Over its 40-year-plus of existence, the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme has proved the most enduring legacy project of governance in Nigeria. In our peculiar clime where the wheel is perpetually being reinvented as every new government habitually dumps whatever idea is linked with its predecessor, only to start its own thing from scratch, the youth service scheme has been a lasting baton handed down across dispensations – military as well as civilian. It won’t beyond the pale if former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, harbours especial pride about this persisting imprint of his on our national life.
The scheme’s undying relevance derives obviously from its singular effectiveness in bonding Nigerian youths across primordial fault lines of tribe, ethnicity, culture and religion, weaning them from a nativistic to nationalistic worldview, and instilling in them the spirit of selfless service to community and fatherland.
The icing is its affording freshly graduating youths a modestly provisioned transitional year between the school and the marketplace, during which they also get paramilitary orientation for personal physical and mental fitness. And in the course of the service year, fortunate (or do we say smart?) ones are inaugurated in the job market and set off on the path of lifelong careers: their labour comes quite cheap for employers in that year, but they are as well afforded a good career starting point. By all accounts, it’s a win-win tangle.
It is moot whether the youth service scheme is as potent today in achieving its founding objectives as it was in the early years. But whatever may be the shortfalls even now, there is simply no programme or feature of our national life – well, maybe other than the armed services – that gets even close to replicating the unity vibes of the NYSC.
And that is not mentioning how the scheme comes uniquely handy in providing critical manpower for Nigeria’s nascent democracy. It is widely known that the NYSC has for some years now provided the bulk of temporary staff deployed on election duties by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). And with all the attendant hazards of our notoriously rudimentary political culture in this country, the scheme’s members on election duties have repeatedly proven – naturally, with very few exceptions – to be disciplined, patriotic, energetic and dispassionate in their comportment, thereby imbuing the electoral process with needed credibility.
All the foregoing positive factors regardless, it would seem that the enduring relevance of the youth service scheme has railroaded its implementation into a fossilized mode, such that the scheme now appears out of joint with modern-day realities of our nationhood. At the last count, mobilisation of eligible participants for the scheme has turned an excruciating obstacle race that leaves throngs of fresh graduates in uncertain pendency after school, and in gruelling suspense about the titanic struggle for space in the marketplace that yet lay ahead.
Anyone who knows jack about the youth service scheme these days knows that call-up and mobilisation of eligible graduates are anything but seamless. Actually, you could say the conventional joy that these youths should savour upon completing their studies gets readily muted in the furlough of uncertainty where they hang in for God-knows-how-long, until they get mobilised for the service scheme. Parents and guardians, of course, aren’t spared the agonizing suspense.
If you asked their opinion, not a few of these young ones would tell you they preferred being excused from the scheme, and in effect the gruelling wait, so they could save the time and go do whatever else they could with their lives. But they would find they really couldn’t cut out, because the extant provisions of the scheme’s enabling law make completion and formal discharge from the scheme mandatory for proceeding to the marketplace. In other words, they are haplessly stuck with the scheme.
It is only fair to mention here that the challenge is not entirely new. The NYSC directorate needs government funding, which is never in abundant supply, to mobilise eligible graduates to the scheme; and this is compounded by the fact of a swelling rank of potential participants who often outstrip the directorate’s projections. Besides, with increasing proliferation of tertiary institutions and perpetual disruption of academic calendar by all manners of emergencies, not the least of which is perennial industrial action by lecturers, it is only to be expected that the NYSC directorate can’t sustain a rigid scheduling of the scheme.
Apparently to get a handle on those intervening factors, the directorate has for many years now broken its mobilisation of eligible graduates into batches. One practical consequence of this, though, is that youths with differing years of graduation overlap in batches that obliterate whatever advantage of a head start there could have been for those who left school in the earlier years.
Now, the harsh effects of the recession Nigeria is currently undergoing expectedly make matters worse, and the NYSC directorate hasn’t really made off with a bid to downplay its difficulties. Reports last week cited the NYSC Director-General, Brigadier-General Sulaiman Kazaure, as pouring cold water on a widely harboured fear that the directorate would not mobilise all eligible graduates for the 2016 service year. But he as well confirmed the directorate’s funding and logistical challenges, which have compelled its splitting up the 2016 Batch B orientation and scheduling mobilisation of the second stream to early next year.
Speaking with journalists in Abuja, the NYSC boss is reported to have said: “The NYSC is prepared as always to mobilise qualified graduates for the next service year batch. However, it must be emphasised that as a budget-dependent organisation, the scope of our activities is facing financial constraints, just like every other government agency in the present recession.
“In the 2016 budget, provision was made for mobilisation of 210,000 corps members. However, the figure for 2016 Batch A and Batch B more than doubled the original projection. As we did before the 2016 Batch A orientation, we have appealed to government for special intervention grant to mop up the excess of this figure. So far, we have received the green light from relevant government agencies to prepare for the mobilisation of all qualified prospective corps members.
“However, the limited cumulative capacity of the orientation camps nationwide necessitates a second stream orientation course for the 2016 Batch B, which is being planned for January 2017.”
Two issues came out clearly in General Kazaure’s statement: (i) There are severe funding constraints necessitating an appeal for government’s special intervention grant, and (ii) There are capacity limitations in the scheme’s orientation camps nationwide. But it seems curious to me that the NYSC boss insists, as reported, that there is no plan to amend the enabling Act making mobilisation compulsory for all graduates.
My view is that we need a rethink of the NYSC scheme in this country by taking another look at the enabling Act. Perhaps we need to consider what Nigeria stands to lose by making the scheme voluntary, because if you asked me, the country would lose nothing. Actually, we would harvest operational efficiency of the scheme along with keener commitment of voluntary corps members. Willing fresh graduates would yet have opportunity to enlist in the laudable scheme, while those that may have ready options of other life pursuits would be unbound to pursue their dreams. And the consequent impact would be salutary on the scheme because the logistical burden would be considerably relieved. If I must restate my view pointedly: I think it is about time the NYSC scheme was made voluntary for graduating students.
