Tragedy Of A Service Year

Tragedy Of A Service Year

Suraj Oyewale

Victoria Island, Lagos

News of death is not one anybody receives with a grinning face. Such news are more saddening when the circumstances leading to the death are gruesome or when the victim falls into the lower side of age brackets. The corps members felled in the post-election violence in the northern part of the country satisfied these two unfortunate scenarios. They were youths, their lives were terminated in gory circumstances.

So anytime I see the pictures of these slain corps members, some of whom were my agemates and some younger, splashed on newspaper pages, I imagine the agonies their families would have been going through.

When one witnesses the joys and emotions that rent the atmosphere when tertiary institution students finish their programmes, either on the day of final paper or convocation day, one will appreciate the feelings of these students. The emotional among them burst into tears of joy. The prayer warriors rush to the praying grounds to give thanks to God. The playful exhibit some pranks. Cameras are kept busy. All manners of songs dominate the environment. It is usually a sight to behold.

But shortly after the celebrations, the discerning among them know that the journey is just beginning. Reality begins to dawn on many of them. The privileges they enjoyed as students soon begin to pale. That is the stage of transition from youth to real adulthood, and for many of them, from dependents to independents. Societal expectations that come with being a graduate begin to stare you in the face. For many poor parents, the mere happiness of having a graduate child is satisfying. To them, this is the time to reap what they have sowed, time to begin to enjoy the returns of their investment. But in Nigeria, you have to undergo a transition stage, called the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme.

When the lives of such promising young men or women are terminated at such stage, when their parents are already looking forward to having them complete this programme and get a good job, even if it is not expected to come immediately, one can imagine the devastation, the pains. Some parents may not recover from it.

A lot of analysts have commented on the post-election violence. I have read the theory that the killed corps members could have been compromised tools in the hands of the election riggers. Some have tried to situate the remote cause of the killings within the context of bad leadership that has over the years visited untold strife on these rampaging youths. I do not think any of these is good reason to kill youth corps members or anybody.

At the other extreme are those that have spared no word for CPC presidential candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari, calling for his head, as if he was the one that ordered the youths out in the first place or as if he was expected to do the job of security officers for them. The North bashers also had a field day, demonizing the north at every opportunity. With their comments, one finds it difficult to disagree with a northern commentator that said that if the South rises against a perceived injustice, like the Operation Wetie Crisis of the early 1960’s and the June 12 protests, both recording tens of deaths, it is sophistication, but if the North does same, they are blood-suckers. But this is not the mood to discuss all these, buck-passing cannot assuage the pains of the families of the slain youths.

This brings us to the question, should NYSC be scrapped? When similar debate erupted in 2007 when the Directorate was hit by acute lack of funds to continue financing the programme, I lent my voice to the debate. In my article titled ‘The NYSC Debacle’ published by several newspapers in July 2007, I opined that the “programme (should) be made voluntary and employers should be compelled not to make presentation of NYSC discharge certificate mandatory in their recruitment exercises. Let graduates who wish to participate in the exercise register their interest immediately after graduating and those who do not wish to participate in the exercise should be issued certificate of voluntary exemption. This way, the number of people being mobilized for the programme annually will reduce and the problem of insufficient funds will be solved.”

The problem today is not insufficient fund, but my opinion still remains the programme should not be scrapped. A review of the programme is no doubt inevitable. The government can look at the option of making the programme optional. An outright scrap of the programme appears to me as throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The programme has served as the launching pad for many people’s careers. Some corps members that got permanent jobs in the institutions they served in, could not have giotten the jobs if they were to apply afresh.

The review of the programme should also give limited flexibility to areas where one can serve. Somebody has recommended that each state should be made to coordinate where its indigenes will serve and there should be a form of contractual exchange between the state governments. This way, the analyst argued, each state government will take the security of the its serving guests more seriously, being responsible for accepting them. This sounds plausible to me.

It is worth mentioning that this is not the theory of an ex-corps member that served inside the air-conditioned offices of Lagos or Abuja, and so does not know what he is saying. This is coming from one whose experience as a youth corps member in the North-Western state of Sokoto was almost fatal. Apart from experiencing close shave with auto-crashes in all the times I travelled by road from Lagos, sometimes Kwara, to Sokoto(and I went by air only once in the six trips I made during service year), my ever busy pen also landed me into trouble with Sokoto NYSC secretariat and the state government, when after I wrote a short piece in The Sun Newspaper(titled ‘Wammako’s Unimpressive Start’, The Sun, August 19, 2007), I found myself facing many panels, for daring to interfere in the politics of the state I only came to serve. It was a trying period for me, details of which I have narrated in my past writings and my NYSC memoirs, but over all, the positive sides of my stay in Sokoto outweighed the negative sides, and if I had the opportunity to serve again, I will gladly welcome posting to the caliphate state again. Needless to say that most of my best friends today were those I met in Sokoto.

Service year, like any other phase in life, has its ups and downs. But bearing in mind that no amount of ups can replace lost lives, the killings of the ‘NYSC 10’ should be totally condemned. The state governments need to safeguard the lives of these young men and women posted to their states. I must also mention that even at the height of my issue with them in 2007, the Sokoto state government and Sokoto NYSC - headed then by Mr Yakubu Jok, the man I read in newspapers is now a Director in NYSC National office and incidentally the man that led the evacuation of slain Bauchi corps members from the state– displayed high spirit of humanity by offering me necessary protection from possible attack by PDP thugs (assuming they can read what I wrote in newspapers) who may have felt I was sponsored by Bafarawa(the contentious article had nice words for Bafarawa, and it was at the height of the Bafarawa-Wammako political war). I remember the state Commissioner for Education, Alhaji Arzika Tureta, after a very moving meeting with me and some top NYSC officials, telling me that ‘we still see you as our child, despite what you did, and we will continue to protect you in our state’. Mr Jok, despite having to overtly satisfy the state government that the erring ‘corper’ has been duly punished, also did not drain his milk of kindness while the ordeal lasted.

My heart goes out to the families of the slain corps members. It is indeed a wound time may not heal easily. The perpetrators of the dastardly acts should be fished out and duly made to face the music, if only to serve as deterrent to future perpetrators.