Varsity sent 27 hawkers for youth service —JAMB

It is unbelievable but it happened in Nigeria. It has happened before and it is happening again. Desperation is the word, yet a section of this country kept pulling all standards to move the country forward.

Now read this ,Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Dibu Ojerinde, yesterday accused the management of an unnamed tertiary institution of sending the names of over 27 groundnut sellers to his organization for regularization and mobilization for the one-year compulsory National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).

The revelation came on the heels of the management of the NYSC accusing the management of tertiary institutions of frustrating full deployment of ICT in the mobilization of corps members.

Ojerinde, who made the remark at the 2015 Batch ‘A’ Pre-mobilisation Workshop in Abuja yesterday, argued that he equally experienced some frustration from higher institutions and even his board members when he introduced the same biometrics in the conduct of JAMB examination.

“It is good that I have this opportunity to speak to the representatives of the higher institutions. I want to ask whether this trend of mobilising unqualified prospective corps members into the NYSC scheme was how you were mobilised during your own days.

“Most of the people here knew that we agreed since 2008 and even 2011 that there would be no more regularisation but up till yesterday, they were still coming. I want to say that there will be no more. Many of you admit students without normal procedure.

“There is a university where over 5,000 graduates were mobilised. We have to make a commitment to sanitise the system by doing the appropriate thing. There were 27 persons a particular institution mobilised for NYSC selling ‘pepper nut’ or groundnut in front of the university.

“A corps member was posted to JAMB to serve, the director under which he would serve said he could not write his name. We wondered how could that be and invited him to my office, asked him which university he attended, he simply replied ‘na UNN. I called the NYSC coordinator in Bwari to come and take your thing because I know he is not a corps member,” he said.

Speaking on the deployment of ICT in the mobilisation of corps members, Ojerinde commended the NYSC for the decision, noting that most of the Corps Producing Institutions (CPIs) “should be ashamed of themselves for resisting the noble change and sanity which NYSC is bringing to the system.”

Similarly, the Director General of the NYSC, Brig General J. B. Olawumi, in his opening remarks, accused some CPIs of not living up to the agreement of appropriately sensitising their graduating students on the benefits of the newly introduced ICT registration platform.