There is no better point of departure for this article than an apology to my broadcast media colleagues for declining their requests for me to comment on the same subject of today’s piece. It was only yesterday that one un-informed comment changed my decade old position that talking about the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, amounted to engaging in the communication of the deaf. But I certainly didn’t shun our tv anchors who wanted my comments, I only told them I was not sure it was the NYSC that was overdue for reforms. For me, what is in dire need of reforms is Nigeria itself because all the challenges of the NYSC can be found in virtually every Nigerian entity; the most obvious being a defective work ethic. Put differently, whereas reforms are ordinarily expected to serve as an elixir to humanity and its institutions, any reform introduced to the NYSC may be short lived because it can quickly be washed away by the Nigerian factor.

The decision of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) to approve a restructuring of the NYSC so as to modernize the scheme, enhance youth skills, and align it with Nigeria’s economic goals is blameless. This column would applaud government if it successfully implements its promise to transform the scheme “from a primarily national integration program into a skills-oriented, productivity-driven, and youth-empowering institution.” I imagine that since it is a promise made by the ruling class, many Nigerians would be quietly asking how it intends to do that because every public policy in Nigeria usually sounds pleasant but becomes sour even before half-way through. I will go beyond that to add that government must also disclose its arrangements to make the policy survive over time. In other words, how do we ensure that the proposed reforms to the NYSC are conscientiously done and also institutionalized against hacking by elements around its environment?

The way to achieve this is to ensure that the proposed reforms are applicable in all institutions in the Nigerian environment. We may pay down cynicism without avoiding a controversy over the first lady’s exhortation on hard work, entrepreneurship and the ability to possess a turn-around capacity of working capital no matter the amount.  Many Nigerians are greatly challenged by the ravages of Tuberculosis, Lassa fever and other ailments which no one has shown as much personal concern about as Mrs Oluremi Tinubu. We commended her publicly for that but didn’t do same for cars donated to party women leaders because the latter does not promote entrepreneurship. The lesson is that Nigerians are not happy about how politicians are living large in society. As a result, no one should help a politician more than the average Nigerian. When applied to today’s piece, our premise is that what we are not ready to do for our corpers should not be done for other groups.

National service is essentially a sacrifice. The military is doing it, the politicians too also claim they are involved as representatives of the people. Any person engaged in service to the nation that suddenly turns stupendously wealthy is not doing national service but national exploitation. If national service brings wealth, then those offering it through the NYSC cannot be placed on sacrificial stipend while a local law maker’s take-home pay is higher than that of 200 corpers combined. What this suggests is that the most meaningful reform to the NYSC is remuneration. Let all political appointees earn the same NYSC stipend to prove that they are all engaged in national service. Indeed, why should lawmakers and other political appointees whose only reason for holding political office is national service earn more than those they claim to represent? If all that politicians earn goes back to the people as they claim, the demand of the people would virtually end once politicians start to earn the same standard stipend.

This is not to say that politics is bad; not at all, just that everyone cannot be a politician. Or else, there would be general starvation as there would be no one to farm. There would be no teachers which would certainly mean that the so-called leaders would be incapable of leading. Teachers and farmers etc should not be impoverished while the political class shines. The best way out is to have an egalitarian society where majority of citizens would be as much as possible treated equally. I have not been to any NYSC camp of recent but reports by those who have visited some as well as reports by the NYSC members returning home do not convey a substantial departure from the culture of deprivation with which the camps have been well associated. Does national service mean suffering? The last time the question was asked by one analyst, the response was that it was meant to make the corpers, physically fit and reliant. Whether or not the supposed attribute could be used against armed attackers is yet to be answered.

Many of the proposed reforms sound precise but some are clearly superficial. I know that rules change a lot in our clime hence all our laws including the constitution are described as amended. So, I may not know how some of the proposed changes came about. However, I remember that many years ago, when I questioned the idea of appointing the Director General of the NYSC from the military, I was told that was the law. On further interrogation, I saw Section 5 of the relevant law which stated that a Director – General shall be appointed for the service by the President, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. I didn’t see where the President was directed to make the appointment from the military other than that the appointee shall be the Chief Executive and shall be charged with general responsibility for matters affecting the day-to-day running of the service. If the law has not changed, I think government should just effortlessly appoint a civilian Director General and discard the convention of depriving career officers of the NYSC from attaining the highest position in their service.

In my contact with more than one state directorate of the NYSC, my finding has been that the service lacks uniformity in operating procedures. In one of the states, the business of the service is greatly commercialized as it is in most Nigerian organizations today. Posting of corpers is influenced by materialism thereby subjecting organizations seeking the services of corpers to unorthodox negotiations. But because this is a national malaise, it will not be enough to attempt to stamp it out in only one service. In the case of the NYSC, computerisation as JAMB has done may reduce its degree of transactional management. In a second state, the NYSC does not appear to have any other assignment than the deployment of corpers. In this second state my team was unable to meet with the state director who was said to be severally in camp; yet the goal of the team was to discuss the possibility of an inter-agency plan for manpower development among the career officers.

Some corpers themselves are not committed to the one-year service. Some have their strategies: they just want to get the discharge certificate. They therefore influence a posting not too far from ‘home’ and then try to negotiate how often to visit their place of assignment. Others visit different organizations in search of better conditions of service which would probably stop if the proposed reforms are better organized. If it is a year of national service, it is not fair for corpers like most Nigerians to use the opportunity to maximize profits by earning double remuneration in addition to that of the federal government. The reforms should be well structured. For example, because most corpers are new to their places of deployment and thus vulnerable, it could be one of the official conditions for those benefitting from the NYSC service to provide accommodation for its corpers rather than allowing the negotiations to be exploited.

The plan to make the first two weeks of the proposed orientation arrangement to focus on civic responsibility, leadership, and national values makes sense. However, national values are still quite different from national unity which was one of the reasons that initially informed the creation of the scheme. I doubt if we need to wait until the NYSC era before focusing on national unity. Tunji Alausa our pragmatic education minister who has so much to do with reforms in his sector can start off with a programme on patriotism and national unity as a course of study before graduation in our tertiary institutions. There is still too much of state of origin thought process in our national conversation that the NYSC can amend.