NYSC SCHEME - TO SCRAP OR NOT TO SCRAP?
On a Monday morning in late August, Nigerians exhaled along with victims and their families. The military announced that it had pulled 21 kidnap victims out of the Egume-Ochaja forest in Kogi State. 15 of them were members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) who had been snatched nearly a week earlier while traveling from Abuja to Bayelsa. The rescue followed a coordinated operation involving the military, police, the secret service, and local vigilantes. President Bola Tinubu called it a moment of relief for the victims' families and praised the personnel involved. Photographs of tearful reunions circulated within hours.
But a rescue operation no longer seems like a sustainable solution. It is, at best, a reprieve from a policy failure that Nigeria has watched unfold for more than a decade, and it is long past time to ask whether the National Youth Service Corps, in its current form, should exist at all. The scheme, created in 1973 under General Yakubu Gowon to knit together a country freshly scarred by civil war, was a noble idea: send young graduates to live and work outside their home regions, and let familiarity dissolve tribal suspicion. Half a century later, the logic that once justified sending young, freshly minted graduate Nigerian youths into unfamiliar territory now works against the foundational idea of the NYSC. Nigeria's security map has changed. Banditry, kidnapping-for-ransom, and sectarian violence have turned entire corridors from Kaduna's forests to the tri-state axis where Kogi, Niger, and Benue meet into hunting grounds, and young corps members, unarmed, geographically disoriented, and often traveling in groups, are close to ideal prey.
The Kogi abduction was not an aberration. Nigerians have watched this movie before. The 2011 general elections triggered political violence across northern Nigeria that killed more than 20 corps members, and in one particularly grim episode that year, dozens of them were trapped inside a fellowship building set ablaze by protesters. A 2021 bill in the House of Representatives, sponsored by a lawmaker from Rivers State, cited the killing and kidnapping of corps members through banditry, religious extremism, and ethnic violence as explicit grounds for scrapping the scheme outright. Just this year, Afenifere, the pan-Yoruba political group, renewed calls for a fundamental overhaul of how corps members are posted, warning that the country risked normalizing what it called avoidable tragedies among young graduates.
The government's answer, so far, has been incremental caution rather than structural change. Officials have floated a "risk-sensitive" posting model that would keep corps members closer to home states or within their geopolitical zones when security conditions warrant it. A tacit admission that the scheme's founding premise, cross-regional immersion, is no longer safe to enforce uniformly. That is more like a reasonable patch than a resolution.
The deeper argument for scrapping NYSC is not only about safety; it is about relevance. Nigeria in 1973 had six universities and a few thousand graduates to mobilize each year. It now has more than 300 tertiary institutions producing roughly 650,000 graduates annually, many of whom are deployed into an economy that, critics note, increasingly treats them as a subsidized labor pool rather than nation-builders or temporary staff for schools, hospitals, and government offices that have stopped hiring permanently. If the scheme's unifying mission has been diluted by scale and its safety guarantees eroded by insecurity, the state is left defending a program mainly on the strength of nostalgia.
None of this justifies why NYSC should continue. NYSC still supplies essential personnel to under-resourced schools and clinics in remote areas, and it remains one of the few institutions that physically moves young Nigerians across ethnic and religious lines at a formative age, something a voluntary or regionally confined alternative may not replicate. Reform advocates argue the answer is redesign, not abolition: tighter risk-based posting, real remuneration, and genuine security escorts for high-risk routes, rather than dismantling one of the country's few surviving post-war unity institutions.
What may no longer be defensible is sustaining the status quo of a scheme as is that keeps asking Nigerian youths to gamble with their lives for a mission the government itself cannot guarantee their safety or protection. The families in Kogi got their children back. The next family may not be so fortunate. That should be the question Abuja and more Nigerians should be asking, not to wait for another kidnapping before analyses start flying right, left, and center.
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