LAGOS - Lawmakers who represent Nigeria at the Economic Community of West African States’s (Ecowas) parliament picked a fight with the bloc over what they described as an unfair recruitment exercise that did not include Nigerians, leaning into the grievance to question the value Nigeria actually gets from belonging to the bloc.
“If you are in a system and you are not getting the right results, where you are investing your money, it pays best to walk out of the union,” Ahmed Idris Wase, the deputy speaker of Nigeria’s House of Representatives who is the first deputy speaker of the Ecowas parliament, said last week.
Wase and his Nigerian colleagues alleged that people in charge of an ongoing recruitment exercise at the Ecowas secretariat in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, have focused on “bringing in their relatives, and their siblings against the larger interest of our community.”
The jobs in question are administrative staff positions at the secretariat. Those who fill the roles run the daily operations that help the union fullfill its mandate.
