The National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, should be made voluntary or scrapped for graduates of tertiary institutions, Prof Attahiru Jega and Prof Anthony Kila has said.
The duo who spoke on two different occasions frowned at drafting participants to replace teachers in public and private schools not minding the courses they studied.
Prof Jega who was a former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, said this when he delivered a lecture in Abuja to mark the 50th anniversary of the scheme.
Jega, also suggested that those willing to be mobilised for the scheme should have a high Cumulative Grade Point Average, CGPA.
The steps, Jega noted, would help reduce the number of participants in the scheme and also help to give them better welfare packages.
He noted that in most nations, youths are only mobilised for compulsory military service and that the NYSC could not be described as one such.
On his part, Kila, a Professor of Strategy and Development and Director at the Commonwealth Institute of Advanced and Professional Studies, CIAPS, in his book “Epistles”, called for a radical reform of the scheme or its total scrapping.
Featuring on a television programme in Lagos, which also had Prof. Bolaji Akinterinwa as a guest, Kila opined that the NYSC had become archaic.
“As it stands today, the NYSC has become archaic and redundant, not meeting the needs of today’s Nigeria. The best way to go is to radically reform it and make participation voluntary or scrap it entirely. The NYSC of the future has to be voluntary and aimed at national duties such as security or elections.
“Also, the practice of deploying NYSC members to schools to serve as teachers not minding the courses they studied or trying to use NYSC members to meet the scarcity of teachers is a grave indictment of our understanding of education and an index of how little a value we place on education,” he stated.
The NYSC was set in 1973 during the military administration of General Yakubu Gowon, a few years after the end of the Nigerian civil war.
It is meant to serve as one of the ways to foster national unity in the country.
