The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) has explained how an undercover reporter with an online newspaper, Audu Umar, was able to breach its system and got mobilised for the mandatory one-year national service even after serving in 2019.
Umar, in an investigative report, had detailed how he bagged a four-year degree under two months and later got mobilised for the NYSC scheme even though he had served earlier.
But days after the report went viral, the spokesman of the NYSC, Eddy Megwa, who appeared on Thursday’s edition of Channels Television’s ‘Sunrise Daily’, said that the reporter used different phone numbers to beat the system.
“It is not that we don’t have checks and balances in place to detect possible breaches of the system. When the undercover reporter first put in his data, the system rejected him because he had served in the scheme before.
“He later changed his email address and his phone number which made the system to accept him. And he was initially posted to Osun State.
“He did that because he was out for a particular purpose. We are looking at the situation and ensure that it does not happen again. We don’t have a database of graduates who served in the scheme. We only rely on the lists sent to us by the Senates of the various universities stating the number of graduates to expect from them,” he stated.
When asked how the NYSC can guard against such in the future, Megwa said: “It is not our duty to assess their certificates, but we have resorted to inviting foreign students and giving them tests to know their abilities.
“In the course of doing that, we have made startling discoveries. Ask some of them to write a simple essay, you will be surprised at what you get. I have some of such materials that I can show you. NYSC is an elite scheme, not for illiterates and the means of communication is English language.
“In 2006, the then DG of NYSC, Brig.- Gen. Yusuf Bomoi, went to an orientation camp and asked a supposed corps member the title of his final project, the answer he gave was incredulous, and further investigation revealed that his name was smuggled into the list of graduates from a particular university.”
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