The Minister of Youth and Sports, Sunday Dare, says the National Youth Service Corps scheme cannot be scrapped as it is here to stay.
Dare said this when replying to a question regarding the calls to scrap the NYSC scheme at the State House on Thursday.
The minister said the cancellation of NYSC at this point of Nigeria’s history can be likened to throwing away the baby with the bathwater, adding that some communities will not survive without Youth corps members.
He said, “The contribution of the NYSC scheme to national development and national unity has been audited. We have communities who wait for youth corpers every year to come and help them with their health facilities.
“We have the CDS program. Multiple projects across communities are projects done by our youth corpers. And I don’t want to talk about the soft side of the NYSC; marriages, long-term friendships, and the rest.
“We don’t throw such programmes away. The largest single concentration of Nigerian youths annually, 320,000, is the NYSC. Some communities do not survive without corpers.”
He added that the ministry has begun a gradual review to look at areas it needs to improve to make the Scheme better.
