he balance to the real owner, who work and sweat for the money. This is synonymous with the case of Mr. A raised above. The worst thing is that our governments, Federal, States and Local Councils of Nigeria do not help situation because they encourage these economy terrorists to thrive in the evil businesses.
Yes, companies can seek consultancy of an employment industry to help get qualified candidates for employment purposes. It is scandalously unacceptable that after that consultancy firm has finished the job of getting qualified employees the employers continue to hold the affairs of the employees to them to the extent that they pay their salaries indirectly through the consultants, who then slash and give the employees peanut they call balance. It is wrong. If it is the Nigerian law that legalizes this, that law must be reviewed immediately because any law that is not for the good of citizenry is not a law.
Now, I am talking emphatically, that companies owned by Indians, Lebanese, Americans, Turkish, Chinese, even Arabs in Nigerian must begin to respect the dignity of Nigerian people by paying Nigerians in their employ directly and not through any contractor or consultant who go behind and slash the salaries by half and hand the real owner who sweats for it peanut. Government must work on this important aspect of evil that Nigerians do against Nigerians in their own country, which make them resort to being trafficked abroad by same Nigerian job scammers and which landed them in the kind of situation like you have in Libya where we now discover that even the owners of those slave camps are Nigerians.
