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PeeCeeJay By Jideofor Adibe
Re-inventing the NYSC There were two important developments on the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme this week: One, was Buhari’s declaration of his commitment to retaining the scheme. The President was quoted by several media, including the online medium, The Cable of August 5 2015, as saying: “I firmly believe in NYSC and I think it should remain a national programme to promote integration.
“Whenever I go home to Daura, I look out for Corps
members from Lagos, Aba and other parts of the country. I am always
thrilled to learn that except for the NYSC, some of them have never
left their states of origin to visit other cities in the country.” The two positions – by the president and the DG of the NYSC scheme - mirror the general sentiments about the scheme. While the sentiment expressed by President Buhari leaned on the integrationist objective of the scheme, Brigadier-General Olawumi’s plans to make the scheme voluntary emphasizes the imperative of situating the scheme’s existence within the context and dynamics of our current financial situation and absorptive capacity of the economy of the Corps members. The two positions are not necessarily irreconcilable. To know the form in which the scheme could be re-invented, we need to pose a number of questions: What are the main criticisms of the scheme as it is? How can we evaluate its success? Is there an alternative platform for achieving the integrationist philosophy of the NYSC - which appears to be the scheme’s greatest selling point? Criticisms There are several criticisms of the scheme: One, it has been argued that the scheme is now dated, that since it was created in 1973, the country has changed in several fundamental ways: the number of universities has for instance increased from about six in 1973 to 138 just as the number of polytechnics has also ballooned over the same period. This essentially means that the number of people eligible to participate in the scheme has increased from an annual enrolment figure of 2,364 participants at inception in 1974 to 229,016 in 2014. One of the issues raised by this quantum jump in the number of eligible participants is that of absorptive capacity – are there enough places to meaningfully engage the Corps members? Two, is the cost of running it, including the bureaucracy it spawns. For instance the annual budget of the scheme is over N74bn, out of which over 80 per cent of the budget are used in paying the salaries and wages of members of the massive bureaucracy that exists to manage the scheme and in paying the allowances of the Corp members during the service year. With so much money available, the scheme is also said to stink of corruption, with suspicions that ‘ghost’ Corp members fuel the wage bill for the government while presenting an opportunity for primitive accumulation for some. Three, is that the scheme has gradually been turned into a source of cheap, if not slave labour. A number of public and private firms engage the Corps members as cheap labour, with only very few of such beneficiary institutions retaining them afterwards. In this sense it is argued that the scheme actually exacerbates the unemployment crisis in the country and also implicitly encourages servitude since some employers rely on them rather than engaging staff of their own. Four, questions are also raised about the compulsory nature of the service, which means that those who are motivated to serve are lumped together with those who would rather be allowed to do other things. This perhaps partly explains why many Corp members try to circumvent the process. This often involves the payment of gratification to ensure prime postings to urban centres or to ‘juicy’ corporations or to avoid the rigors of camping or to skip the service year altogether even though records are created to suggest otherwise. Five, is the issue of the relevance of some of the forced experiences. What for instance is the point of the three-week orientation camp, where quite often the Corps members are camped in horrendous conditions, with horrible feeding arrangements and even worse sanitary conditions? How does the early morning drills at the orientation camp contribute to the overall aims of the scheme? And what about most of the Corp members being forced to teach – without teaching qualifications, aptitude and even any form of crash programme on teaching? How come that most of those engaged in public or private offices end up doing nothing but run minor errands? Criticisms of the scheme, such as above, have led to many people calling for the scheme’s abrogation or its radical reform. Evaluating the NYSC How do we evaluate the scheme against its mandates? Many people have an intuitive belief that because the NYSC is one of the country’s few institutions that have endured over time, it must have been a success. I am not sure of this. In fact I am not aware of any empirical study on the impact assessment of the scheme over the years. True, in its early years, the scheme obviously helped to fill the skills gap in many parts of the country and was also a key platform for participants to access other parts of the country. The issue is whether the scheme remains relevant today. For instance I believe that the scheme’s most popular philosophy – helping in nation-building through intercultural exchange - is exaggerated. These days there are several enhanced opportunities for Nigerians who want to explore other parts of the country or other cultures to do so. For instance the explosion in the number of universities and other institutions of higher learning across the country is offering Nigerians of different ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds an opportunity to meet and engage in deeper interactions – than what you have with the NYSC scheme. Similarly, the revolutions in information technology, (including the coming into being of Nollywood and Kannywood ) offers Nigerians who are genuinely interested about learning about other cultures in the country the opportunity to do so easily – at a mere switch of a button. Additionally, the rapid increase in the number of urban centres in the country, especially with the creation of states and local governments has accelerated internal migrations as people move to greener pastures. Internal migration in turn is an opportunity for cultural exchanges. In these urban centres, there are several agencies that bring people of different ethnic, religious, regional and ideological backgrounds together – churches, mosques, sports clubs, business associations etc. In other words there are several agencies today that are better positioned to perform the sort of integration role that the NYSC played in the early 1970s and 1980s. Besides, it is preposterous to suggest that Nigerians being made to serve in other parts of the country other than their own will automatically promote unity in diversity. It could actually be argued that at the horizontal/societal level, integration across the country has been quite successful – in churches, mosques, businesses, Nigerians of different backgrounds tend to get along well. Inter-ethnic marriages are quite common. Even Nigerians who loot the treasury are able to work in concert regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. It is in fact often intriguing how the composition of several arrested crime gangs tends to reflect the country’s federal character. Politicians that specialise in mobilizing ethnic sentiments for support remarkably have friends from even the ethnic groups they attack. In this sense we have no problem at the horizontal level of integration My opinion is that the country’s problem is with, what for want of a better terminology, I will call ‘vertical integration’ - group relations with the state and its institutions especially in the context of the struggle for the scarce socioeconomic resources and other societal values. I don’t think, the NYSC, as presently constituted, has any relevance in furthering ‘vertical integration’, which is where our main challenge in nation-building lies. Right now, there appears to be disconnect between the good successes the country has achieved at the horizontal level of integration with the crisis we have at the vertical level of integration. In essence the crisis in our nation-building is epitomised in the alienation of several groups and subgroup actors from the Nigerian state and its institutions not in inter-personal or intergroup relations (outside the context of state). If the NYSC is abrogated today, it is unlikely to make any difference in the country’s quest for unity in diversity. The proposal to make the NYSC voluntary is a necessary first step in its reform – but not enough. The content of the programme needs to change- radically. I propose that the content should follow two pathways: participants who are genuinely interested in community projects, including specialist teaching as a way of learning the culture and ways of life of other groups and Peace Ambassadors who should be trained on internal ethnic, religious and regional conflict resolution strategies. Three months should be devoted to giving the participants relevant skills while they will be placed for another nine months with an organisation where their skills will be very effectively utilized. Additionally, the scheme should be open to all Nigerians of certain age brackets and educational qualifications through competitive admission process – not just to graduates of universities and polytechnics. |