By Francis Ewherido
The Minister of Education, Dr. Olatunji Alausa, has proposed extending the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) service year from one year to two years. This proposed extension has enormous implications in terms of additional funding by the federal government, impact on the corps members and their families, etc. Consequently, the proposal needs to be vigorously scrutinized because it smells like the plan of the minister’s predecessor to make 18 years the minimum age for entry into Nigerian universities. In one sentence, though it is still a proposal, I feel it was hastily done.
Let us go back to the beginning. The National Youth Service Corp was established by Decree No. 24 of May 22, 1973. The scheme was conceived by the government of Gen. Yakubu Gowon in furtherance of his government three Rs policy: Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction after the Nigerian Civil War. A review of the impact of the three Rs policy is outside the scope of this column, MARRIAGE AND FAMILY, but some of the current inter-ethnic marriages and long-lasting friendships happened as a result of the NYSC scheme. Some Nigerians also settled and live in the states where they did their service till date.
When the scheme started, getting employment was easy because jobs were waiting after service. As at 1989, when I completed my service, that was no longer the case. It is worse now because there are more graduates and fewer job opportunities. Like every scheme of this nature, there ought to be periodic reviews, but I don’t know what the situation is. Let me just focus on the minister’s proposal as it concerns the young graduates and their families?
Before embarking on this kind of change, you have to get a representative sample of students, the potential youth service corps members, to know what they feel about the extension. Has that been done? The Gen Zs have their own minds. I interact with some of them and I will share my findings on their opinion of the scheme. For simplicity, I will break it into two broad categories: Those who want it and those who don’t. The first group want to do the service. They see it as another opportunity to be out of home and experience a new environment. Some see it as an opportunity to sow their wild oats after being under the strict guidance of their parents. Some look forward to it as an opportunity to earn an income for the first time in their lives. Some do it with the hope of being retained where they served. Some are not sure when they will get a job, so they want to enjoy the alowee (allowance) while it lasts. There are also those with mortal fear of the unknown. They are ready to do service for eternity, so the proposed two years is music to their ears. For me, the last set deserves the eaglet treatment. For all the wonderful attributes of the eagle, some people do not know that at maturity many eaglets are reluctant to leave the comfort of their parents’ nests. The parents instinctively boot them out to go and start a life of their own.
The second group are those who see it as a waste of time. They feel that there are very few jobs out there and instead of postponing the evil day, they want to confront unemployment straightaway after graduation by commencing their hustling. There is another set. They have already acquired entrepreneurial skills in school. They provide services and sell goods to their fellow students on campus. They make good money. One student told his parents to stop sending him money. There are those who have done online training and acquired specialized skills. As students, they already earn plenty of money. There are those who are into online trading. I have met a few who are already worth millions. I learnt some are really “big boys” with tons of money. The one-year service is already a distraction. Telling them to do two years will be unacceptable to them. There are those who want to japa, but they want to do the service because dodging it might come back to haunt them later in life when opportunities arise. But an additional year is an issue.
Now to families, when I travelled from Effurun, Bendel State (now Delta) to Nsukka, in then Anambra State, for the first time in 1984 to commence my studies, my family didn’t hear from me until they got my letter about three weeks to a month later and there was no panic. Nigeria was safer then. It is not so anymore. Now, if your wards are posted to certain parts of the country, the parents call hourly until they get to their destination. In addition, the family is constantly in touch and it is for good reasons. Some corps members have been kidnapped/killed and some have died due inadequate healthcare when they were ill. What exactly is the NYSC doing about improving the welfare of corps members beyond increasing their allowance?
And that reminds me, is there a group life insurance policy for corps members? There should be if there is none because every year, corps members die. If the death benefit, for instance, is N5m, it cannot compensate for the loss of the corps member, but it can give financial relief to the bereaved family, especially those of little means. Some of the youth corps members who die have younger siblings. The death benefit but can help in training the younger ones. Some people are uncomfortable with us talking about death, but it’s happening every day.
This brings me to the next point. The families of some of these corps members are waiting for them to complete their service, get a job and contribute to the economic wellbeing of the family. Does the NYSC want to keep them for another year on the same 77,000 monthly allowance?
Now let us look at the reason the minster gave for making the proposal. He said that the extension of the scheme from one year to two years is part of efforts to deepen skills acquisition and boost youth employment. This is contestable. What life-transforming skills are corps members currently acquiring to necessitate the extension to two years? Very little or none. That is partly why millions of graduates are unemployed. They said the proposed one-year extension is supposed to include an expansion of the NYSC Skill Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) programme to better equip corps members with practical skills for job creation and national development. The NYSC needs to come out and showcase the impact and results of SAED to necessitate an extension of the period of service.
This skills acquisition being touted reminds me of a session we had during my service. Someone came to teach business administration and wealth creation. Among the corps members were graduates who were part of their families’ businesses and knew a few things about running a business. When the man was done, he was bombarded with questions he couldn’t answer. It was then he confessed that he was just a civil servant from the ministry that he didn’t even have the courage to go into business. That was 37 years ago, but what has changed, NYSC? Nigeria needs real solutions to the problem of unemployment, not hollow rituals. With better funding and rejigging of the curricula of universities/polytechnics, they are better equipped to handle skills acquisition and prepare graduates for entrepreneurship, not NYSC.
The proposed extra one year will be a waste of time and resources. At graduation, graduates ought to know what they want to do with their lives which vary from one person to the other. It is not something you can achieve by bunching corps members together. Moreover, some of these graduates started making money from the university. Some are millionaires through legitimate money made in school. What does NYSC want to teach them? Some are not even interested in serving at all.
For graduates who still do not know what to do with their lives after leaving the university, what they need is a journey of self-discovery under the guidance of a mentor, not what the minister is proposing. The fund for the extra one year should be directed to improving the quality of education. The ingredients for everybody’s greatness and success are within, not without. It can only be fanned into flame from without and universities/polytechnics are more suitable.
