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 the argument in this article is that rescue operations no longer seem 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 pieces of a country freshly scarred by civil war, was indeed a noble idea: to send young graduates to live and work outside their home regions (i.e., the state of origin) and, in the process, build bridges that may break down and dissolve tribal divisions across cultures. However, 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 reality has now changed. Banditry, kidnapping-for-ransom, and sectarian violence have turned entire corridors from the East to the West and North to South in danger zones. The forest of Kaduna to the tri-state axis where Kogi, Niger, and Benue meet into hunting grounds, and young corps members like others, unarmed, with limited knowledge of the complexity of Nigeria's geography, and often traveling in groups, have become preys.
The Kogi abduction was not an aberration. Nigerians have watched this movie script over and over. The 2011 general elections triggered political violence across northern parts of 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 allegedly 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 outrightly scrapping the scheme. 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 deep structural change that goes to the root cause of the many intertwined issues at hand. Officials have floated a "risk-sensitive" posting model that would keep corps members closer to their home states or within their geopolitical zones when security conditions are relatively better. A tacit admission that the scheme's founding premise, cross-regional immersion, is no longer safe to be enforced uniformly across the country.
The deeper argument for scrapping NYSC is not only about safety; it is also about relevance. Nigeria in 1973 had six universities and a few thousand graduates to mobilize each year. The country now has more than 300 tertiary institutions (private and public) 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. Hence, if the scheme's unifying mission has been diluted by scale and whatever safety guarantees left are now being eroded by insecurity, the Nigerian state may now be left with defending the program mainly on the strength of nostalgia.
Not that nostalgia is a justification for why NYSC should continue. To its credit, the NYSC program 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 analysis-based posting, value-based remuneration, and genuine security escorts for high-risk routes, rather than total dismantling of the country's few surviving post-war unity institutions.
What may no longer be defensible is sustaining the status quo of a scheme that keeps asking Nigerian youths to gamble with their lives for a mission the government itself cannot guarantee their safety or protection. The families of the Kogi abduction got their children back. The next family or batch of corpers plying that route may not be so fortunate. Is it worth it? 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.
Comments