The National Youths Service Corps (NYSC) will never be scrapped or made optional for Nigerian youths who are below 30 years of age by the time they complete their undergraduate studies, the Minister of Sports and Youth Development, Mr Sunday Dare, has made clear.
The minister made the clarification while responding to questions from journalists after presenting his ministry’s scorecard to the media at the National Press Centre in Abuja, yesterday.
According to the minister, the rationale which informed the establishment of the NYSC in 1973 by the General Yakubu Gowon administration, which was to promote unity among Nigerians, still remains subsists and cannot be done away with by Nigeria.
Dare explained that Nigeria, like any other country in the world, values the contributions of youths into the polity and would therefore not abandon the lofty ideals of the NYSC for any reason.
The minister said, “When General Yakubu Gowon and that government decided to come up with the idea of the NYSC, the central rationale was to promote the unity of Nigeria as the country was just coming out of the civil war and we have been singing the song that says though the tongue may differ in brotherhood and unity we stand. You know that the life wire of any nation is its youths and once their patriotism is captured, that can spread across.
“So, the rationale for bringing on the NYSC scheme by General Gowon up till now subsists. Every country and even Nigeria is still on a daily basis trying to promote its unity in diversity. And, with the strength of our youths, sending them to the different parts of the country, some of us have never been to the parts of the country where we served, never knew their cultures, never experienced them, never knew that they were even Nigerians up north or in the Southeast that you shared your common language or culture with,” Dare explained.
The minister also announced that necessary reforms were being put in place to end the era of fake NYSC certificate and remove the confusion as to those Nigerians in the Diaspora who should and should not serve in the scheme.
He said, “Reform is a constant thing and the NYSC is looking at some reforms because we have had some challenges with those that are in the Diaspora as to whether they should serve or not. There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding. The NYSC is working to ensure that those areas that are fussy about the laws are made clear. It is either you are 30 years and you serve or you are above and you are exempted from the scheme.
“There is a solid database now because we have had cases of people collecting fake certificates and going forward one would have no doubt about the genuineness of the NYSC certificates they have. This is because we are going to produce the certificates with watermarks so that if you get a fake NYSC certificate you know that it is fake, and you would not need to wait ten years in order to discover that it is fake. You will discover the fake one immediately after you see it. Even now, if you don’t have an original NYSC certificate, it would be possible for us to know within five minutes because it would show up once we press the button from our end,” Dare stated.
The minister, who was asked to give reasons why the former Director General of the NYSC, Brig.-Gen. Mohammed Fadah was removed, declined to give the reasons, but stated that Buhari does not want anything to stall the progress of the scheme, which was essential to the nation as a whole.
The minister also explained how thousands of Nigerian youths were evenly selected by his ministry to participate in various job openings and training programmes, so as to give them equal chance to take part in all the available opportunities as opposed to what was obtained in the past where a certain group of persons manipulated and used all available opportunities.
He said, “What we met on the ground was whenever there were opportunities to train our youths, the selection process was by word of mouth and by whom you know. That way, forms for employment and training opportunities were printed and given to a limited number of people and some of the forms hardly ever left Abuja. As a result of that process, there was a tendency for the same number of persons to benefit all the time from available training without any spread to others. But when we came, we decided to engage our youths online since they are tech-savvy.
“The online platform we are using gives everyone the equal opportunity of being selected and with their data taken at the same time for processing, using the chosen social media platforms. That is why when we did our recruitment over 3.9million youths applied from even some of the remotest villages around the country. Ordinarily, we would have just printed 200,000 forms and shared them and that would have been it”.