If the world is full of misery and heart-break, pain, sickness and oppression, it is because we caused it. — Socrates

AT a time the National Youth Service Corps is finding relevance again, deaths of NYSC members in riots across the country have provided the latest reasons for calls to end the scheme. Emotions are running high.

Decisions based on the type of emotions that attend these deaths are most likely to be wrong. When a state governor asks indigenes of his State to return from where they are serving, what else is he offering? Does he know where the next crisis will erupt?

Nigeria is often in more danger that we think. Some of our decision makers are at the centre of these troubles with their approaches. They say the wrong things, spend their time fighting imaginary enemies instead of their own ineptitude.

Once NYSC members were on elections duties, we were exposing them to more danger. Could we have protected them better? Yes, to some extent, but as we emphasised in an editorial after the 2008 Jos crisis, in which three NYSC members died, an occasion that provided the fodder for those who wanted the scheme abolished, government cannot guarantee security of NYSC members as individuals. The goal should be improved security for all Nigerians.

There are no clear indications that the seven who died in Bauchi were killed because they were NYSC members. The one who died in the bomb blast in Suleja was on duty, like others.

Yet what government has failed to do, after promises to protect NYSC members, following the 2008 Jos riot, was to punish the killers.

These young people who we have pressed into national service must be treated as important. The impact the NYSC scheme has made in the country should not be dismissed over general challenges government fails to manage.

Director-General of NYSC Brigadier-General Maharazu Ismaila Tsiga angered NYSC members with his denial of the death in Suleja. Last year, he threatened to stop sending NYSC members to Delta, Ebonyi and Plateau, States he rated as crisis-prone. Bauchi, Borno, Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Gombe and Yobe did not make his list. Are they not where the crises are raging now?

Calls to end the scheme are assuming a new stridency. People still remember the 2009 murder of Miss Grace Ushang from Cross River State in Borno State. These incidents are regrettable, but more regrettable is the limpid efforts to punish their perpetrators.

However, those using them as proof of the dangers the scheme poses to lives fail to establish that these people died because they were NYSC members.

The challenges of providing security for all Nigerians, teaching Nigerians to be tolerable of each other – under all circumstances – are confronting us.

Stopping the scheme is not a solution to the security crisis in Nigeria. If we do not punish the killers, these young people would have died in vain, serving a country that promised to protect them.