NYSC: “7:48PM ... REAL TIME My journey from Onitsha to Benin city that night was filled with reminiscences. I thought intently about the national youth service corps(NYSC); a scheme whose ultimate objective was to achieve national unity and integration; an agency whose systemic plan was to develop a common existence and a common destiny of the people of Nigeria; to help create a Nigeria that her citizens would proudly call their own and contribute keenly to the accelerated growth of the national economy; to inculcate in Nigeria youths the spirit of selfless service to the nation; to remove prejudice, eliminate ignorance and confirm at first hand the many similarities amongst Nigerians of different ethnic group; to help create a virile and egalitarian Nigeria.... A Nigeria where people are not judged by the language they speak or by the sound of their names, by their ethnic nationality or by their religious persuasion; a Nigeria where everybody has the opportunity to be all they could be without hindrance by anybody or any institutions; a Nigeria where people do the most they can to lift up the subjugated and make positive impact on their communities for the good of all The national youth service corps, through her well thought corps year programs, is expected to help the Nigerian youth change their squalid attitudes, aberrant behavioural pattern, their elitist outlook of not identifying with the plight of the common man and of people living in the rural areas; to help prepare and orientate them for the leadership that they have consistently laid claim over, as even a born leader could fail in the face of adversity if he lacks the requisite training and discipline; to give them the proper guidance and orientation relevant to the peculiar needs of the country, so they can contribute remarkably to our journey to social economic bliss; to enable the Nigerian youths acquire the spirit of self reliance by encouraging them to develop skills for self employment; and to have them motivated for nationalistic favour; ... Indeed a lofty objective But over the years, there has been a surge of visible and invisible, external and internal factors seriously competing for space to derail or thwart the scheme and its original intent. These forces are manifestly existence in virtually every aspect of the scheme, showcasing itself in form of: the constant call by so many for the scrapping of the scheme; Over concentration of corps members in certain areas; preferential posting; falsification of doctors report by some corps members in order to get redeployment; corruption; the recent wave of terrorism in the north; dereliction of duty by some corps members who are in favour with corrupt LGIs; diversion of corpers local government allowance by “smart LGIs; the list is endless. My greatest concern is the recent wave of ethnic complexity among corps members In my days in Donga as a corps member, there was a classical case where corpers from a particular ethnic group inaugurated a tribal association(tribal name withheld); an association that excluded corps members from other ethnic group. I watched with irritated contempt as “qualified members of this group grew in pomp and panoply, overweening pride and all kinds of crude showiness. If it had ended there, the action might have been seen as one of those tribal small mindedness and thoughtlessness evoked by unbridled youthful exuberance. But with time, members of the said group went further to print tracks and banners which were brandished at strategic location, non members were seen as alien or fremd, and meetings were mostly held in secluded places; reminiscent of campus confraternity. At first, I thought of all these anti-NYSC behaviour as a game that began innocently enough and then went suddenly strange and venomous. But as I probed further, it begins to seem to me that this thing probably never was a game, that the present was there even before I became a corps member, only I was too green in the community or too busy to notice it. How members of this group managed to create a murky milieu to avoid being detected by the NYSC disciplinary committee was sort of enigmatic to me. But this mystery was unraveled when news came that our LGI was even spotted in one of the groups inauguration ceremony. Indeed a shame. When a leader starts aiding and abetting what he was commissioned to extirpate, it creates a heavy conundrum or a bugaboo situation. Kenneth Onwuka may have been right after all when he lamented that intellectuals are the worst peddlers of tribalism. This is my call on the governing body of the NYSC to please step into this issue and put a stop to this tribal cancerous neoplasia that is ravaging the corps members at Donga local government area. If the NYSC was truly inaugurated to break tribal barrier, then non of her arm should support tribalism within the scheme.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 06:12:20 +0000
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