First class graduates to serve in varsities —NYSC

The Director General of the National Youth Service Corps, Brig.-Gen.Johnson Olawumi, said on Wednesday in Kaduna that prospective corps members with First Class degrees would henceforth be posted to universities for their primary assignments.

Also to be posted to the universities, according to Olawumi, are corps members who graduated with distinction from polytechnics.

This is just as the Kaduna State Governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, stressed the need for positive orientation of corps members across the country

The governor, through the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Youths and Sports, Kaduna State, Alhaji Ibrahim Balarabe-Musa, also hailed the decision to deploy first class graduates to tertiary institutions to serve.

He added that with the lack of lecturers in the nation’s institutions of higher learning, the decision was a welcome development.

Speaking at the inauguration of the 2015 Batch ‘B’pre-orientation workshop, the DG also disclosed that Nigerian universities had been banned from offering postgraduate admission to serving corps members.

Olawunmi noted that doing so had over the years violated the NYSC Act and brought in unwarranted distraction to the programme.

The pre-mobilisation workshop was tagged, “ICT and NYSC mobilisation process: Towards eliminating identified challenges.”

“All first class graduates will be posted to the universities for their primary assignments,” the DG said.

He also appealed to vice-chancellors to retain first class/distinction gradautes after their NYSC programme.

He noted that the use of ICT had 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.

Also speaking, the Director of Corps Mobilisation, Mr. Anthony Ani, explained at the event that the pre-mobilisation workshop would enable the corps members to “resolve critical issues arising from poor data entry for the Senate Approved List of prospective corps members.”

Ani said, “The workshop would equally review the list of approved corps-producing institutions and the list of accredited courses of such institutions and resolve issues of identified discrepancies arising in the process.

“The workshop would also revisit problems associated with JAMB numbers, wrong entry of dates of birth of prospective corps members and admissions into our higher institutions as well as issues of outright manipulation of data sent to the NYSC by the corps-producing institutions.”