NYSC wasting our youth

Nigeria is persistently unfair to its young people. While my generation can reel off countless things we enjoyed during our school days and when we entered the labour market, today’s young people have nothing but lamentations whether they look back or project forward. Having survived the lion’s den that our mismanaged educational institutions have become, they graduate and roam about because the authorities have not made adequate preparations to enable them proceed on National Service on schedule.

Now, our young graduates finish school and wait for many months for the

National Youth Service Corps to log them into a batch to serve their fatherland. You hear tags like Batch A, Stream B…. It is such a bleeding shame. National service used to be automatic. As soon as you finished your final papers, well before convocation, the list of eligible corpers would be out and you simply made arrangements to proceed to your designated orientation camp.

Today, because of pervasive corruption in the land, we simply stopped planning. It does not take rocket science to calculate how many graduates we would be producing over a ten-year period. We knew that the facilities needed to be expanded to cope with the rising number of graduates. But what did we do? Nothing. We simply waited for the problem to overwhelm us and then we transferred the agony to the fresh graduates who are now trapped in limbo as they are no longer students and at the same time are not eligible for employment because the NYSC scheme is mandatory.

This nonsense must stop now. We have dehumanised the younger generation enough. During our own university days, our facilities were in top shape; we enjoyed bursaries from state governments; we had subsidised meals (Breakfast - 10 kobo; Lunch - 20 kobo; Supper - 20 kobo). With 15 Naira, you were sure of feeding for one month. When the military later increased feeding to 75 kobo per day (a 50% increase) Nigerian students hit the streets in massive protests. The cafeterias have since disappeared and most of the other facilities that made our student days relatively blissful have since fallen into disrepair.

Nigeria is cheating its younger generation. We are breeding a generation that doesn’t have many good things to say about the land of their birth.

That is why they laugh in our faces when we preach patriotism to them. Patriotism - what is the spelling? What kind of animal is so called? Can a person perpetually brutalised by his country be expected to be ‘patriotic’, more so when he is daily confronted with news of billions of local and foreign currencies stolen by government officials - money that could have transformed the educational sector?

In many cases, university calendars have been rubbished by labour strikes.

Many of our graduates spend two or three extra sessions than they originally planned. Then, they graduate and have to stay at home because their country is not yet ready to enrol them into the national service scheme. If this isn’t a scandal then I truly don’t know what it is.

The situation is made more scandalous by the fact that the National

Assembly has always looked the other way while the younger generation is dealt a raw deal. Why has the legislature not intervened by tweaking the

NYSC Act to allow excess graduates to be given exemption certificates? If the system can only accommodate 50% of the graduates we produce annually,

GIVE THE OTHERS CERTIFICATES OF EXEMPTION so that they can get on with their lives! It isn’t as if there are jobs waiting for them, but at least the system ought not to be an obstacle to their progress in life. HOW TIMES CHANGE! Talking about how we have lost our compass and our family values as a nation, sample this reminiscence from renowned economist, Professor Sam Aluko, on corruption and national development at the 2008 Bala Usman memorial lecture at the Centre for Democratic Development, Research and Training (CEDDERT) Zaria:

“Shortly after I returned from Britain in 1959, with a PhD in Economics, I went home to visit my parents. My wife and I were driven to the village in our new car which we purchased with money provided by the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Ibadan, which was then my employer.

“After being well received by my family and the entire village community and we retired into our bedroom, my father and my mother came quietly into the room, called me and inquired very calmly but firmly how, so soon after my arrival from England, I was able to possess a car.

“They were worried that I should not soil the family by possessing a vehicle beyond my financial capacity. When I told them that it was the Federal Government that bought the car for me, to repay the cost over time, and that even my wife was also entitled to a similar facility so that we could have two cars if we so desired, but for modesty we decided to have one, they were greatly relieved.

“They didn’t want any corruption allegations against me and against the family that gave me birth. And it was one of the smallest cars of that era.

Now, in the same village, some of my family members pooh-pooh me for coming to the village in a Peugeot station wagon car when even junior public officers and minor political office holders ride the latest Jeeps, Mercedes Benz and other cars out of the ordinary.

“Few Nigerians today, bother about the source of wealth or affluence of fellow Nigerians. The honoured and the honourable are those with money and property. Honesty is no longer the best policy.”