NOW YOUR SUFFERING CONTINUE (NYSC)

 Amidst the many crises going on in the north where many of the NYSC members have lost their lives, the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) Director General, Brig.- Gen. Maharazu Tsiga, has disclosed that 70 serving corps members are undergoing training on skill acquisition in Germany and the United States (U.S.).

According to him, 50 corps members are currently on skill acquisition programmes in Germany while 20 are in the U.S. for the same programme at the expense of the scheme.The NYSC boss explained that the foreign training was part of efforts of the government at repositioning the scheme and corps members for greater challenges.

He was reported to have said that “I am glad to say that due to tremendous achievements of NYSC in the past years and most especially in the conduct of the April 2011 general elections, the international community is now preparing to accept our corps members and staff of the scheme for training and retraining and mostly on skill acquisition programmes,”

However, considering the objective for the establishment of the NYSC, this information on overseas training for 50 corps members in Germany, and 20 in the United States of America, is novel. For the records, the NYSC was established shortly after the civil war, which ended in 1970, by the military regime of Gen. Yakubu Gowon as a vehicle to foster unity amongst the diverse ethnic and religious groups in the country. The ultimate aim was to unite the people through better understanding of the culture, customs and traditions of other Nigerians.

Consequently, members of the scheme, mainly young graduates from the universities and polytechnics, were posted to serve the nation in states different from their states of origin. In most cases, graduates from the southern parts of the country were posted to the northern parts for their one-year mandatory national service.

In the first ten years, the scheme was lauded for the opportunities it provided for cross-cultural understanding and for providing needed manpower in some parts of the country that were then regarded as educationally disadvantaged. But, the shine of this redistribution of manpower advantage was deleted when most state governments refused to offer permanent jobs to corps members at the end of the service year. Subsequently, the nation's economic downturn and the collapsing industries led to massive rejection of corps members, countrywide.

Also, the recent killing of corps members who served as electoral officials at the 2011 general elections during violence that trailed the presidential poll in the northern part of the country has renewed calls for the scrapping of the NYSC scheme. Before then, there had been suggestions that compulsory military training, beyond the current mere drills, should be incorporated into the scheme.

While urging workers of the scheme to eschew all forms of negative practices capable of running the scheme down, General Tsiga observed that one of the challenges confronting the NYSC were calls by some people that it should be scrapped. He noted that “Scraping of the NYSC will lead to kidnapping, robbery and other vices in the country. Most importantly it will also lead to throwing over 5,000 workforce of the scheme into the employment market,”

In the midst of divided opinions on the continuing relevance of the NYSC scheme in view of its challenges over the decades, the Federal Government does not seem to have done a comprehensive evaluation of the programme to fine-tune its objectives and implementation.

However, the recent announcement by the Nigerian Senate that it will review the 1973 NYSC act, indicates that a middle ground approach that favours retaining the program appears to be the winning argument by Nigerian legislators.

One potential middle ground solution that has been proposed is for the government to mandate that corps members serve in their geo-political zones.

This makes sense in principle since it is unacceptable to sacrifice the lives of young Nigerians in the name of promoting national unity. Giving young people such a cross to bear is certainly too costly a price.

Meanwhile, such an arrangement begs the question, what then will be the purpose of the NYSC? Having lost its primary function of fostering national unity, it will need another function that will, at the very least, justify the high cost of running the scheme.

The likely alternative primary function for the program in view of such initiative as sending corps members abroad for skill acquisition would be for it to serve as a means of job creation. Though the NYSC in its present form currently in a sense fulfils this role for one year, many corps members find themselves thrown once more into the job market after earning 18,000 monthly although their service year. Then their suffering will begin. It is indeed Now Your Suffering Continue (NYSC)