Fresh university graduates with first class grades, and graduates of polytechnics with distinctions, would henceforth carry out their compulsory one year national service, under the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, programme, as lecturers in higher institutions.
The Director General of the NYSC, Brigadier-General Johnson Olawumi, made this revelation on Wednesday in Kaduna, while speaking at a two-day pre-mobilisation workshop for the 2015 Batch ”B” NYSC programme.
Olawumi also said the NYSC is to introduce online certificate verification procedure to simplify the procedures for certificate verification and enquiries. This will help make participation into the national service more transparent and less cumbersome.
He noted that Nigerian universities have been henceforth 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 the workshop tagged “ICT and NYSC Mobilization Process: Towards Eliminating Identified Challenges,” the NYSC boss emphasized that henceforth “the posting policy scheme is also being vigorously implemented for the achievement of the desired impact. Pursuant to this, all corps members who graduated with first class/distinction degrees and Diplomas will be posted to Tertiary Institutions for effective utilization of their manpower.”
He therefore appealed to the authorities of all tertiary institution to reciprocate the gesture by accepting and offering them permanent appointment after service.
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.
Declaring the workshop open, the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai, who was represented by the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Youth and Sports, Alhaji Ibrahim Musa, 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.
The governor said the scheme has so far justified the objectives for which it was established.
