Photo credit: Nairametrics
Someone in the National Youth Service Corps said recently that the organisation is being overstretched. I believe that was an understatement of this fast ending year.
The days when Youth Corps members are called up for service almost as soon as they write their last papers have certainly gone. Of course, anybody waiting for those days to return should wait for a perfectly dead man to wake up!
We now have graduates waiting for up to a year before they are called up to serve their fatherland.
I believe this is callous!
Let’s consider the plight of the students who finally passed out of our tertiary institutions. There is hardly anyone of them that would not have gone through a strike lasting approximately one academic session.
When lecturers are not on strike, it will be the turn of students. When the strike period is added to the unnecessary wait to be called up for service, we will be talking of about two years.
Curiously, the situation hardly affects the private tertiary institutions. Nobody goes on industrial strike action in those elite schools.
Personally, I believe the NYSC should be restructured, that word again!
When a school goes on strike, the students should be regarded as being on national service. This should go on until the strike action is resolved.
More importantly, once students finish their final papers, the NYSC should be given three months to call them up. If it so happens that they are not called up, the service year should be deemed to have started. This is because the failure to call them up is not their own making.
The last one is that the body should be thinking of reviewing the call up age downwards. This will certainly reduce the number to be called up.
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