The Minister of Youth and Sports, Sunday Dare, has said that the National Youth Service Corps scheme is here to stay and cannot be scrapped.
Dare said this when responding to a question regarding the calls to scrap the NYSC scheme at the State House on Thursday.
The minister said the cancellation of the scheme at this point of Nigeria’s history will be like throwing the baby away 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.”
He said the ministry has begun a gradual review to look at areas it needs to improve to make the Scheme better.
“We don’t throw such programs away. The largest single concentration of Nigerian youths annually, 320,000, is the NYSC. Some communities will not survive without corpers,” Dare added.
