Chris Ngige
With millions of Nigerians losing their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, experts fear criminality in the recruitment sector will only get worse.
To mitigate this, a revised Code of Conduct to strictly regulate activities of Private Employment Agencies (PEAs) in Nigeria is in the making.
Every year, thousands of Nigerians looking for opportunities to improve their livelihoods outside the country, fall victim to fake and exploitative recruitment agents.
In what is becoming a familiar script for many potential migrants and their families, job seekers approach a recruitment agency, which offers them an opportunity to work in the Gulf, but only in exchange for extortionate recruitment fees which run into hundreds of thousands of naira.
Often, the recruit is unaware of the details of their employer or the receiving agency at their destination and may be misled about the nature of the job awaiting them.
“Some end up in slave-like employment and their human and labour rights are violated,” says Comrade James Eustace of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC).
Private Employment Agencies (PEAs) in Nigeria remain highly unregulated. But to make matters worse, investigation has revealed that travel agencies are now doubling as recruitment agents.
“It is common in Nigeria to see travel agencies who are not registered as recruitment agencies promising young Nigerians job opportunities outside the country, especially in the Gulf region,” says Gideon Sunday, a resident of the FCT.
Comrade Eustace also emphasised that “we have a good number of PEAs that are not even registered. We have individuals playing that role.”
Despite thousands of Nigerians falling victim to these recruiters, there has not been any reported instance of prosecution of any recruitment agent by the government.
To curb the trend, experts say the Ministry of Labour and Employment should take punitive action, including prosecution of such employers or ban them from running employment agencies.
Shoddy recruiters in unregulated sector
The Nigerian government commenced licencing of PEAs in 2007 in line with ILO Convention No. 181; the ministry is empowered by sections 23, 25 and 71 of the Labour Act Cap L1 LFN 2004 to license fit and proper persons to operate as labour contractors and private employment agencies, yet the sector remains poorly regulated.
“Since the commencement of the licencing regime, the greatest challenge has been enforcement of the guidelines. This has become more problematic in the face of dwindling government revenue,” says Dr Yerima Tarfa, the Permanent Secretary Ministry of Labour and Employment.
Experts argue that the proliferation of fake PEAs in the country, should be blamed on poor supervisory and inspectorate activities of the relevant authorities, especially the Ministry of Labour.
The number of registered PEAs operating under the umbrella of Human Capital Providers Association of Nigeria (HuCaPAN) has increased to 198 companies. However, not many Nigerians are aware of their existence. Which means that more sensitisation has to be done.
Check shows that there are several registered PEAs that are not members of HuCaPAN which makes it difficult for them to abide by the existing Code of Conduct for PEAs.
Disturbed over the worrisome trend, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama in June, 2018, instituted a fact-finding mission to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to investigate complaints of human trafficking of Nigerian domestic workers.
The fact-finding mission concluded that “there were many illegal recruitment agencies, including travel agencies that were recruiting domestic workers to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.”
It has been discovered that the sectors most targeted by shoddy recruitment agents are low-paid professions where workers might be desperate for employment or have less awareness of their rights.
Most of the scams, therefore, take place in sectors like construction, sales reps and domestic workers.
A Code of Conduct rarely enforced:
In 2011, the Federal Ministry of Labour brought into force a new Code of Conduct for PEAs to regulate their operations
But stakeholders say not much has changed.
“Ten years after the adoption and implementation of the existing 2011 Code of Conduct for Private Employment Agencies, visible challenges still exist regarding the awareness of its existence, the application of the normative contents, persistence in operations of unregistered recruiters in the industry as well as splinter groups and the absence of a monitoring and evaluation framework to access the level of implementation and compliance to the provisions contained therein,” the director of the ILO office in Abuja, Vanessa Phala, says
Phala spoke in Abuja during a validation meeting of the Revised Code of Conduct for PEAs.
Comrade James Eustace of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) says, “The one (Code of Conduct) that has been existing before now is just for an association, which is HuCaPan. Which was only binding on members of that organisation. But what is being done now is to have a broader Code of Conduct that will guide all PEAs whether they are members of HuCaPan or not.
“What that means is that this will be more detailed and encompassing and also in line with the current realities and emerging changes in the world of work which we think that is ideal because if there is no Code of Conduct to guide and regulate the activities of these PEAS, it will even be worst for workers that they are trying to recruit.”
A New Code of Conduct in the making
Nigeria has commenced the process for the validation of a revised Code of Conduct for PEAs.
“This document also addresses the issue of unlicensed recruitment agencies,” says Jide Afolabi, HuCaPan Executive Secretary.
“Over the past decade, a number of developments in the outsourcing industry have made a review of the 2011 Code of Conduct compelling. The review was further informed by the need to incorporate additional guidelines that will better position Private Employment Agencies to promote decent and productive employment in a globalised world,” Dr Yerima Tarfa added.
Stakeholders express hope that the revised Code of Conduct for PEAS will help sanitise the sector.
Comrade James says stakeholders during the validation review meeting cautioned that the Federal Government must ensure that the revised Code of Conduct does not give room for proliferation of recruitment agencies and associations and that the Ministry of Labour must ensure that registered recruitment agencies are identified and their activities clearly regulated and coordinated.
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