CHIMEZIE LANDS A JOB.

                         CHAPTER FIVE

        I had just entered my second year in Medical Laboratory Science when Chimezie graduated from Banking and Finance with a second class upper grade from the University of Nigeria, Enugu. They whole family celebrated it. My mother threw a mini party. Adaobi and I came home to celebrate his graduation with our friends. We popped up champagne; we ate, drank and danced. We were all happy for him. He later went for his National Service in Edo State. He worked in a local government in the accounts department where he gave in his best. He initiated the computerized system of accounting to the local government. This was made for easy computing and accounting. Little wonder he earned the award of the best corps member that served in the local government council that year. 

  When he finished his service, he sent out his curriculum vitae everywhere. He sent it to the banks, companies and organisations in search of employment. For one whole year he wrote and answered aptitude and verbal tests of different organisations without being offered any job. Some of his friends who graduated a year or two earlier than he were also in the business of job application. After each test, the companies would congratulate Chimezie for impressing them. They would tell him to expect their call for a job appointment, but they never called. It was a series of broken promises.

 Chimezie would wake up every morning, collect money from Mum and leave the house for job search with other millions of graduates in the country. You needed to see him during those days of his job search. His bent shoes with their deflated soles, how tired he looked whenever he returned from yet another fruitless search. 

What would I say of the time and money he invested in sending and applying for jobs through the internet and post offices? I began to wonder if there was  any hope of getting a worthwhile job for those who did not get to the tertiary level of education, when Chimezie, with his intelligence and good grade from the University, found it difficult to get gainful employment.

       With bitterness my brother returned one Saturday from an Immigration Service job interview. He had paid the sum of one thousand five hundred Naira to purchase the job form. I had wondered where on earth government collected money from jobless ones they were supposed to give jobs in order to give them a job. 

       This was a job opening that the government was sure it was for about five thousand personnels but the government deliberately sold more than eight hundred thousand forms to the teeming job seekers in their various states. Maybe to mock them at their calamity and rip them off of the little they had managed to get out of their struggles. 

        On that said day of Immigration service job test and assessment, Chimezie woke up early in the morning to get ready for the job assessment. After taking his bath I was expecting him to dorn the new black suit that Mum had bought for him when she went to Aba for a conference of secondary school principals. 

           Aba in Abia state of the eastern Nigeria is famous for clothing business. They are good in making clothes, shoes, bags, waist belts; in short they are good in anything leather and textiles. They made quality products that could beat leather and textile works from Italy, London, Paris, Dubai and New York. They could also make lesser quality products that could beat designs from China, Taiwan, Belgium and Korea. The quality of their products depended on the request and taste of their consumers.

        Rather than adorning the new black suit, Chimezie wore a pair of white shorts, white T-shirt and white sneakers, like a prisoner of hope. He was meant to do the aptitude and fitness tests that same day. He took a pen and a sheet of paper for the aptitude test and headed straight to the stadium where the tests would take place. 

          According to Chimezie, who narrated his ordeal to us when he got back; for he was a great orator and story-teller, when he got to the stadium he saw a sea of fellow applicants, both males and females, all dressed like him. He said he was lucky to have gotten to the venue of the test before 8 o'clock that morning, so he was allowed into the stadium. Immediately it was 8 oclock the officials for the job tests closed the gate of the stadium against the late-comers such that the late comers were held up at the gate.

 In less than an hour, a greater sea of job applicants formed at the gate, pleading and agitating that they should be allowed to go in and join their colleagues already sitted in the stadium. The job officials wouldnt give ears to their pleas and their agitations. Some radical ones among the applicants started hitting the metal gate with high-sounding materials while others took to shaking the gigantic gate that looked like the gate of heaven. The tension at the gate grew the more when some of the applicants started shouting at the officials, So this is how you soulless people have conspired to 'eat' my one thousand five hundred naira for nothing?! It can not work o!" 

      Chimezie said that there and then, the desperation grew to its peak. The noise became louder, the gate shook harder and some applicants were desperately trying to scale the fence of the stadium. When the officials saw the level of their desperation and what they were bent on achieving, they reluctantly opened the gate for them to enter the stadium.

      Chimezie said he wondered why they decided to enter the stadium all at once: Why they couldnt organize themselves like learned people, like well-cultured ladies and gentlemen, like the University graduates they were. There were casualties: Not less than ten persons were stampeded to death right before his eyes and so many others were greatly injured.

          He described what happened when the gate was suddenly opened for them; the shout of joy that escaped from their mouths as everyone of them at once made for the gate like gravely-starved dogs reaching out for a piece of meal. Some were pushed down at that instance and were unintentionally stepped on in the heat of the rush. A good number of them were injured while some were stampeded to death instantly.

        My brother said that it didnt take long before the answers to his puzzle started trickling into his head. Firstly, these applicants had paid heavily for this job test, so they could not afford to watch their money go down the drain as the fee was  non-refundable; all of them needed the job badly.

          Secondly, they knew that getting a job in the Immigration Service was a ticket to a comfortable life; at least their three square meals and basic needs were covered by the virtue of the salary they would be paid.  University graduates were being grossly underpaid and abused in work places because employers of labour had many job seekers pestering them for jobs. 

There were many job seekers who were ready to do almost anything just to get the peanuts being paid as salary. The level of poverty was so high that some university graduates had their gross earning to be as little as seven thousand naira; an amount less than twenty dollars a month for a job as sensitive and tedious as teaching. 

         Thirdly, these applicants saw how reluctantly the officials opened the gate for them and how hard they troubled them before they did. They couldnt risk having the gate shut against them again. Who knew if the gate would be shut again in a few seconds and never be opened again, so they all rushed in at once. 

         Finally, it was like a jungle where everyone was on their own, fending for themselves and striving to belong among the selected few. No one had time to organise the other person, seeing that some of their colleagues were already seated for the tests. These were some of the reasons why they couldnt organize themselves to quietly enter so as to avoid the deaths and injuries recorded.

       Chimezie said that as he was seated, waiting patiently for the commencement of the test, a young lady by his side decided to keep them occupied with the tales of her job hunt. Her name was Ini. She told them of how she went for an interview at a famous private school in Enugu where she was told that she was qualified for the job but would be ready to start as soon as she slept with the principal of the school.

         Little did Ini know that the job was not in the hands of the principal who just took advantage of her. It was much later that she learnt that it was only the Board of directors of the school that could employ a person and not the principal. She said that she hated herself for falling to a sex-for-job trap as she cursed the principal. 

        Kekere, an applicant also narrated his own experience to Chimezie and those around her: How a certain man from one of the government agencies swayed him and his friends into paying the sum of three hundred thousand naira each so that he would give them an automatic job in the agency. They sold some of their property to raise the money and even borrowed more money, with the assurance that they would pay off the debts gradually when they started earning an income. 

                 It was after the scammer had collected the full payment from the unsuspecting applicants that his phone numbers, residential and office addresses suddenly changed. He purposely changed every link they had of him and made away with their money without securing job for them as he had promised.

   Chimezie finally got a job in one of the new generation banks through what was known as Gate Crashing by job seekers. Gate crashing is all about going for job test or interview where one had not been invited.

            Job seekers went with every thing that may be needed for the test or interview, simply trying their luck at any job opportunity they came across, hoping that along the line the organisation may need more people than had turn up, or may not succeed in getting the caliber of personnel they wanted and so they would give a chance to the uninvited applicants to participate in the test or interview.

 The unfortunate thing in this gate crashing in the country was that the number of gate crashers surpass the number of people really invited for the job interview or test.

 The gate crashing that got Chimezie the banking job kept him waiting till 6 Oclock in the evening, when most gate crashers had given up and left. Luckily the job officials called Chimezie and two other gate crashers that were still hanging around, and tested them. 

        You people have already passed the job test because of your patience. We are basically looking for patient people; the department you will be working in requires a lot of patience and tenacity. You are to balance the accounts of daily financial transactions, the head of human resources department revealed to them even before the test.  

Chimezie had barely worked for six months with the Enugu branch of the bank before he was transferred to Kano, one of the northern states of Nigeria.