When a state commands its young graduates to step forward, pack their bags, and journey across rivers and highways to serve a fatherland in the name of national unity, it enters into an unwritten, sacred covenant with them.
The covenant is simple.
We send you out to build the nation, and we guarantee you will return home alive.
Yet, for thousands of young Nigerians and their agonizing parents, that covenant has been shattered.
That obligation has become impossible to discuss as an abstraction.
On October 1, gunmen attacked two buses along the Owerri-Onitsha Road in Imo State carrying prospective corps members and other passengers travelling from Ibadan to orientation camps in the South-East and South-South. The police confirmed that 10 victims had been rescued while the exact number still in captivity was being verified. The incident came only weeks after 15 corps members were abducted in Kogi State while returning from an orientation camp in Bayelsa. They were later rescued in a joint security operation.
The details of each incident will eventually become another entry in the country’s long catalogue of insecurity. For the families involved, however, there is nothing routine about it. A graduate who has just completed university and is preparing for the first major transition of adult life suddenly becomes the subject of frantic telephone calls, anxious messages and desperate efforts to establish whether he or she is alive. Parents who had expected to worry about employment, accommodation and the future are instead confronted with the possibility of raising money for a ransom to secure the freedom of a child who was travelling to serve the country.
That is the point at which the language of patriotism collides with the responsibility of the state.
The National Youth Service Corps was created in 1973, in the aftermath of the Civil War, with national integration at the centre of its mission. Its purpose was to take young Nigerians beyond the boundaries of their immediate communities, expose them to other parts of the country and cultivate a sense of shared citizenship. It was an ambitious response to a country that had learned, at terrible cost, what happens when Nigerians cease to see one another as part of the same national story.
More than five decades later, the idea remains important. But the conditions under which the state asks young Nigerians to fulfil it have changed dramatically.
A programme created to bring Nigerians closer together cannot ignore the security environment through which those Nigerians must travel.
The distinction matters because national service is not simply a voluntary adventure. The NYSC framework provides for compulsory service and requires those liable to serve to make themselves available at the place and time specified in their call-up. The same framework assigns responsibilities for the welfare and transportation of corps members, while local government committees are specifically charged with ensuring the security of corps members deployed within their jurisdictions. The NYSC itself identifies security and welfare among its formal responsibilities.
That creates a question the government can no longer answer with general assurances.
What happens between the moment a young Nigerian receives a call-up letter and the moment that young Nigerian safely reaches the place where the state has ordered him or her to serve?
That journey is part of the service.
If the government knows that particular corridors have become vulnerable to kidnapping, what does it do before thousands of young graduates begin moving along those corridors? If intelligence indicates that criminals can anticipate the movement of prospective corps members during mobilisation periods, what measures exist to prevent those predictable journeys from becoming predictable opportunities for attack? If a particular route becomes too dangerous, who decides that corps members should not travel through it, and how quickly can an alternative be arranged?
These are not unreasonable demands for a government to eliminate every danger from Nigerian roads. No government can honestly promise that. They are demands that a government which compels citizens to undertake a particular journey should take reasonable responsibility for the risks attached to that journey.
A travel advisory cannot carry the entire weight of that responsibility.
Telling a young graduate to be vigilant does not answer the larger question of why the state has asked that graduate to travel through a known danger zone without demonstrating that every reasonable protective option has been considered. The burden of surviving a national programme should not quietly be transferred from the government that designed it to the family that produced the graduate.
When parents begin to regard NYSC deployment as a security threat rather than a national opportunity, the damage extends beyond the individual victim. Families will naturally seek safer postings. Graduates will become reluctant to travel. Communities that depend on corps members for teaching, healthcare and other public services will lose personnel. Young Nigerians will increasingly measure patriotism against the geography of insecurity.
The consequence is not simply fewer corps members in vulnerable places. It is the gradual erosion of the very idea the NYSC was created to defend.
National unity requires movement. It requires Nigerians to encounter one another beyond the comfort of their own states and communities. It requires the young graduate from the South to be able to serve in the North, the graduate from the North to work in the South, and citizens from every part of the federation to believe that the country belongs to all of them.
But unity cannot be built by asking one generation to accept risks that the state has normalised.
This is why the responsibility cannot be left at the door of the NYSC alone. The security of corps members travelling across federal highways necessarily involves the wider security architecture of the country. The NYSC must account for its deployment and welfare procedures. Security agencies must explain how routes used repeatedly by corps members are assessed and monitored. State and local authorities must discharge the responsibilities assigned to them. The National Assembly must examine whether the structure of compulsory national service still adequately reflects Nigeria’s present security realities.
The Presidency must answer for the performance of the institutions responsible for protecting young Nigerians whom the federal government has called into service.
What exactly does the state owe a citizen whose service it requires?
The answer cannot be that the citizen must accept whatever danger happens to accompany the assignment.
The state does not owe anyone a life without risk. It does, however, owe its citizens seriousness about foreseeable risk. It owes them planning. It owes them coordination. It owes them the willingness to change a policy when the circumstances that once made that policy reasonable have changed.
That is particularly true when the citizens involved are young graduates at the beginning of their adult lives.
For decades, the green and white uniform has represented something larger than a compulsory year. It has represented the possibility that Nigeria could persuade its young people to believe in one another. But that symbol cannot survive indefinitely if the young Nigerians wearing it begin to associate national service with the fear of kidnapping and their parents begin to associate deployment with the possibility of ransom.
The country must therefore decide what it is prepared to do to preserve the integrity of the scheme it asks its young people to serve.
If a route is unsafe, find a safer route. If a location is too dangerous, suspend or redesign the deployment. If the movement of corps members is predictable, secure it differently. If the existing system is inadequate, change it. If compulsory service is to remain compulsory, then the protection attached to that compulsion must be treated with corresponding seriousness.
There is nothing wrong with asking young Nigerians to serve their country. There is everything wrong with asking them to demonstrate that patriotism by assuming dangers the state has failed to confront adequately.
The young Nigerian in khaki is not a disposable instrument of national integration. That young person is someone’s child, someone’s sibling, someone’s first graduate, someone’s investment after years of sacrifice, and someone’s hope for a better future.
The NYSC was born from a national tragedy because Nigeria once understood that rebuilding a country required more than roads, institutions and budgets. It required rebuilding trust among its people.
Today, that trust is being tested in a different way.
The question is no longer whether Nigerian youths are willing to serve Nigeria. They have answered that question every time they report to camp, board a bus, cross a state boundary and take up an unfamiliar posting.
The question is whether Nigeria is prepared to protect those who serve it.
Patriotism cannot mean that the citizen bears the danger while the state retains the credit.
A government cannot keep asking its young people to prove their love for Nigeria by placing themselves at risk while treating their safety as an administrative detail.
At some point, the burden of patriotism becomes a ransom.
And no nation should demand that its children pay it with their lives.
Stephanie Shaakaa
shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
08034861434
