NYSC Groan Under Rejection Of Corps Members
The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) reform programme started as part of the present administration’s effort to restructure the scheme to make it more productive and efficient. The former Minister of Youth Development, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, took some steps to kick start its implementation which he said was in line with the transformation agenda of the Jonathan administration.
The minister went ahead at a media briefing to mark the 100 days of the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan to announce that corps members will now be posted to four key sectors of the economy, beginning with 2012 Batch A. He explained that the former posting policy did not sufficiently align with areas of priority national need.
These areas of priority, according to the minister, include education, rural health, infrastructure and agriculture. Under the new policy, corps members will no longer be posted to private sector, except those whose services fall within the key sectors of the new policy. The minister said that the new policy would ensure effective and efficient utilisation of the members’ productive abilities and deliberately deploy their skills to areas of critical needs even as he stressed those private organisations requiring the services of corps members would have to sign an undertaking assuring that those corps members would be retained after their service year. The policy has been criticised as capable of limiting the productive capacity of the scheme.
The envisaged contributions of the NYSC new reform policy include, economic development, labour supply, strengthening of value system, unity and national integration.
Others are patriotism and national loyalty expected to provide a sought-after experience that brings value to youths and the nation.
This has generated some reactions from observers that tent to suggest that the policy is targeted at the private sector. Otherwise, they argued, the public sector should be made to sign the same undertaking because they also use and dump corps members. But many others hail the policy would, hopefully, check the lobby by influential Nigerians for their children, wards and relations to be posted to blue chip companies, agencies and parastatals like NNPC, National Assembly, CBN, and so on.
By definition, to reform means to improve, amend or improve by change of color or removal of faults or abuses, beneficial change, more specifically, reversion to a pure original state, to repair, restore or to correct. For this to take place, however, there must be an enabling environment.
The absence of this, analysts point out, would put a question mark on the reform itself and stymie its success considering the large number of students who graduate every year. Presently, in the Federal Capital Territory, the reform is telling both on the scheme and the corps members alike.
With over 90, 000 corps members mobilised for national service in the last 2012 batch ‘A’, the FCT had about 4000 corps members with about 90 per cent of them sent to the four main areas specified, most of the corps members are made redundant as the sectors now have more corps members than they need, thereby rendering majority of them redundant.This has also affected the current Batch ‘B’ corps members as most of them are being rejected for lack of space.
Recently, hundreds of the batch ‘B’ corps members deployed to the federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) for their mandatory one year primary assignment were rejected by the administration.
The FCT’s decision to reject the Batch B corps members according to report was reached at a meeting where it was unanimously agreed that the NYSC FCT was over burdening the administration.
“For the 2012 Batch ‘A’ alone, they sent us 1915 corps members against the 400 agreed on. Ever since they reported, where to post them is a problem and if you go to some of our schools, you will find as many as 65 corps members posted there just idling away. Even to pay them is a big problem for the administration and it has been decided that we cannot take anymore than we already have,” a source who preferred anonymity complained.
Findings revealed that the four areas targeted by the reform are now overcrowded with corps members, some schools in the FCT have more corps members than the regular teachers while most states especially the FCT have no farm to send those posted to the agricultural sector and the health sectors can only absorb few of them that studied medicine or related courses which are in anyway small in number. This means that, at the end of the service year, most of these youth would not gain any experience that the scheme was designed to impact on them.
This has made the scheme to readjust the posting policy, as investigations revealed that the scheme has defiled the policy and has started posting corps members to agencies, ministries and parastatals as a result of the rejection witnessed.
But Nigerians have been asking questions ever since. Could it be that the Federal Government decision to limit the posting to the four sectors was not well researched before the president approved the plan, most especially now that ministries under the same federal government reject corps members even though the government had recently threatened to sanction any organisation, or agency that reject them? Or could it be that the policy is ill -timed?
Reacting to the change in the posting policy the FCT NYSC Coordinator, Mr Frank Ekpunobi, said that there was an amendment to the new posting policy which according to him would soon be made public. He said that the NYSC had increased the scope of coverage, which was the reason behind the posting to other areas. But LEADERSHIP gathered that the management was forced to change its mind when it realised that the sectors alone could not absolve the huge number of corps members. It therefore sent signal through text massege to all state coordinators to post corps members to places other than the approved sectors.
Many are of the opinion that the private sector should not be shut out of the scheme’s posting policy but that it should be moderated by ensuring that the private sectors do not abuse the privilege of enjoying the services of corps members.
This could be achieved by designing a development policy that would ensure that the private sector is engaged as partners in the process of preparing the corps members for employment or self-reliance after service.
Another shade of opinion suggested that the scheme should be modernised in such a way that the corps members would be well trained in skill and entrepreneurship ventures during the one year period with fund set aside to mobilise them.
This, according to this viewpoint, would further reduce unemployment and translate into empowering thousands of youths yearly as they would be made to set up businesses that would employ others just as NYSC foundation could be empowered to monitor their activities to make sure that the money given to them is properly utilised. All, however agree that the scheme is still relevant to the development of the Nigerian youth.
No comments:
Post a Comment