By John Oba
Abuja
Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) has been ranked as the best voluntary youth services scheme for youth after graduation from the universities in Africa.
This is even as the scheme said it had mobilised over 150,000 graduates for the 2017 Batch ‘A’ orientation exercise.
Speaking yesterday, the Special Assistant to the President of Sierra Leone on youth, Dr. Shikhu Kamara, who led a delegation from the country’s nation youth scheme to Nigeria, said research carried out on countries with voluntary service after graduation from universities placed Nigeria first in Africa.
Kamara commended NYSC management on the successful implementation of the scheme programme for the past 44 years, saying the biggest take-away from Nigeria will be the successful implementation of the Nigeria youth service, and the organisation of structure.
He said: “We did a lot of research and found out that Nigeria represents the best model of volunteerism in youth service in Africa.
“We are now one year in active implementation of our scheme, though it has been going on for few years now. We have to structure the organisation such that it will work with our structure.
“Nigeria is a federal system, while we practice unitary system, so we have administrative levels, the problem we have in selling it from the national level to the local level an having the local participation up to the level that we want.”
Welcoming the delegation, NYSC director-general, Brig.-Gen. Suleiman Kazaure, said the challenges of the scheme in Nigeria had been the increase numbers of corps members mobilised for service.
He said: “NYSC was established in May 7, 1973, and 2364 corps members were the first set to be mobilised for service, but now the scheme is mobilising over 300,000 corps members annually. The increase in number has been the main challenges the scheme is faced with. But the problem is being tackled.”
