The Director-General of the National Youth
Service Corps, NYSC, Brigadier General
Nnamdi Okore-Affia, yesterday said there
were many corps members who could
neither read nor write.
The DG, who made the disclosure at the
opening of the 2013 Batch ‘A’ Pre-Mobilisation
Workshop holding in Ilorin, Kwara State,
however, promised that institutions producing
half-baked graduates for NYSC would
henceforth be sanctioned.
Okore-Affia, who painted a sordid picture of
illiterate- graduates churned out by the
universities and polytechnics, said this had
culminated in mass rejection of corps
members in their places of primary
assignment.
He said: “We have corps members who can
hardly communicate in English Language, let
alone being able to teach in the classrooms. The
level of academic deficiency among corps
members has heightened corps members’
rejection and redundancy.
“This worrisome development has resulted in
a situation whereby members of the public
wrongly condemn the NYSC for the poor
academic standard displayed by these corps
members.”
Okore-Affia accused some Corps Producing
Institutions, CPIs, of deliberately producing
more graduates than their quota thereby
making records unsuitable and causing
problems for the directorate.
He said many of the ‘illiterate’ corps
members are “graduates who ordinarily are
either overaged, underwent part-time
programmes or products of internally
introduced unaccredited courses/
programmes.”
According to him, some institutions extort
money from their graduates before giving out
call-up letters or include names of graduates on
the master list.
As a way out, the DG said the national
Universities Commission, NUC, the National
Board for Technical Education, NBTE, and
the Joint Admissions and Matriculation
Board, JAMB, would henceforth be involved
to identify erring institutions for appropriate
sanctions