On Tuesday, the Federal Government reaffirmed that it had no plans to end the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), which will soon celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Mr. Sunday Dare, the Minister of Sports and Youth Development, offered the guarantee while participating in the most recent episode of the President Muhammadu Buhari Scorecard media series in Abuja, revealing that the committee for the anniversary celebration will soon be inaugurated.
Additionally, he promised that the program will not be made optional for eligible graduates who are under 30 years old when they finish their undergraduate education.
Dare recalled the need for the General Yakubu Gowon regime to establish the NYSC in 1973, which he claimed was done to foster unity among Nigerians.
According to him, the need to use it to promote the nation’s unity remains as Nigerian youth have continued to know more about other parts of the country.
While stressing the importance of the youth to nation building, he said: “When General Yakubu Gowon and that government decided to come up with the idea of the NYSC, the central rationale was to promote the unity of Nigeria as the country was just coming out of the civil war and we have been singing the song that says though the tongue may differ in brotherhood and unity we stand. You know that the life wire of any nation is its youths and once their patriotism is captured, that can spread across.
“So, the rationale for bringing on the NYSC scheme by General Gowon up till now subsists. Every country and even Nigeria is still on a daily basis trying to promote its unity in diversity. And, with the strength of our youths, sending them to the different parts of the country, some of us have never been to the parts of the country where we served, never knew their cultures, never experienced them, never knew that they were even Nigerians up north or in the Southeast that you shared your common language or culture with.”
The minister, however, affirmed that reforms are underway for the NYSC to end the possibility of fake discharge certificate as well as the confusion arising in the eligibility of Nigerian graduates in the Diaspora.
He added: “Reform is a constant thing and the NYSC is looking at some reforms because we have had some challenges with those that are in the Diaspora as to whether they should serve or not. There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding. The NYSC is working to ensure that those areas that are fussy about the laws are made clear. It is either you are 30 years and you serve or you are above and you are exempted from the scheme.
There is a solid database now because we have had cases of people collecting fake certificates and going forward one would have no doubt about the genuineness of the NYSC certificates they have. This is because we are going to produce the certificates with watermarks so that if you get a fake NYSC certificate you know that it is fake and you would not need to wait ten years in order to discover that it is fake. You will discover the fake one immediately after you see it. Even now, if you don’t have an original NYSC certificate, it would be possible for us to know within five minutes because it would show up once we press the button from our end.”
Dare said over 320,000 youth are camped every year and made to serve the nation, adding that 387,364 Corps members were trained on Skills and Entrepreneurship from 2015 to 2022, while 1,227 Corps members were financially empowered from 2015 – 2022 for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).
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