NYSC REFORMS: ONE MORE THING

 The Khaki is an enduring symbol of the NYSC. Do not change it, contends JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA

The National Youth Service Corps always needed to be reformed. The scheme was born in 1973, in the shadow of a civil war, designed by the Gowon administration to stitch a wounded country back together by sending its young graduates across its fault lines. The world that assignment met is not the world we live in now. So when the Federal Executive Council approved the most consequential reforms of the scheme since its establishment, the Tinubu administration deserved the credit it received. A six week orientation built around skills and enterprise, deployment guided by risk assessment rather than routine, civilian leadership, a call up process driven by technology. These are answers to questions Nigerians have been asking for years.

But there is a difference between reforming a thing and replacing it, which is the essence of this article.

Every serious student of change knows the temptation. You are handed a mandate, you see the flaws, and the cleanest option seems to be the bulldozer. Start afresh. It feels bold. It is also how change fails. Kurt Lewin, whose thinking still anchors the field of change management nearly eighty years on, described change in three movements: unfreeze the old ways, make the change, then refreeze so the new ways hold. The step reformers forget is the third one. Change that does not refreeze does not last. And nothing helps change refreeze like continuity, the familiar handholds that tell people the institution being changed is still theirs.

John Kotter, the Harvard scholar whose eight-step model has guided everything from corporate turnarounds to public sector reform, put the same truth differently. The final and hardest step of any transformation is anchoring the change in the culture. Reforms that attack the culture they are trying to change do not get anchored in it. They float, then they drift, then a future administration reverses them and calls that reform too. Nigerians can relate to such policy reversals across administrations.

Among the announced changes is a plan to retire the khaki in favour of new attire. On the list of reforms, it looks like the smallest item. It is the one I would urge the administration to drop. The khaki is not fabric. It is the single most recognisable symbol of the scheme, the one artefact that binds the corps member of 1974 to the corps member of 2026. A Nigerian who served in Maiduguri in 1981 and one who served in Yenagoa last year have almost nothing in common about their service except that uniform and what it stands for. Strip it and you have not modernised the scheme. You have orphaned it from its own history.

There is an old principle in the philosophy of reform, associated with G. K. Chesterton, about the fence in the field. Before you tear down a fence, know why it was put up. The khaki was never put up by accident. It was chosen to flatten difference, to make the banker’s child and the farmer’s child indistinguishable for one year of their lives, to dress a fractured country in one cloth. That purpose has not expired. If anything, in a Nigeria more polarised along ethnic and religious lines than it has been in decades, the purpose has appreciated.

Edmund Burke, the patron saint of careful reformers, made the case two centuries ago: a state without the means of change is without the means of its own conservation, but change should repair, not demolish. The genius of lasting reform is knowing which parts of an institution are the problem and which parts are the point. The three -week camp is now six weeks of leadership, digital skills and enterprise training. Blanket postings into insecure states were a problem; risk-based deployment is a solution. The khaki was never the problem. The khaki is the point.

The scholars of organisational identity have a term for objects like this: identity carriers. Logos, rituals, uniforms, anthems. They look decorative. They are load bearing. Research on mergers and institutional change knows this too well: when people lose the symbols that told them who they were, they resist the entire change, including the parts that benefit them. Reformers then mistake this resistance for backwardness, when it is actually grief. Wise change management does not trigger that grief unnecessarily. It spends its disruption budget on substance and keeps the symbols as bridges. Every corps member who wears the same khaki their mother wore is a walking argument that the institution endures even as it evolves. This is beyond nostalgia. It is anchoring, just as Kotter prescribed.

There is also a practical argument the strategists in Abuja will understand. The khaki is brand equity built over five decades at zero additional cost. Companies pay fortunes to create symbols with a fraction of that recognition. No serious organisation discards such an asset while attempting its most delicate transformation in fifty years. You do not change the substance and the symbol in the same breath. You change the substance and let the symbol carry the people across.

So here is the position, plainly. The Tinubu administration has done the hard and correct thing in reforming the NYSC, and the critics calling for the reforms to be suspended wholesale are as wrong as any reformer who would demolish everything standing. But within a good reform sits an unforced error. Keep the khaki. Let the graduate of the new six-week programme, trained in enterprise and technology, march at her graduation ceremony in the same cloth her father wore at his passing out parade in 1979. Let the eye see continuity while the substance transforms.

Institutions are not buildings, torn down and rebuilt. They are rivers. You can redirect a river, deepen it, clean it, bridge it. What you cannot do is replace the water and still call it the same river. The NYSC is being redirected, and rightly so. It should still be recognisable to everyone who ever swam in it.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach, BGX Publishing