By Tony Edike

ENUGU—THE Director General of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Brigadier-General Maharazu Tsiga, has blamed the evacuation of corps members from states in the Niger Delta region on the activities of militants.

He declared that the agency has a responsibility to ensure the safety of corps members participating in the scheme, saying  that the deployment of members to such crisis areas was capable of undermining the scheme.

Brigadier-General Tsiga, who was in Enugu on familiarization visit to NYSC formations, said the agency recently evacuated several corps members from the Niger Delta areas,  following the disturbances in the area and were redeployed to other states outside the zone to continue their services.

He said though the measure affected their places of primary assignment, it was done to avoid unnecessary loss of lives, insisting that the youth corpers as Nigerians deserved protection while participating in the scheme.

He said, “ Corpers there (Niger Delta) are Nigerians and we cannot allow them to suffer what they know nothing about.  What we did was to evacuate the corps members in that region and took them to a safer place where they are being taken care of.

It is our responsibility, we reassigned them  to  or other places for their primary assignment. It is not only in that kind of situation that we act, we act when we observe that their security is not assured in any particular place within the country”.