Femi Akintunde-Johnson
There was something painfully symbolic about the timing. On 1 October, while Nigerians were marking 66 years of independence with the usual mixture of patriotic speeches, parades, prayers, complaints and increasingly creative explanations for why things are the way they are, 20 young Nigerians were being deprived of their freedom on an Imo road. They were not fleeing the country. They were not engaged in some private adventure. They were travelling from Ibadan towards orientation camps in Abia and Akwa Ibom states to begin the National Youth Service Corps programme. A week later, on 7 October, they were rescued by a joint operation involving security agencies and taken for medical attention. That rescue deserves acknowledgement. But it also leaves a question that should not be buried beneath the relief of their return: how did young Nigerians travelling to fulfil a compulsory national obligation become so dangerously exposed in the first place?
The National Youth Service Corps was born in 1973, in the emotional and political aftermath of a civil war that had badly damaged the idea of Nigeria as one country with a common destiny. The original conception was therefore larger than sending graduates around the country to teach, work in hospitals, serve in government offices or occasionally discover that their university degree does not automatically make them useful in a village where there is neither electricity nor decent accommodation. NYSC was intended to encourage national integration, expose young Nigerians to communities and cultures beyond their immediate experience, and cultivate the idea of service. For more than five decades, millions have passed through the scheme. Many have made lifelong friendships, discovered new parts of Nigeria, found employment, acquired practical skills or simply returned home with a more complicated understanding of the country they thought they knew.
So, is NYSC obsolete? Not necessarily. In a country still struggling with ethnic suspicion, regional anxieties and the politics of belonging, there is something valuable about compelling young Nigerians to live and work, even temporarily, outside their familiar environments. The more serious question is whether a programme conceived in a dramatically different Nigeria can continue to operate as though the country around it has not changed. In 1973, sending a young graduate from one part of Nigeria to another carried risks, certainly, but kidnapping was not a routine consideration in the planning of inter-state journeys. Today, the security environment has changed so profoundly that deployment without a corresponding revolution in safety planning borders on institutional negligence.
This is where the recent abduction becomes more than another frightening security story. The 20 prospective corps members were reportedly travelling in two buses when they were attacked along the Owerri-Onitsha road. They spent about seven days in captivity before their rescue. Whatever the precise circumstances of the operation, the fact remains that these were young people in transit to perform a service that the Nigerian state requires of them. Their vulnerability was therefore not entirely a private matter. The State had an interest in where they were going, how they got there and whether they could reasonably be expected to arrive alive and free.
Indeed, Nigeria’s own NYSC architecture recognises this responsibility. The scheme maintains a Corps Welfare and Health Services Department with explicit responsibilities covering security, welfare, accident cases, insurance, health and tracing the whereabouts of corps members. Its official structure also assigns responsibility for the security of corps members in NYSC formations, while the scheme’s health-insurance arrangement provides for government-backed healthcare and emergency access. The legal framework goes further in establishing welfare obligations around accommodation, medical services and transport. In other words, duty of care is not some generous idea that an activist has invented for newspaper purposes. It is already embedded in the machinery of the scheme.
And this makes the question more uncomfortable. If the State knows that corps members are travelling into areas of serious security risk, what does “risk-sensitive deployment” actually mean if it does not include risk-sensitive transportation? If a route is sufficiently dangerous for government officials, military personnel or senior civil servants to avoid unnecessary travel, why should a 24-year-old graduate be expected to make the journey simply because a call-up letter says so? We should be careful here: the answer is not that every dangerous road can be rendered perfectly safe, nor that NYSC officials possess supernatural intelligence capable of predicting every ambush. Security is never absolute. But reasonable precautions are not an impossible luxury.
Curiously, the government itself appears to understand this. In June, the Federal Executive Council approved what was described as the first comprehensive reform of NYSC in its 53-year history. Among the reforms announced was risk-sensitive deployment, alongside a redesigned orientation programme, skills development and improved camp standards. That is encouraging. But the October incident provides an inconvenient test of whether reform is merely a collection of attractive phrases or an operational commitment. Risk-sensitive deployment cannot mean identifying dangerous states on a spreadsheet while leaving young people to negotiate dangerous highways in ordinary buses.
There is another uncomfortable dimension. We often speak of corps members as “youths” with the casualness reserved for a demographic statistic. But each one is somebody’s son or daughter, somebody’s younger brother or sister, somebody who has spent years studying, probably endured strikes, examinations, transport difficulties and the peculiar Nigerian obstacle course called graduation, only to be told that before beginning the next chapter of life, he or she must give the country a year of service. That is not necessarily an unreasonable bargain. But compulsory service imposes a corresponding obligation on the country. You cannot reasonably demand sacrifice from citizens while treating their safety as an administrative afterthought.
Nor should the response be limited to rescuing abducted corps members and expressing gratitude to the security agencies afterwards. Rescue is important, but prevention is the higher standard. The families of these young people should not have to spend seven days wondering whether their children are alive, while officials and security agencies mobilise after the damage has already been done. Every such incident should trigger a serious review of route intelligence, transportation arrangements, communication systems, emergency response, camp coordination and the procedures for moving prospective corps members through identified danger zones. If those things are already being done, the public deserves to know whether they worked. If they did not, the system needs fixing.
There is also a larger temptation we should resist: to respond to every security failure by asking whether the programme itself should be scrapped. That may be the easiest question, but it is not necessarily the wisest. Scrapping NYSC would remove one problem while leaving untouched the much larger problem of insecurity that threatens travellers, students, farmers, traders, schoolchildren, workers and ordinary families. A country that cannot secure a road does not solve the road-security problem by stopping graduates from using it. The better challenge is to modernise the obligation without normalising the danger.
At 53, NYSC clearly needs more than cosmetic adjustment. It needs a serious renegotiation of the social contract between the young Nigerian it compels to serve and the country receiving that service. If service is compulsory, deployment must be intelligent. If mobility is necessary, transportation must be planned around actual security realities. If danger is known, warnings must mean something. If tragedy occurs, compensation and care must not depend on public outrage. And when young people complete their service, the country should have something more substantial to offer than a certificate, a handshake and the familiar Nigerian instruction to “manage”.
The 20 graduates rescued in Imo are fortunate to have returned to their families. Their ordeal should not become another item in the national archive of frightening stories that briefly dominate conversation and then disappear beneath the next outrage. They have reminded us, rather painfully, that national service is not an abstraction. It is performed by flesh-and-blood young Nigerians who can be frightened, injured, abducted and killed.
Perhaps that is the point at which the argument about NYSC should finally mature. The question is not simply whether young Nigerians should continue to serve Nigeria. It is whether Nigeria, having demanded that service from them, is prepared to take their safety seriously enough to deserve it.