1 July 2011
The National Youth Service Corps Scheme (NYSC) is a laudable instrument for national integration and its raison d’etre is made more imperative by our contemporary political experience. But the Scheme faces grave challenges, most of which were not envisaged at its inception.
Yet these challenges may mar and permanently undermine its value and impact if they are not quickly addressed.
The NYSC was flagged off at a time when the academic calendars of our tertiary institutions were stable and fairly predictable. The number of potential Corps Members was conceivable within accepted margins of error.
The number of duly accredited institutions was also no mystery.
The managers of the Scheme were therefore programmed to function with variables that have since ceased to be relevant. There is now a disconnect between the number of students matriculated by most universities and the numbers they actually turn out.
Whereas in the past the managers of the Scheme could project the number of participants and their due dates in the orientation camps whenever they had more than one batch of Corps members, today such is no longer the case.
Individual universities, with their roundly skewed calendars, have made sure of that because of the routine disruption of the school year by trade disputes across all the various strata of academic and non-academic staff.
The extenuating considerations that once enabled the managers of the Scheme to make contingency arrangements are therefore no longer meaningful, as the very programme itself is now run as a series of contingency arrangements.
Thus the NYSC Scheme has fallen casualty to the wider systemic problems of the larger society. This is in addition to a brand of anomaly that is peculiar to the NYSC: it has fallen into disrepute because many of its underpinnings are now perfunctory suppositions which attract subdued, and sometimes open, jeers from the public and even from serving Corps members.
With few exceptions, the facilities for the NYSC Orientation Programmes handle four times their actual carrying capacities. Hygiene is a major challenge and the minimum standards of decency for accommodation and toilet facilities are absent.
The old distinction between the main batch and the supplementary team of Corps members in any service year has collapsed; as the Scheme is saddled with a rolling stock of young graduates who have since lost count of the number of years they spent pursuing a four year programme.
No one ever envisaged that the Scheme will one day be constrained to have a massive backlog of graduates waiting to serve a nation the older generation has become very cynical about.
Faith in the objectivity of officials and the sanctity of postings are undermined by the rampant practice of alleged interference by the public, sometimes involving the use of money to influence posting for national service. The peak of the abuse came with the recent uncovering of thousands of people posted for the NYSC who were neither graduates, nor possessors of O’Level certificates.
Yet these touts were duly posted for national service under the NYSC. It is therefore not surprising that the old practice of welcoming Corps members, which was once a regular practice in many Nigerian communities, is no more and the enthusiasm of the prospective Corps member has gone with it.
This has led to several unwholesome practices. For instance, Corps members are known to make arrangement with some unscrupulous supervisors to be absent during the service year. In some cases these renegade Corps members actually enrol for academic programmes in other universities.
This is another issue on its own, because a graduate is not supposed to be registered for a higher academic programme without tendering the NYSC Certificate.
How do graduates register for these programmes, graduate and use the certificates thus obtained without any of the supposed checks in the system detecting same?
Unless some of these problems are addressed, we fear a massive groundswell of denigration of the Scheme with contemporary realities.
AllAfrica – All the Time
Continued here:
Nigeria: Re-Inventing the NYSC Scheme