Legislative Aides In Employment, Admission Rackets

Legislative aides working with senators and members of the House of Representatives are allegedly involved in employment racketeering going on in ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) of government in Nigeria, New Telegraph report.

Investigations carried out by New Telegraph on the allegation, also exclusively revealed that the legislative aides are deeply involved in admission rackets into various tertiary institutions in the country.

An insider at the National Assembly told our correspondent, on the condition of anonymity, that some of the legislative aides used to forge the signatures of their principals to execute the fraud.

According to the source, the aides use letterheads of their principals to issue letters of recommendation to applicants looking for jobs in MDAs, where the applicants were usually considered for the jobs, having been assumed to have been recommended by the lawmakers whose names appeared on the letterheads.

The source further revealed that the National Assembly political staff also used to apply the same technique to give recommendation letters to heads of various tertiary institutions of higher learning, to offer admission to persons looking for admission from such institutions.

The source said that the legislative aides whom he knew to have successfully engaged in such rackets collected reasonable sums of money from the prospective beneficiaries.

It further disclosed that the amount usually collected from the job or admission seekers by the aides varied, depending on the classification of employment being sought or the course of study applied for by candidates.

According to the source, those seeking employment in highly lucrative and competitive organisations in Nigeria were usually made to pay higher prices than those going for establishments considered less lucrative.

For instance, the source said that applicants looking for jobs in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and other choice places, used to pay very high amounts of money to the racketeers.

For admission racket, applicants seeking admission to study Medicine, Law and Engineering, were usually asked to pay higher than their counterparts seeking admission to study arts or humanities.

It was, however, learnt that in some cases, the applicants were usually made to pay in two instalments; the first payment was usually made when the letter of recommendation was issued while the last tranche of the payment was usually made after the applicant received appointment letter.

New Telegraph further learnt that in the event that the employment did not materialize, the applicant was the one to bear the loss, as the aide would not refund the affected applicant the money he/she paid, and the victim would not make trouble.

The source said: “I am surprised if you are just hearing or knowing about this now. This practice has been on almost as old as this National Assembly itself, which came into existence in 1999, when Nigeria returned to democratic rule.

“But I can tell you that this racket became more rampant when employers of labour started making recommendation letter a condition before they can offer employment to qualified Nigerians.

“The legislative aides you are talking about are into these rackets because they are part of the Nigerian corrupt system. They are born and brought up in the corrupt culture; so you don’t expect them to behave differently from the general attitudinal culture of the country.”

Another source, corroborating the reality of this forgery cum racketeering scam going on unchecked in the National Assembly, however, noted that some lawmakers had discovered in the past that their signatures were criminally used by their aides to get jobs or admissions for people.

According to the source, some of the lawmakers discovered when the heads of the establishments for employment or schools for admission, called the senator or the member, whose name was used, to authenticate the genuineness or otherwise of the recommendation letter.

The source cited a case of a lawmaker from Taraba State (name withheld), in the Seventh assembly, whose legislative aide massively used his letterheads with his forged signature to get jobs for people in choice establishments.

He said: “It is true that some of the hardened political staff forge the signatures of their bosses to transact all manner of fraudulent businesses in this National Assembly. And I don’t blame them because there is a saying that if you can’t beat them you join them.

“I want to state that the practice is not a new thing, and I can say that our system encourages that, and it is getting worse by the day.”

A member of the National Assembly Legislative Aides Forum (NASLAF), who also preferred to speak on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the practice, disclosing however, that the lawmakers and MDAs had devised measures to frustrate the fraud.

He said: “It is a fraudulent exercise that has been going on. That’s why the National Assembly Service Commission (NASC) doesn’t give letter of appointment of legislative aides to them directly.

“They first of all have to confirm from the senators or from the Reps, to ensure that the recommendation letter is from the lawmaker in question, and when they want to issue the letter, they send it directly to the lawmaker and not the person recommended for recruitment.

“Most establishments don’t honour letters saying “I am directed” unless those directly from the office of the President of the Senate or the Speaker, and there is a confirmation that the appropriate authority issued the letter of recommendation.”