NYSC, N4,000 and the criminal exploitation of the vulnerable By Emmanuel Onwe

To paraphrase the immortal words of the oath of the ancient musketeers: this world is an uncertain realm filled with danger. Honour is undermined by the pursuit of rotten lucre. In today’s Nigeria, the prize for being vulnerable, weak and helpless are oppression, deprivation, extortion and deliberate trampling by the powerful, the rich and the politically connected. But there are those who oppose these powerful forces; those who dedicate their lives to truth, honour and freedom. I am proud to come from this constituency of brave and forthright citizens who will not stand silent whilst the powerless are degraded, exploited and ultimately crushed. On March 15, 2014, a particular strain of scandal married to tragedy erupted over the employment test for recruitment into the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) conducted across the country. The Immigration service is a government department under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The narrative of the scandal is simple but devastating. About 6.5 million jobless young Nigerians had been made to pay an application fee of N1,000 each for only 4,000 vacancies. The tragedy followed a pattern that has become a typical Nigerian signature. Tens of thousands of jobseekers turned up at designated centres in Abuja, Port Harcourt, Minna, Gombe and Benin. There were stampedes at the National Stadium, Abuja, Liberation Stadium, Port Harcourt, and in Minna. About 16 innocent, hungry, tired but hopeful young Nigerian souls perished. Scores were injured. The culpable criminals got away with it because they are rich and politically connected. The brutalised and traumatised youth leaked their wounds, out of pocket and still out of work. It stinks but our noses have become stuffed with indifference. A couple of years ago, the Nigerian people were informed by news reports that a staggering amount of N33 billion had been stolen from the Police Pensions Fund. A comical series of investigations, hearings and committees to analyse and report on the investigations and hearings ensued. Somewhere down the line, this joke that parades in Nigeria as a legal process swung, or, rather, limped into action. Some nonentity was convicted and offered the option of paying a fine in the breathtaking sum of N250,000. Another mega-nonentity deployed dozens of armed policemen as a shield against police investigations into the embezzlement of funds meant to aid their erstwhile colleagues as they languished on the breadline waiting for the cold embrace of the grave. The raucous noise that emanated from civil society soon died down. The oppression of the vulnerable continued unhindered in many other sectors of society. These examples typify the horror that awaits you if you ever find yourself in any of the vulnerable constituencies in the Nigerian republic. Everyone hired and paid from public funds to protect your interests, defend your rights, and guarantee your wretched subsistence will deploy the full powers of his office to oppress you, cheat you, steal from you and finally shuffle your bones into a premature grave. A few days ago, it came to public notice that another vulnerable constituency, the Nigerian youth, are being stolen from, being cheated, being oppressed and their painful existence being exacerbated. The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) remains a beacon of national unity – yes, with grave but certainly surmountable challenges. Our sons and daughters have continued to pay a terrible prize, sometimes in blood, in the line of duty to the Corps. But the patriotism of the youth has once again been rewarded with wicked exploitation and total lack of compassion. The Director, Corps Mobilisation, Anthony Ani, disclosed in a radio programme recently that corps members will now pay N4, 000 to download their call-up letters online. This is an outrage! N4,000 to travel, at cost, to an internet cafe, log into some website and download a letter informing you that you are obligated to render a full year’s service, possibly in a very dangerous environment, while subsisting on a paltry stipend, to your country? Our public servants not only appear to thrive on wickedness, they appear to be a select band of sadistic psychopaths, utterly bereft of any form of consideration for the circumstances of others. Now, consider this: the mischief for which the imposition of the fee of N4,000 was meant to cure, according to Mr. Ani’s explanation, was that “the N4, 000 online registration fee was introduced so as to stop fresh graduates from travelling back to their various schools to pick up the letters.” As far as explanations go, this one takes the trophy for galactic stupidity. Simple email, the administration cost of which should already be captured in the organisation’s budget, is a perfect solution. Domestic text messages cost N4 and, for students domiciled abroad, it will cost no more than N15 for the call-up notification. This is not a study or a thesis on the efficient running of the NYSC to avoid imposing unacceptable measures and costs on the hapless corps members. But you get my drift – a tiny measure of quickness of mind will deliver the required service at insignificant cost to the Corps. Nigerians should stand up and call this nonsense out for what it is – a bald faced criminal extortion of our jobless young. The current system which compels graduates to collect their call-up letters from their alma mater is bereft of imagination. But what is truly depressing about the entire deplorable affair is that the initiators and executors of the scam know it to be such – an imagination-free scheme designed to defraud but pursued, nonetheless, with the full knowledge that the vulnerable in Nigeria are too easily and profitably exploited and adverse consequences seldom, if ever, follow. “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power” – William Shakespeare. In other words, Nigerians in positions of authority abuse and pervert their power when they separate it from compassion and decency. If the Nigerian youth were the products of the harsh conditions of existence bequeathed and enforced upon them, they would today be grease-soaked rags strewn on the roadsides – useless, inconvenient eyesores. But they are not. They thrive and soldier on in spite of the indignities, carelessness and disregard which stand as their only inheritance. Where Nigerian senior citizens are the villains, the youth are the heroes. If you inquired carefully into the status and background of the decision makers who derive pleasure in enacting punitive policies against young people, you will find that they belong to the generation that enjoyed free education, had jobs, accommodation and cars thrust on them upon graduation from universities. They are now marshalling the resources and capacities of a Nigeria that was so good to them to undermine and destroy the generation that will take all our hopes and aspirations as a nation forward. The younger generation are poorly educated not because of their inherent inadequacies but because of the grossly inadequate system of education that the privileged generation has put in place. Today, the graduates who paid their own way through university education outnumber by far those who relied on contributions from any other source. There are no jobs for our young because the older generation has delivered two devastating blows to the system; one is by stealing all that can be stolen from the common coffers and the other is a tragic lack of a sense of intergenerational altruism. Having stolen everything, they have now devised a means of sinking their paws directly into the pockets of young people. Let’s amputate those goddamn greasy paws.