NYSC’s extortionate decision on call-up letters

THE recent decision by the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) to impose a N4, 000 online registration fee on prospective corps members in assessing their call-up letters is nothing but extortionate. The subsequent announcement by the NYSC Director of Press and Public Relations, Mrs. Bose Aderibigbe, when the decision became controversial, that the fee would be reduced in subsequent years but not this year, added absurdity to the proposed extortion.

The initial obstinacy of the leadership of the NYSC, despite the widespread condemnation of the decision to impose a fee on corps members in the collection of their call-up letters, is a demonstration of the fact that those in charge of this otherwise laudable scheme have become sorely desensitised to the fundamental conditions that necessitated it and its overall goals. The simplistic reasons offered in defence of this decision also expose the limitations of the current leadership of the NYSC.

The NYSC Scheme was created in the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War in 1973 as part of the elaborate efforts to reconstruct, reconcile and rebuild the country which had just survived a 30-month long challenge of dismemberment. The law establishing the NYSC, Decree No. 24 of 22nd May 1973, envisioned a scheme that would ensure “the proper encouragement and development of common ties among the youths of Nigeria and the promotion of national unity.”

From the onset of the scheme, and as acknowledged by the current leadership, the NYSC recognised and continues to recognise that the country is plagued by the problems of underdevelopment, including poverty. Indeed, tragically, the educated young Nigerians who are being called up to serve the nation through the scheme have mostly come to regard the NYSC as a stopgap between higher education and unemployment. Only in June this year, the Central Bank of Nigeria announced that 80 per cent of Nigerian youths were without jobs.

This is the bleak future that many of these young people who are graduating from the nation’s higher institutions face after their national service. This is made worse by the terrible conditions under which many of them survived in the years that they spent in higher institutions. Therefore, to demand that these young people who are looking forward to the “interregnum” that the service year represents in their lives pay any amount of money to receive their call-up letters is a brazen response to the tough conditions of their past, present and future.

These graduates should not have to pay even a kobo to receive their call-up letters. That the spokesperson of the NYSC explains the N4, 000 controversy as a charge “just for the operation and provision of infrastructural facilities in all NYSC camps and its 37 secretariats and offices in the 774 local governments nationwide” is an unashamed display of the lack of imagination of the leadership of the NYSC and the relevant oversight institutions in both the executive and legislative branches of the government of the federation. It is not the duty of the corps members to fund or subsidise the NYSC. A government that establishes a compulsory service scheme must have the funds to run its operations.

It would seem plausible, as it has been suggested in some quarters, that this decision is not unconnected with the shameful pattern of government agencies creating opportunities for some private businesses to make money where none should be made. Aderibigbe might have betrayed this when she stated that “it might be possible after [the NYSC] management and Sidmach Technologies have sat down to see the possibility of the reduction. So for now, it might not be possible but subsequent ones, if it is possible, the entire public will know about it.” Is the imposition of the N4, 000 charge just a way of assisting Sidmach Technologies to make money off the hapless prospective corps members? Who in the NYSC Directorate is complicit in this suspect “contract”?

The technical and logistical excuses that the NYSC spokesperson has offered for this imposition are untenable. A serious public institution led by able and visionary people is easily able to surmount the problems identified. The NYSC has survived for more than four decades, despite the astronomical growth in the number of corps members since 1973, without having to charge a fee to distribute call-up letters. What the leadership of the NYSC lacks in imagination, it must not make up for it by extorting money from the corps members. It is incumbent upon the NYSC leadership to devise ways through which the distribution and delivery of the call-up letters will be smoother and easier. The cost for using new information and communications technologies to make this possible should be the burden of the NYSC and not that of the corps members. Therefore, nothing recommends the extortionate ruse by the scheme.

We salute the step taken so far by the House of Representatives on the issue, but beyond that, the relevant committee of the National Assembly should investigate “the deal” between Sidmach Technologies and the NYSC leadership as soon as possible to determine if a breach of public trust was behind this pointless inconvenience that the young corps members have been subjected to.

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