End NYSC Already

Through the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), a conciliatory post-war programme aimed towards nation-building, Nigeria maintains, at a great cost, a softer, but no less punitive drafting system with adverse consequences on its teeming youths.

In March 1983, the Black Sash, a South African human rights organization, passed a motion at its annual conference demanding that the South African government abolish all conscription for military service. South Africa’s ‘Defense Amendment Bill’ of June 1967 had made service in the South African Defence Force (SADF) mandatory for young, white South African men for up to two years. The Black Sash’s motion at its annual conference advocated ‘conscientious objection’ to national military service under the aegis ‘End Conscription Campaign’ (ECC); this advocacy drive was part of a broader consciousness in South Africa against armed conscription which began in the early 1980s. In defence of the government’s position over compulsory conscription, Magnus Malan, Minister of Defence in P.W Botha’s apartheid cabinet of 1988 derided the male ECC supporters as ‘mommy’s little boys’ who were scared of masculinity and warfare.

 South Africa eventually severed its coarse link between national service and civilian life through a constitutional amendment in 1996. Nigeria, however, still maintains a softer, but no less punitive, drafting system. Through the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), a national programme set up in 1973 following the dark struggles of the Nigerian civil war, many Nigerian graduates have to travel to far-flung locations to engage for a year in paramilitary training and ‘community development service’ as a conciliatory post-war effort towards nation building...