HUMAN rights activist and former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Chidi Odinkalu, has said that President Bola Tinubu and Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, are eroding the values of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) by allowing politicians who failed to participate in the Service to be part of the President’s cabinet members. 

In an interview with The ICIR to commemorate Nigeria’s 64th Independence, Odinkalu criticised the nation’s leadership for undermining one of Nigeria’s ‘few success stories’ – the NYSC.

The ICIR reports that the former military Head of State Yakubu Gowon, an Army general, established the NYSC in 1973, three years after the Nigerian civil war.

The Service sought to unite the nation which was ethnically balkanised by the nearly three-year deadly conflict.

Odinkalu lauded the NYSC as a unifying force in the country but decried how successive governments, including Tinubu’s, neglected its potential to foster national unity and development.

“I think the Tinubu government with my good friend, Godswill Akpabio, have been a dreadful disservice to this country by going ahead to bulldoze the clearance through to ministerial positions of people who should have done the national youth service but failed or refused to do.

“There are, I believe, three ministers who failed clearly to have done the NYSC when they were eligible to do so and the Federal Government and the National Assembly, Senate in particular, nevertheless cleared them,” he said.

According to him, some standards should not be compromised as a country, noting that NYSC is an essential component in building Nigeria.

He noted that making people to understand the country’s diversity was an important asset to building it.

The ICIR reports that the Minister of Art, Culture and Creative Economy, Hannatu Musawa, during her confirmation hearing at the Senate could not provide proof of completing the mandatory one-year NYSC programme after graduating from university.

Although in August 2023, the NYSC confirmed that the minister was a serving corps member, reports indicate that she abandoned the programme in Ebonyi state around 2003.

Musawa, however, argued that the NYSC had not conducted a thorough and careful search for her records and that she was not given a fair opportunity to demonstrate that she did not abscond from the programme.

Nigerians are bleeding in dozens

Speaking further on the impact of Nigeria’s leadership crisis on the youth, Odinakalu said Nigeria’s best and brightest were fleeing the country in droves to seek better opportunities abroad.

He warned that the country’s productive population was dwindling, leaving behind an ageing and dependent population.

“We are not bleeding our best in tens or dozens. We are bleeding in the droves,” he said.

He also emphasised that the exodus was a result of the country’s failure to create an environment where young people believed they could succeed.

The consequence, according to Odinkalu, is a national productivity crisis, with Nigeria unable to leverage its human capital to build a thriving economy.

“All of that is because of the absence of vision and the narrative of a divided country,” he added.

While stressing that the failure to unite as a country stemmed from the absence of visionary leadership, compounded by a lack of accountability in elections, Odinakalu, noted that democracy is built on three pillars.

“Democracy is about three things or about one thing in three dimensions. Democracy is about counting and accounting; what do you count an account for? One, you count your people. What do you call that? Census. Two, you count the votes of your adults. What do you call that? Elections. Number three, you count your money. What do you call that? public accounts.

“So how does this work? Through elections, you acquired the legitimacy to administer your public accounts, your money, commonwealth on behalf of and for the benefit of your people. Those are the three things. It is more of counting and accounting. The Nigerian condition is that we don’t count or account honestly,” he said.

 He added, “We manufacture numbers for elections that have not taken place. And we read judgments of the courts, it is the same thing and then what happened because we don’t count to account properly.

“We then look to the judiciary to manufacture legitimacy, which belongs to the people. And so the judiciary has toppled the people and installed itself as the source of electoral legitimacy, which ordinarily if you look at Section 14 of the Constitution, should be the people,” he added.

This culture of electoral fraud and corruption in the judiciary, Odinkalu argued, has eroded the legitimacy of government.