NIS Recruitment Scam: Court Adjourns Abba Moro’s Trial To February 2019

Moro is standing trial along with a former Permanent Secretary in the Interior Ministry, Anastasia Daniel-Nwobia; an ex-director in the Ministry, Felix Alayebami and a firm, Drexel Tech Nigerian Limited.

At the proceeding, the EFCC presented its tenth witness, Mustapha Zakaria, who worked as a Permanent Commissioner on the Board of the Civil Defence, Customs and Prison Board. While being led in evidence by prosecuting counsel, Aliyu Yusuf, Zakaria, told the court that the 2014 recruitment exercise embarked upon, and in which it was later reported that many died, was fraught with irregularities.

He said: “That time, I was a Permanent Commissioner, and there was a proposal for recruitment. I however along with my colleague Dr. Francis, observed that it was not being done as we will normally do it.

“We had been doing recruitment for the past six years by then, and we did not use to ask applicants to pay, but we observed that for this recruitment, applicants were to pay N1,200 and the recruitment process was contracted out.

“We wrote our observations and recommendations to the Board, stressing that for level 8 and above it was the Board that was supposed to carry out the recruitment process.”

According to him, after the observations and recommendations were made against the recruitment process, he was literally kept in the dark, until he received instruction to “supervise” the exercise at the North-Eastern part of the country. He added that when he visited the Kaduna centre where the recruitment exercise was taking place, “it was so crowded that I could not enter and so I left, only to hear later in the day about casualties”.