Foot soldiers Pushed Into Immigration

Hundreds of foot soldiers of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) on Saturday stormed the national headquarters of the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) with one mission. They were there with instructions from the headquarters of the NDC to be recruited into the GIS.

This is in spite of the fact that the original recruitment exercise by the GIS is long over, with potential recruits to write their initial examinations on Saturday. The foot soldiers, numbering about three hundred began arriving at the headquarters of the GIS early on Saturday, with claims that they had been sent by party leaders to come for their jobs with the GIS.

Speaking to the Daily Searchlight newspaper, an enraged official of the GIS stated that the number of foot soldiers were far in excess of the protocol list of 150 people that is given to the government. "They are far in excess of the required number and worse, most of them do not have any qualification to speak of. When the Daily Searchlight visited the place, many of the foot soldiers looked unkempt and were moving from office to office.

Another officer explained that what was going on was unprecedented. This work requires a certain minimum of education, but these people they are sending to us, many do not even have junior high school education, are overage and clearly by temperament may not be fit for the profession they are being pushed into," the officer said. A third officer lamented that the nation's security was being endangered. "So now are they telling us that the primary qualification for recruitment into the nation's security services is to be a party soldier? Do they not realize that it is the job of the immigration to keep out undesirable aliens and that messing up with the recruitment standards may have repercussions for our collective national security?", he wondered.

Soon after the NDC came into power, it cancelled the 2008/2009 recruitment exercise with the excuse that the exercise had been politicized, but what is happening today is clear evidence that if anything, the practice has worsened.