The DG said the corps has stopped posting members to the three state.

The Director General, DG, of the National Youth Corps Service, NYSC, Johnson Olawumi, has stated that some youth corps members have been demanding to be posted to serve in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states despite the Boko Haram violence there.

Mr. Olawumi, a Brigadier General, made the declaration, Wednesday, when he appeared before the National Conference Committee on Civil Society, Labour, Youth and Sports at NICON luxury hotel, Abuja.

The DG said despite that the service has stopped posting corps members to the states under state of emergency for security reasons, his office has been inundated with requests from corps members to be posted to the three states.

“We have stopped sending corps members to the three troubled states in North East under emergency rule.

“Some corps members are, however, demanding that they be posted there,” he said.‎

As part of measures to reform the service and improve the dwindling fortunes of education in the country, the service in recent years adopted the strategy of posting nearly all corps members to schools to teach across the country.‎

However, Mr. Olawumi informed the committee that the service will soon start posting corps members to banks, telecommunications, and oil and gas companies in the country.

“By government policy, we are expected to deploy members to four key areas; health, education, agriculture and rural development.

“Over time we found out that when we post corps members to these areas, we still have some that do not have places for their primary assignment. We are looking at expanding it beyond this four to places like the oil industry, the banking sector,and the telecommunication industries, but in doing this, we might need to put some regulations in place so that corps members are not used and dumped as it was done sometimes in the past by banks.

“We must put those things in place to ensure that they are not abused,” he said.

He also declared that the service has commenced moves to make the youth corps members employers of labour after their service year rather than search for non-available jobs in the saturated employment market.

“Already we have the skills acquisition and entrepreneurship development programme in states where we train corps members and I can conveniently tell you that so many of them have benefited from that programme and rather than becoming job seekers after the one year service, they’ve actually turned to job creators.

“What we are looking at with the youth empowerment fund is to have a pool where those corps members who have acquired one skill or the other while in camp and throughout the service year will write a business proposal, which we will look at and if we find it suitable, refer such a corps member to the administrators of that fund that they can advance on loan.

“Such a loan if it is approved will be interest free and there will be no issue of bringing collateral, since the corps member is just passing out, we hold the discharge certificate as collateral.

“We have tried that under the MDG, War against Poverty Programme and seen hundred per cent response by corps members to payment of loans given to them,” he said.