NYSC members
I had seen the title online in my
regular internet surfing, reading everything readable, but it did not
occur to me to click the link that day, captivating as it was. So, when a
friend posted the link to the above article on my Facebook wall, with
the additional comment, “Meet your ‘brother-in-arm’ — no,
‘brother-in-pen,’ I became interested.
Behold, it was the cry of a young corps
member that, like me in Sokoto State five years ago, had fallen victim
of the ridiculous invocation of the section of the National Youth
Service Corps bye-laws that forbids serving corps members from “granting
interviews on matters affecting NYSC policies.”
The young man, Folarin Samson, narrated in the article published in the August 17 and 19, 2012 editions of The Guardian and THE PUNCH
newspapers respectively, how NYSC extended his service year for
expressing his grievance against delayed payment of corps members’
allowance on the pages of newspapers.
Samson had his academic training in
communication and had been expressing opinion on newspaper pages since
his school years. Indeed, he had written several other articles on
national issues during his service year before the article on the NYSC
allowance. Pray, why didn’t the NYSC discipline him for commenting on
official issue when he defended the scheme in an earlier article he
wrote on the alleged rape of a serving corps member by a traditional
ruler in Osun State?
No, they didn’t, because the articles
were favourable to the NYSC. But when he criticised NYSC’s withholding
of their monthly allowance, the body remembered there was a law that
forbade corps members from granting interviews on matters affecting NYSC
policies. More laughable is the body’s interpretation of an opinion
article as interview.
I suffered similar fate as a youth corps
member in Sokoto State in 2007, when I asked similar question on
delayed payment of our allowance in my article titled ‘Wammako’s
unimpressive start’ in The Sun newspaper of August 19, 2007.
Like Samson, I was used to expressing my
views in newspapers on national and local issues right from my days as
an undergraduate of Obafemi Awolowo University. I continued my service
year, however. Three months into the then new Governor Wamakko’s tenure
as Sokoto State’s chief executive, I did a comparison of his
administration’s performance with that of his predecessor, picking,
among other things, delayed payment of corps members’ allowances, as the
low points of his administration’s commencement.
The article did not go down well with
the new government, especially since it appeared to have positive things
to say about his predecessor, Attahiru Bafarawa, who had been in
political showdown with the new governor.
The authorities of the NYSC, obviously
wanting to please their host government, punished me. What section of
the NYSC bye-laws did I violate? Granting “interviews” on matters
affecting NYSC policies! When a Letter to the Editor became an interview
is what NYSC has not been able to explain to me.
As if to prove the hypocrisy of the
NYSC, when I wrote an earlier article titled, ‘The NYSC debacle’
(published in several newspapers in July 2007), wherein, at the height
of the debate over whether or not NYSC should be scrapped, I made a case
against the idea. NYSC feigned ignorance and did not remember that
there was a law that forbade serving corps members from commenting on
NYSC policies in the media. This is how those in authorities selectively
interpret and misinterpret some so-called laws.
Suppressing citizens’ opinions is
clearly not a tenet of a just society that our leaders claim to build.
Just because one was a corps member, NYSC believes one should not
express his opinion publicly. That is undemocratic.
In my own case, so harsh was the
punishment that at the height of the issue, I was reposted from my Rabah
Local Government Area service post (which was closer to Sokoto town),
to a more rural and remote Gudu LGA, where there was no mobile
communication network. Obviously, this will prevent me from gaining
access the internet or the media that can facilitate my following what
was going on in the political scene.
I raised the alarm against this
perceived injustice after, but that was after I had obtained my NYSC
certificate in 2008 after my service year. Four years after, here is
another young man being made to suffer because of an arbitrary
interpretation of some laws. For how long shall we cry before the NYSC
repeals this law?
•Oyewale, a chartered accountant, lives in Ajah, Lagos.
