When Recruitment Becomes Frustration—How CDCFIB’s Portal is Failing Nigerians

For many Nigerians, public sector recruitment exercises represent more than just an opportunity, they are often a rare chance to escape the punishing realities of unemployment, underemployment, and economic uncertainty. So when the Civil Defence, Correctional, Fire and Immigration Services Board (CDCFIB) announced the opening of its recruitment portal on July 14, thousands of hopeful applicants leapt at the chance to submit their credentials and pursue a dignified livelihood.

Yet, in the 48 hours since the application commenced, that hope has been met with overwhelming frustration. Instead of a transparent and accessible process befitting a federal institution, applicants have encountered a chronically inaccessible website –https://recruitment.cdcfib.gov.ng—that repeatedly fails to load, crashes mid-registration, or simply refuses to respond altogether.

For a recruitment exercise of this magnitude, targeting some of Nigeria’s most competitive and coveted paramilitary jobs—it is incomprehensible that the platform was neither stress-tested nor robustly prepared to withstand predictable traffic. The result has been an exercise in collective psychological torture. Young graduates, many of whom scraped together money for internet data and cybercafé fees, have spent hours refreshing error pages. Others who managed to initiate their applications have been abruptly logged out or forced to restart, again and again.

This is not a trivial inconvenience. Every hour of downtime fuels speculation about nepotism, preferential backchannels, and the ever-present fear that “slots” are being allocated behind closed doors while ordinary citizens fight a losing battle against a dysfunctional portal. When technology fails so consistently and without explanation, it breeds distrust—and understandably so.

CDCFIB has a moral and civic duty to treat Nigerians with respect. Respect means communicating clearly about technical challenges, issuing regular status updates, and—most importantly—fixing the problem swiftly. It also means acknowledging that a recruitment process so marred by poor planning can easily become yet another symbol of systemic failure.

At a time when youth unemployment exceeds 40%, public recruitment should be conducted with utmost seriousness and care. Instead, this experience reinforces the perception that institutions lack the empathy or competence to manage something as basic as an online application.

To restore credibility, CDCFIB must take immediate measures to scale its infrastructure, extend the application deadline to compensate for lost time, and guarantee fair access to all eligible Nigerians. Anything less is an insult to the very citizens these agencies are meant to serve.

If public institutions cannot get recruitment right, how can Nigerians trust them to deliver on more complex national priorities? The thousands of applicants stranded in login queues deserve better than silence and indifference. They deserve a fair chance—and a functional system that respects their aspirations.