Safety Or Service? Rethinking The NYSC

This week, families of prospective National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members have been thrown into panic after gunmen reportedly attacked two buses travelling from Ibadan to orientation camps in Abia and Akwa Ibom. Several corps members were abducted, with reports that the kidnappers demanded N50 million ransom for each victim.

It is not an isolated incident. In August, 15 corps members travelling from the NYSC orientation camp in Bayelsa State towards Abuja were reportedly abducted in Kogi State. Eleven were subsequently rescued. These incidents should force us to ask a question that Nigeria has avoided for too long: at what point does national service become an unacceptable national risk?

The NYSC was established in 1973, in the aftermath of the Civil War, with a noble objective: to promote national unity and create common ties among Nigerian youths. Fifty-three years later, the country is vastly different from the Nigeria that gave birth to the scheme.

The question is not whether national unity remains important. It does. The question is whether the NYSC, in its present form, remains the best and safest way to achieve it.

When Service Becomes a Security Risk

Young Nigerians from different parts of the country would leave their familiar environments, live together in orientation camps, and subsequently work in communities outside their states of origin.

The scheme was an ambitious social experiment: expose young Nigerians to one another, break down ethnic and regional stereotypes and create a generation with a stronger sense of Nigerian identity.

But today’s Nigeria has introduced a dangerous complication. The journey to national service can become a security threat in itself. Road accidents, kidnappings, banditry, communal violence and poor transportation infrastructure have transformed what should be a rite of passage into an ordeal for many families.

And the problem is not only what happens inside the camp. It is the journey to and from the camp, the journey to places of primary assignment and the daily movement of corps members in communities where the state may have little effective security presence.

The NYSC itself acknowledges significant infrastructure challenges with overstretched camp facilities, lack of permanent orientation camps in some states, inadequate clinics and ambulances, and dilapidated facilities among the problems confronting the scheme.

Even where the camps are reasonably secure, getting there may not be. That is the paradox: Nigeria is asking young people to demonstrate patriotism by exposing themselves to risks that the state has failed to adequately manage. Patriotism should never be measured by how much danger a citizen is prepared to endure.

Whose Children Actually Bear The Risks?

Officially, every eligible Nigerian graduate is subject to the same national service obligation. In practice, Nigeria has never been a country in which everybody experiences government policy equally.

The children of the powerful often have options: influential parents, secure postings closer to home, Abuja, Lagos or another relatively secure urban centre avoiding particularly difficult or dangerous locations altogether.

Meanwhile, the graduate whose parents have spent their life savings to put him or her through university may receive a posting hundreds of kilometres from home and be expected to travel there by road, sometimes through insecure corridors.

For the ordinary Nigerian family, the NYSC posting letter can therefore become more than a letter of national service. It can become a security calculation. Where is my child going? How will they get there? Is the road safe? Will there be accommodation? What happens if they are kidnapped? But there should be no distinction between the child of a minister and the child of a teacher when it comes to protection.

These are questions that should not be part of the price of citizenship. And there is something deeply disturbing about a system in which the children of those with the least political influence appear most exposed to the dangers of serving the country.

If national service is compulsory for everyone but the risks are not equally distributed, then national service is not operating on an equal national playing field.

What Exactly Are We Preserving?

This is where the conversation must move beyond the latest kidnapping. The question should not simply be: how do we make NYSC safer? We should also ask: what is NYSC actually achieving today, and is the achievement worth the cost?

The scheme undoubtedly continues to provide benefits. It places young graduates in schools, hospitals, public institutions and communities where their skills can make a difference. Its Community Development Service has supported countless local initiatives. It gives young Nigerians an opportunity to experience parts of the country they might otherwise never see.

Nigerians from different backgrounds living and working together is valuable. But good intentions cannot be an excuse for institutional inertia. A programme created more than half a century ago cannot be preserved simply because it was once a brilliant idea.

Nigeria has changed; its population has exploded, the graduate population has expanded dramatically and technology has transformed work. Remote collaboration is possible because insecurity has become a national emergency, roads remain dangerous and public infrastructure is under enormous pressure.

Yet the fundamental model remains largely the same: mobilise thousands of young graduates, move them across the country, assemble them in camps and deploy them into communities. Perhaps the time has come to ask whether national service must necessarily mean physical relocation.

Could national service be redesigned around skills, community impact and national priorities rather than geography? Could graduates serve through structured digital public service, healthcare outreach, teaching, climate and environmental programmes, agricultural extension, civic technology, disability inclusion and entrepreneurship?

Could graduates still be deliberately exposed to communities different from their own but through shorter, carefully managed placements rather than a blanket 12-month relocation? And, most importantly, could it become safer?

Reform It or Replace It

The irony is that government already knows the NYSC needs to change. In June 2026, the Federal Executive Council approved a comprehensive overhaul of the scheme—the first holistic review in its 53-year history—with reforms including risk-sensitive deployment, improved camp standards, skills-based assignments and a shift to civilian operational leadership. But the recent kidnappings raise a more fundamental question: is this reform going far enough, or are we simply modernising an old system without confronting the risks that now make national service dangerous?

Security must become a condition of deployment, not an afterthought. No corps member should be posted to an area where the government cannot provide reasonable assurance of safety. Transport to and from orientation camps should be coordinated and secured, particularly along identified high-risk corridors. Camp facilities should meet enforceable minimum standards. Emergency response, tracking, insurance, healthcare and family communication systems must be strengthened.

Institutions are created to serve citizens. Citizens are not created to sustain institutions. The NYSC was born from a Nigeria recovering from war. It was designed to help build a country desperately in need of national cohesion. Today, Nigeria faces a different crisis: insecurity, unemployment, weak infrastructure, declining trust and a widening distance between citizens and the state. We need national service that responds to this Nigeria.

Asking a 22-year-old graduate to travel through a kidnapping corridor in the name of national unity is not nation-building. It is outsourcing the cost of a broken security system to the young.

As young people commit “to serve our fatherland,” will the fatherland protect those it asks to serve?