RECENTLY, the Director General of the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, Brigadier-General Nnamdi Okore-Affia announced a new posting policy for the scheme. Under the new policy, corps members would be posted to four key areas: Agriculture, education, rural health and rural infrastructure.

According to him, the policy, which takes effect from the 2012 Batch ‘A’ service year, is to ensure effective utilization of the Corps manpower. I think this will go a long way to restoring the dignity of corps members while they are serving their country.

NYSC seemed to have lost its sheen in the last two decades or so. It is disheartening when one looks back to the early years of the scheme and reflects on how the lots of corps members and the estimation of what they bring to the table have taken a tumble. As a secondary school student then, one looked up to the corps members as role models and each year we looked forward to the arrival of a new batch.

I still recollect the sort of community celebration that used to follow the arrival of corps members to my village, starting with the excitement from the school premises where the regular teachers knew the corps members would lighten their work load to the entire village where people scramble to host the “government children”. Even in the towns and cities it was not an uncommon sight for commercial transporters to waive the fare for corps members or in some cases other commuters were usually willing to pay for them.

Contrast that to the present when the common reaction to corps members is either indifference or rejection. Our schools churn out more graduates now, and most of them want to be deployed to cities regardless of whether they find places where they can genuinely serve the nation. The situation has sunken to an all-time low such that some corps members lobby their way first to the cities and then to a blue-chip company or “well-paying”government agencies only to end up running errands and serving tea.

Sadly, even the ones who end up in such ignoble role are still considered lucky by their contemporaries who roam the cities for the better half of the service year, as they are repeatedly rejected by the places they are posted to.

In some instances, business centres are reported to have turned down corps members such that it is not unusual to see corps members continue to roam the street weeks after their initial posting to places of primary assignment. There are suggestions that in extreme cases, some have to play the role of mistresses to get placement with small scale businesses.

The new NYSC policy of posting corps members only to the four critical sectors is highly desirable in this regard. The agricultural sector for example would readily absorb a number of corps members. This would hold true if the idea the NYSC has in mind is the mechanised enterprise where skills from diverse background are required. It will at the same time ensure food security for the nation while the corps members responsible for this can beat their chests about making meaningful contributions to national development.

Similarly, those posted to the educational sector will have the satisfaction of impacting more positively to a sector grappling with the dearth of teachers. The corps members can be used to correct the shortage of teachers in some public schools, which is sometimes as bad as a ratio of one teacher to 80 or 100 pupils with the expected consequences.

Rural healthcare delivery is not known to fare better than rural education and will thus benefit from the policy that is making more personnel available to attend to the health needs of people in this area. The import of deploying corps members to man the development and maintenance of rural infrastructure still sounds like a tall order.

However, it would be a welcome improvement on the Community Development Service, CDS, that corps members currently carry out. CDS is often limited to the erection of sign boards or the weekly sweeping of public spaces.

Embracing the new NYSC policy on posting has all the potentials to end the harrowing experiences a significant number of corps members go through just to secure places of primary assignment.

Moreover, it opens up the possibility of learning vital life-skills that may not be acquired if one were to spend the service year loafing around in search of a place for primary assignment. Our corps members will also be spared the humiliation that comes from being rejected by places of primary assignment. They will also have the honour of making meaningful contributions to nation-building and as well as boosting their self-esteem by so doing.

The prospect of serving in the rural areas may not be as rosy as it sounds, but then the programme is also not a pleasure retreat. It is meant to be one year of giving to the fatherland and learning about people from backgrounds other than that to which one belongs. It would thus be unfair to think that the nation is best served in the neon glitz of the cities when the nation’s needs are more pressing in the rural areas.On its part the NYSC in conjunction with the Ministry of Youth must depart from the past trends where policies aimed at posting corps members to the rural areas are implemented only on paper or implemented half-heartedly and soon abandoned in some cases.

The scheme and the Ministry should interface with the Ministry of Agriculture to ensure that there are farms and agro-allied industries that would gainfully engage the corps members posted to that sector in the rural areas.

A similar interface should be maintained with states and federal ministries of education and corresponding agencies to ensure that schools are empowered to take on the corps members who would be posted to them since they are supposed to provide accommodation.

Authorities can also work out an arrangement that would impart teaching skills to those who did not originally study education. Providing rural health goes beyond the personnel, so when corps members are deployed to man rural healthcare delivery the government should also provide the medicine and equipment needed in such cases in addition to providing clean health centres that those deployed for rural infrastructure could possibly be responsible for renovating.

No doubts that any corps member who spend one year contributing to the country in any of the four areas would come out knowing that the one year of “National Youth Service” was spent doing just that, serving the nation without being subjected to the varying degrees of indignities that corps members are presently subjected to.

Mr. TUNDE AJISAFE , a social critic,wrote from Lagos.