Let it stay! Its for exposure and pre job experiences!
Lets find a way to refine it and even make it safer!

I think if it is scrapped, it's purpose of establishment will be defeated.
I think it should be continued because it enables d fresh graduates get necessary working experience.

nysc shld be voluntary and not forced on pple. Allow pple to make their choices.

We marshal our top graduates from all across the nation and then we put them in a camp where things barely work and call it a national orientation. I take that back...mandatory national orientation - where our graduates are mandated to live in substandard conditions, get yelled at and shouted at by soldiers, and are made to put up with all sorts of deplorable conditions in hot over-crowded rooms, with toilets that barely work...that is, if there are toilets at all, in which case our top graduates are probably slinging shiitt over the wall. And we call in national orientation - orientation to what? shiitt?

#CORPERSARENOTGOATS #JusticeForBunmiAdeyera
IF NYSC IS NO LONGER SAFE, ITS TIME TO SCRAP IT

When I heard about what happened to my at the NYSC camp, the only emotion that came over me was outrage. Bunmi Adeyera, a very gentle young man, one of the Batch A Corp members currently in Nasarawa state Orientation Camp was almost slaughtered like a useless goat by security operatives. He was my classmate at the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, Ogba, Lagos.

The young man was sick, had to go get drugs and food, was waylaid by obviously inefficient Security Officials, who, without waiting to listen properly, decided to beat the senses out of him until he fainted. This is highly unacceptable. This is a barbaric and an uncouth behaviour from people who are supposed to know better.

It is so annoying that we have agreed to go through the seemingly useless and pointless NYSC programme, even at the cost of loosing a full year of one's life, serving a country that has only paid us back with blood and tears...yet, we are still tortured, beaten and bullied. The cases of Soldier brutality on Corpses have always surfaced every year, but this is one which we will not turn blind eyes to.


Have we not suffered enough...? Has our dear nation not tortured us enough...? Can you count how many secondary school leavers have lost direction and focus in life due to lack of admission..? So many young boys and girls have become yahoo boys and call girls, as a result of sitting at home for so many years waiting to get into school with no avail.

We are being killed, now not only with guns and machetes; not only our blood being spilled, but our tears being shed. Our hopes are raised to the sky when we graduate from secondary schools; we dream of our futures, we set goals, map out plans. With smiles on our faces, we rush to buy UTME forms, write the exams, then those our raised hopes are left to fall back to the earth and shattered into a million pieces when we are told that there aren't enough spaces to admit us in our higher institutions.

We finally get into the Higher Intitutions, only to be murdered by allowing hungry, unpaid, un-motivated lecturers teach us in our schools. There is no way on earth they will teach us passionately. How then do we now become sound and learned in our fields. Yet when we graduate, we are called 'half baked', 'unlearned', 'uncultured' and so many other funny names.

Now, you ask yourselves, are these the youths that will come out tomorrow and want to serve Nigeria in the Youth Corps programme with all their hearts..NEVER.

For so many, they start little businesses that begin to fetch them money. They set up and start struggling to make ends meet. These same people are plucked out of thier growing businesses and thrown into strange places to slave for a practically nonexistent welfarist scheme in the country, where they will be paid paltry sum for a year.

The Youth Service programme has lost its value. The lives of our youths are rather being used as pawns in a game of Chess. For the one year of Service, parents are nof in one piece. Their hearts are permanently kept in thier mouths, constantly praying for the safety of their children.

If we can not guarantee the lives of our young people serving the nation, if the security operatives who are supposed to be of good conduct begin to act like roadside touts and pounce on the so-called leaders of tommorrow, and beat them to coma, then we should rather stay back in our homes and pursue success. It's not like jobs are even available to us after practically waiting one year of our lives.

This article is dedicated to Bunmi Adeyera and all others who have painful stories to tell from thier Youth Service days. We demand an apology from the DG of the NYSC and that the perpetrators of this act be brought to book.

----Don't just read this article, join in this fight. Let's get our voices heard. Tweet this hash tag #CorpersAreNotGoats.



Akan Imoh is a final year student of Political Science, University of Lagos.

it should be scrapped