The Federal Government has mulled a new plan to reform the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and make it one of the revenue generation agencies for the country.
The Minister of Youth Development, Dr. Jamila Bio Ibrahim, who gave this hint when he featured as a guest on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics programme, said, while responding to a question on how the government intends to increase the monthly remuneration and allowances of corps members, that the government was working on reforming the NYSC scheme to reflect the present realities of the nation.
She clarified: “We all understand that resources are dwindling, even oil revenues are not as they used to be but we will find innovative ways of ensuring that corps members’ welfare is well-taken care of.
“When it comes to remuneration and looking totally at the holistic funding of the NYSC, we have announced a reform of the NYSC scheme itself. So, we want the scheme to go beyond that social programme of government to be that revenue-generating scheme and agency.
“The reforms which transform the NYSC into a revenue-generating agency and prepare the corps members for the job market and to be decently and gainfully employed or to be employers of labour through entrepreneurship and of course, perfect matching into primary assignment and all the support they need in that career path”, the minister added.
Ibrahim also disclosed that corps members were no longer posted to states with high rate of insecurity in the wake of worsening security conditions in the country.
The minister expatiated: “As an immediate intervention of the government and the NYSC as an agency, we have actually stopped posting corps members to the very unsafe states.”
