March 17, (THEWILL) – A number of months in the past, the Nationwide Youth Service Corps obtained a letter from the Nationwide Salaries and Wages Fee notifying it that the Federal Authorities had elevated the month-to-month allowance of serving corps members from N33,000 to N77,000.
That bit of knowledge was, as anticipated, celebrated throughout the nation, significantly by corps members themselves who’re the first beneficiaries of the gesture. They may heave a sigh of reduction, eventually and sit up for finishing the service 12 months in relative consolation.
Quick-forward to March 2025. The increment nonetheless has not mirrored within the month-to-month allowance obtained by corps members since July 2024.
One thing have to be flawed someplace, they concluded.
Explaining the delay, the Director-Normal of NYSC, Brigadier-Normal Yushau Ahmed stated the Federal Authorities had but to launch funds for the implementation of recent allowance.
Dissatisfied, offended and annoyed by the limitless wrestle to deal with the prevailing hardship within the nation, corps members growled, ‘That is unfair. Who’re the devils doing this to us?’
That is precisely the query that many involved Nigerians are asking in the meanwhile throughout the nation. Who’re the folks behind the delay within the implementation of the N77,000 month-to-month allowance due serving corps members?
Sadly, for the reason that NYSC boss didn’t specify when implementation of the increment will start, the state of affairs persists. The established order stays as it’s: An undesirable post-graduate course in endurance, starvation and pain-absorption.
The grapevine is replete with gossip supposed to determine potential motives for the delay within the implementation of the increment. Whereas some folks view it as a gimmick by politicians from the ruling political celebration to make sure that, come 2027 Normal Election, corps members will vote for the celebration, others imagine that corrupt components throughout the authorities may be behind the delay for clearly doubtful causes.
A 3rd faculty of thought seems satisfied that the federal government truly lacked the capability to offer ample funds for the implementation of the brand new allowance on a month-to-month foundation. If that is true, then the federal government must be instructed that reneging on its promise to make sure that subsequent batches of corps members profit from the increment of the month-to-month allowance might have far-reaching penalties for the way forward for the celebration and the nation at massive.
THEWILL believes it’s the Federal Authorities’s duty to convey an finish to privations suffered by serving corps members wherever they’re posted. The welfare of corps members ought to be handled as a matter of high precedence.
It takes a number of braveness, ardour and patriotism to serve a rustic mired in insecurity, infrastructural decay, financial melancholy, acute corruption and extra with out soiling your fingers within the course of. That’s what corps members, previous or current, are. And so they deserve respect.
Some have both been maimed or killed in the middle of serving their nation. The tragic occasions that occurred in elements of northern Nigeria through the 2015 presidential election, through which some corps members serving as advert hoc workers to the Impartial Nationwide Electoral Fee misplaced their lives, are nonetheless recent in our collective reminiscence.
Corps members deserve a greater deal. It’s as much as the Federal Authorities that they get it.
