NYSC: First Class Graduates Now To Serve In Versities - DG

Director-General of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Brig.-Gen. Johnson Olawumi, Wedneday in Kaduna disclosed that prospective corps members with First Class degree and their counterparts who graduated with distinction from the polytechnics, would henceforth be posted to the universities for their primary assignment.

Gen. Olawumi while speaking at the flag-off of the 2015 Batch ‘B’ Pre-Orientation Workshop, rolled out far-reaching reforms aimed at improving service delivery and efficiency by the NYSC, stressing that if fully implemented, the NYSC programme would go through a seamless process and add value to young Nigerian graduates.

“In addition, Nigerian universities have been banned from offering post-graduate admission to serving corps members as doing so have been in violation of the NYSC Act and brings in unwarranted distraction to their service programme”.

At a Pre-Mobilization Workshop tagged “ICT and NYSC Mobilization Process: Towards Eliminating Identified Challenges”, the NYSC boss emphasised that henceforth, “all first class graduates will be posted to the universities for their primary assignments” and appealed to the Vice-Chancellors to retain them after their NYSC programme.

Gen. Olawumi equally promised to introduce further innovative ideas into the NYSC operations, adding that the gains arising from the 2015 Batch ‘A’ Pre-Mobilisation Workshop led to the full implementation of the use of ICT in registration of prospective corps members.

He pointed out that the use of ICT in that regard eliminated registration by proxy, reduced costs, curbed avoidable accidents, fast-tracked the payment of corps members on relocation and made deployment and relocation easier and faster, among several other gains.

Also speaking, the Director of Corps Mobilization, Mr. Ani further expatiated that the current pre-mobilisation workshop would enable the NYSC to also critically resolve issues arising from poor data entry for Senate Approved List of prospective corps members.

“The workshop would equally review the list of approved Corps Producing Institutions and list of accredited courses of such institutions and resolve issues and identified discrepancies arising in the process.

“The workshop would also revisit problems associated with JAMB numbers, wrong entry of date of birth of prospective corps members vis-a-vis admissions into our higher institutions as well as issues of outright manipulation of data sent to the NYSC by the Corps Producing Institutions (CPIs)”.

Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Youth and Sports, Kaduna state, Alhaji Ibrahim Balarabe Musa, who represented Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, the Kaduna state governor, stressed the need for positive re-orientation of Nigerians, pointing out that there can not be peace, harmony and progress ?among Nigerians which the NYSC should assist to actualise.

He applauded the decision to post first class graduate corps members to tertiary institutions, adding that with the paucity of lecturers in such institutions, it was an encouraging decision of the NYSC to do so.
el-Rufai equally applauded the attitude of corps members engaged in conducting national elections and census, stressing that their level of patriotism and sacrifices have elicited the support of his administration.

On the decision by NYSC to use ICT to drive its mobilization process, the governor ?explained that for the desired change in the polity to come about, Nigerians must embrace ICT in order to move the country forward and charged all the stakeholders to embrace the innovation.