When Consultant Congenital Cardiac Surgeon Dr. Ikenna Omeje, stepped into the operating theatre on April 16, 2025, it wasn’t just another high-risk procedure — it was a powerful continuation of a remarkable medical journey he helped begin.

Seven years earlier, Dr. Omeje was part of the pioneering team at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust that delivered Vanellope Hope Wilkins, a baby born with ectopia cordis — a rare and typically fatal condition where the heart develops outside the chest.

At the time, Vanellope was given less than a 10% chance of survival. But she beat the odds according to the BBC.

Now, Omeje was once again at the centre of her story, leading a groundbreaking chest reconstruction surgery aimed at finally giving her heart the permanent protection it never had

“This was always going to be one of the most delicate surgeries we’ve ever done,” Omeje said. “We’ve been waiting years for the right moment to protect her heart properly—and it finally came.”

The operation, which lasted over nine hours, took place at the East Midlands Congenital Heart Centre. Vanellope, who had lived for seven years without a breastbone, relied on a thin layer of skin and an external brace to shield her exposed heart. The goal of this groundbreaking surgery was to use her own ribs to form a permanent, protective cage inside her chest—a method never before attempted in the UK.

Before the procedure, Vanellope was placed on a heart-lung bypass machine, allowing her heart to deflate and be carefully detached from the skin it had adhered to. Surgeons then performed a bilateral rib osteotomy, carefully breaking and repositioning her ribs to enclose the heart within the chest wall.

The surgical team included Consultant Paediatric Surgeon Nitin Patwardhan, visiting Cardiothoracic Surgeon Nagarajan Muthialu from Great Ormond Street Hospital, and around 20 support staff including anaesthetists and perfusionists. But for Omeje, this was personal.

The operation’s success marks a milestone not only in Vanellope’s life, but in medical history. It’s the first time such a reconstruction has been carried out in the UK on a child with ectopia cordis.

Omeje, humbled by the outcome, said: “The best satisfaction is when you get a message from the family saying ‘thank you.’ That’s when you know your work has really made a difference.”

[DailyTrust]

Former Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, has accused the National Judicial Council, NJC, of being “deeply complicit in judicial corruption” in the country.

According to him, NJC is handing out irresponsible slaps on the wrist of corrupt judges with utter disregard for their effect on judicial integrity.

Odinkalu claimed that the NJC as currently constituted is part of the problem not part of the solution.

The statement comes after the NJC slammed one year suspension without pay on three Judges of the High Court in the country for various acts of judicial misconduct.

DAILY POST reported that the affected judges include Hon. Justice Jane Inyang of the Court of Appeal, Uyo Division, Hon. Justice Inyang Edem Ekwo of the Federal High Court, Abuja Division and Hon. Justice Aminu Baffa Aliyu of the Federal High Court, Zamfara Division.

However, Odinkalu, in a post on his X handle on Thursday, expressed displeasure about the sanctions meted out by NJC against the affected judges.

He specifically stated that what the NJC has done in those cases is just not good enough, arguing that its dispositions are evidence of the deep malaise that currently afflicts the country’s judiciary.

Odinkalu’s words: “Jane Inyang became Justice of @CourtOfAppealNG in Sept 2023, less than 2 yrs ago. Yesterday, @njcNig suspended her for just 1 yr for egregious acts of judicial corruption while she sat in @FederalHigh. How can she still be a judge?!

“This was part of the last minute elevations masterminded by the baleful Olukakayode Ariwoola was he made his way out of office as the Chief Justice of Nigeria, #CJN, in Aug 2024.

“The only miracle in the case of Inyang Ekwo is how he has remained on the bench until now. He’s bn one of the more predictable judges in @FederalHigh. For the past year, he has bn under caution by @njcNig. Now, he has bn suspended for delivering judgment without hearing parties!

“Many will see these dispositions by @njcNig as progress; May be. But, these dispositions are evidence of the deep malaise that currently afflicts the #NigerianJudiciary. 1st, if a person is as crooked as Jane Inyang or as Inyang Ekwo, how can that person be a judge to begin with?

“2nd, if a judge can behave with such manifest impunity & disregard for the basic rules of judicial comportment as these 2 & still remain a judge – that’s what suspension for 1 year means – what wld it take for a judge to be relieved of their position? May be commit murder….?

“3rd, how did Jane Inyang manage to make it to @CourtOfAppealNG while the complaint about her conduct was still pending? @njcNig says it has suspended her from elevation for 5 yrs. U know what that means? She can still get to @SupremeCourtNg. U see the mess we are in?

“In plain language, the @njcNig is now deeply complicit in judicial corruption. It is handing out these irresponsible slaps on the wrist with utter disregard for their effect on judicial integrity or the damage that these entrench in the judiciary. This rot is deeply criminal.

“The conclusion is inescapable that @njcNig as currently constituted is part of the problem not part of the solution.
What it has done in these cases is just not good enough. If it is not willing to root out judicial crookedness, then it should be rooted out.”

[DailyPost]

Against the background of ongoing defections to the All Progressives Congress by politicians from the so-called opposition parties, we still harbour the fear of a one-party state as an imminent reality. The truth is, what we run is already tantamount to a one-party system, a short historical distance away from the military era, where the head of state, who creates political parties, also hands political parties their respective defining ideologies. The multi-party democratic system, planked as it is on the distinctiveness of ideas and ideologies between parties, and requires the independence of political agents. Contenders must have equal chances to sell their moral vision to the people, contest for power, and maintain their stance even when they have not been voted to power. Also, the institutions must be autonomous enough to regulate the activities of political actors across the board. These are all features that have been seriously lacking in Nigerian politics.

Properly speaking, Nigeria does not even have political parties. What we have are platforms on which any candidate who can commandeer money and influence runs an election. The closest to an ideology that anyone will find in Nigeria’s present political arrangement is the desperation to seize power and, if that fails, to get as close to it as possible. Once upon a time, the PDP called itself the most formidable political party and boasted it would sustain power for the next 60 or even 100 years. They hardly survived one election cycle out of presidential power. Their party members virtually emptied themselves into the winning party even before the 2015 electoral losers had fully understood what had befallen them.

In any case, it does not quite matter which side wins an election because we will ultimately be governed by the same cross-carpeting agents. Our politics mostly lacks a distinguishing philosophy. Take, for instance, the APC. Does anyone have any examples of the progressive causes they have pursued since their founding? I even doubt anyone in the APC ever wonders if they are staying true to their “progressive” appellation. One can say the same for the PDP, whether as the “Peoples Democratic Party” or as “Power to the People.” One of the most laughable comments I read about the Labour Party during the 2023 elections was that it platformed a candidate whose antecedents did not match the “labour” ideology. There was an implicit assumption that the Nigerian “Labour Party” had an ideological affinity with the “Labour Party” of, say, the UK and Australia (which are typically peopled by social democrats) and should therefore act according to character. But there is nothing like that in Nigeria. Whatever name a political party calls itself is, at best, aspirational. It has little to do with what they can be trusted to always stand for. What matters is the control of federal power and mobilising resources for electoral victory.

 Our politics has always been more of an aggregation of personalities managing their self-interests rather than an espousal of a governing vision. If you ever watch parliamentary debates in Nigeria, you would have noted that it never happens that lawmakers disagree with their peers based on any philosophy of how government should be structured. They all agree and disagree on the same thing; they collectively sign off the padded national budgets, and like serfs, they jump to their feet to chorus “on your mandate, we shall stand” when Bola Tinubu appears in their hollowed chamber. Without any internal differences, does it truly matter whether we have one party or a dozen?

Besides, the nature of our politics makes no room for abstract ideas. Elections are won or lost based on what they call “structure”, a euphemism for clout cultivated at grassroots levels and which will be sold to the highest bidder during elections. Politics is a pyramid scheme where those who hold sway at different levels exchange the votes of the people over whom they maintain some influence, and their calculations are always based on immediate material gains. The average Nigerian, too, hardly subscribes to a politics of ideas; people vote for personalities representing their identity groups and who they believe will hold power in trust for them. The platform on which such candidates compete hardly matters to our people, and it would seem superfluous for any party to maintain a distinctive ideology.

Perhaps, the biggest reason we never seem to evolve beyond a singularising political order is the nature of our economic system itself. We are largely an extractive economy, a system where the primary function of leadership is to manage and allocate raw resources. It is a political arrangement that makes the president disproportionately powerful since the opportunities for everyone’s social mobility are concentrated in his hands. He distributes to them based on the perceived degree of their fidelity to him. It is not in his personal interest to institutionalise the social instruments of democracy, and he will do everything to ensure opposition parties do not flourish.

If the “opposition” does not allow themselves to be amicably enticed with money and other offers, they will find themselves forcefully crippled. It is not strange that Ifeanyi Okowa, the man who could have become the vice president in 2023, is now crawling on his face to join the APC. He could simply have joined the APC without a fuss, like his peers had done, but he had to add a cringeworthy explanation. For a man who has a N1tn case with the EFCC, who can blame him for being practical? He is not the first person to join the APC to have his sins forgiven, as Adams Oshiomole once enjoined. Godswill Akpabio, the Senate President, too, was once in Okowa’s shoes. He joined the APC, and his case with the EFCC has been put in permanent abeyance. In a country where their president can suspend a governor, how many people will not bow and worship if their survival depends on it?

About the only time since 1999 “opposition” politics thrived in Nigeria was when the regional ACN contended with the national PDP. Now that power has changed hands, we know that the APC was hardly driven by ideological commitment during those years. Their “opposition” politics was funded by ambitious Tinubu with Lagos’ money. Once he got into power, he muted their bought voices. The only state in Nigeria where the “Lagos model” of sponsoring political opposition can replicate itself is Rivers State, and Tinubu has already anticipated that possibility. Not only did he undercut the strength of the PDP in that state by taking over one of their chieftains, Nyesom Wike, but he also showed his hand of power by suspending the substantive governor for six months. The Rivers State Governor, Siminalayi Fubara, who—just months ago—stood defiantly on his two feet, now grovels before the almighty federal power. The reality of being out of power must have hit him.

Such is the disempowering nature of our democracy. It constricts our choices to either being rewarded for compliance or punished with marginality. The average career politician chooses the former for obvious reasons, but also because they are amoral like that. Let me be clear that the fear of a one-party state is a well-founded one. To the best of our ability, we must resist it from becoming fully official because it will further degrade our politics. Yet, we cannot just mourn a politics that we wished we had—rather than the one that is already operative.

Suspended Rivers State Governor, Siminalayi Fubara, has commended the resilience and dedication of the state’s workforce, calling for greater protection of workers’ rights and improved working conditions across sectors.

Fubara gave the charge in a solidarity message to mark the 2025 Workers’ Day, stressing that workers remain the backbone of the state’s progress and a beacon of hope amid current political challenges.

He said this in a statement issued in Port Harcourt, the state capital, on Thursday by his Chief Press Secretary, Nelson Chukwudi.

Fubara described the workers’ commitment as the backbone of the state’s development and a beacon of hope for a better future.

He said that this year’s theme, “Ensuring Safety and Health at Work in a Changing Climate,” underscores the urgent need to protect workers amid escalating environmental threats and socio-political uncertainties and stressed the importance of prioritising occupational safety and well-being as essential pillars for sustainable growth.

He acknowledged the efforts of the Federal Government, under the leadership of President Bola Tinubu, in advancing labour reforms and promoting climate-conscious policies that support a healthier, safer working environment nationwide.

The statement partly read, “Governor Fubara expressed deep gratitude to Rivers workers who, despite political turbulence and governance disruptions, continue to demonstrate patriotism, integrity, and an unwavering commitment to duty, emphasising that their sacrifices form the cornerstone of the state’s stability and advancement.”

Reaffirming his administration’s dedication to workers’ welfare, the governor called on all employers —public and private — to respect labour laws and uphold the rights and dignity of every worker.

He advocated for continuous improvements in working conditions to reflect both legal standards and moral responsibility.

Fubara offered prayers for divine wisdom and guidance for all leaders, pledging that his administration will remain steadfast in creating a work environment that nurtures dignity, opportunity, and prosperity for all.

He encouraged the people of Rivers State to stay hopeful and united, assuring them that the “forces of justice, peace, and progress will prevail in the end.”

[Punch]

As a directing staff at the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Kuru, I was charged, as one of my responsibilities, with bringing the participants at the senior executive courses (SEC) and other programmes up to speed on recent developments in public administration and management in the twenty-first century. One of the most significant developments, and the point of many excited discussion is public policy decision-making. Given that governments all across the world are judged on their performance of the function of policy formulation and service delivery (of course, the regulatory function is also significant), the policy architecture of any government must factor in intelligent policymaking that will transform policy intelligence revolving around governance and development decision-making processes. And if the public service must facilitate a professional and intelligent policy advice to the government in ways that orient the politics-administration dichotomy in public administration, then due attention must be given to new developments in intelligent policymaking in the twenty-first century. 

However, the practical worry I usually communicated to the SEC participants is how, since its emergence, public administrators in Nigeria have failed to give decision science its right of place in administrative and management practices. The cutting-edge application of development in this fascinating field has only been exploited by industrial management. Decision science was significantly facilitated by Chester Barnard. In his groundbreaking The Functions of the Executive (1938), he outlines a theoretical framework that allows us to examine how organizations actually operate outside of any normative or prescriptive requirements. Bernard’s contributions connect between the rationality of organizational, rather than individual, decision-making processes, and the cooperative capacity required to facilitate decision-making. While organizational decision-making is more significantly logical and rational, it is often facilitated by social and strategic contexts, like clear objectives, specialization, the flow of information, etc. 

The organizational rationality that Barnard was referring to does not translate into the “perfect rationality” of traditional economic models and theories. This concept assumes that in the decision-making process, the decision makers are fully equipped with the necessary information and data to make the best economic decisions. On the contrary, Herbert Simon undermined this assumption of a perfect decision-making. According to him, human fallibility makes it impossible to achieve the perfect standpoint—having the capacity and the resources to gather and process all the information and data required to make perfectly rational decisions. There is just too much uncertainty involved in how we decide, what we decide and the alternatives available in resolving our decisional dilemma. This therefore implies that in critical decision-making, cognitive limitations, policy complexity and resource constraints, Herbert Simon argues, that decision-makers only pursue satisficing rather than optimal solutions. A solution is satisficing if it is founded on rational and pragmatic principles and circumstances. 

Given the many troubles and predicaments of the modern world, from climate change to political processes, and given the fact that we do not have all the answers we seriously need. This is where artificial intelligence and big data become the starting point of our attempt to understand before we can even predict or act. It is in this sense that decision science has learnt a lot from Barnard’s and Simon’s understanding of decisional rationality, and how computers and machines generally can contribute to the decision-making dynamics. We can therefore immediately see how the idea of a data-driven decisional strategy can assist governments across the world, and especially in Africa, to come to terms with critical policy intelligence required to backstop governance and development policies. 

There is no gainsaying the fact that we now live in the world of big data and artificial intelligence. This is the age of the machine. The operation of social media platforms, their algorithmic underpinnings, and the emergences of enormous databases all indicates that the amount of data available in contemporary world is beyond staggering. It has been reported that Facebook, the social media platform, warehouses “300 petabytes of data about its 2 billion active users, or 150 megabytes of data per user.” Of course, the Cambridge Analytica scandal that ignited concerns about the misuse of data raised critical issues around the ethics of data usage. However, that same concern attends the extent to which governments can ethically deploy data-driven policy intelligence in the pursuit of the well-being of their citizens. And even beyond this, governments all across the world are now confronted with multiple dimensions of polycrisis that disarticulate all efforts at making sense of their governance and development circumstances and objectives. The deployment of artificial intelligence and big data—from financial transaction data to the internet of things (IoT), and so on—cumulate into the enhancement of the credibility of those governments who have the courage to exploit their usage for policy intelligence. 

However, before any government can get to the zenith of credibility and legitimacy, there is the outstanding and fundamental issue of extracting meaning, purpose and direction from the enormous amount of data available. This involves designing the models that extract and interpret the data in ways that enable government to explain and predict things, situation and circumstances in the real world. Data scientists, in other words, assist the governments in formulating hypotheses, based on the identification of trends, patterns and flows that investigate current problematics, anticipate future challenges and proactively energize government policies. In a world where climate change has undermined lots of policy intelligences, where geo-spatial data analytics backstops the government’s infrastructure masterplans in terms of identifying geographic patterns, trends, dynamics and disparities so as to be able to initiate creative policy designs and formulations that prioritize investments, allocate resources more effectively, and facilitate service delivery. 

We now need to confront the necessity of deploying artificial intelligence and big data at the level of public service institutions, especially in line with the imperatives of institutional reforms that have the objectives of bringing these institutions up to speed with modern technologies, procedures and administrative imperatives that can enhance the government’s capacity to efficiently deliver goods and services to the citizenry. This deployment must however go beyond the default level where pubic institutions are just compelled to adopt any reigning innovation without a significant feasibility study in terms of the fundamental utility of the innovation within an overall organizational reform blueprint. For example, as part of the institutional imperatives, public institutions have to factor in the challenges of privacy, security, data governance and data ethics. 

What differentiates a good administration from a bad one is the intelligent policymaking capacity that is founded on policy intelligence. Within Nigeria’s governance framework and policy architecture, a reformed policymaking founded on big data and artificial intelligence demands that the public service adopts a change management programme that must first give attention to the (re)professionalization of the workforce, especially the senior executive service. The SES must be beefed up as a multidisciplinary elite team that is charged with the articulation of a strategic policy intelligence. This allows the SES to not only play a critical role in policymaking function, but also facilitate the strategic deployment of big data. Recruitment into this top-level administrative corps will be on the basis of intelligence, professionalism and performance rating. 

The establishment of the SES will entail modifying the generalist composition of the workforce through a competency mapping that create a hub of specialists and experts specifically reskilled for the demands of new technologies, artificial intelligence, big data and data science. The second dimension of the change management is to link this generic professionalization to the reform of the department of planning, research and statistics in the MDAs. The DPRS could then serve as the effective policy hub that mediates the articulation of the demands of decision science and big data around the dynamics of data culture, data availability and action research capacity to interpret such data as input to policy and feedback.      

Each DPRS will have to recruit, train and incentivize new officers who will be put in charge of regulating the new innovation. It is not just enough to innovate; it must be a guarded reform that is founded on a blueprint of how artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science and new technologies factor into the governance and development objectives of the Nigerian government. This will necessitate, for example, collaborating with research-based think tanks and institutes in ways that further enhance the quality of policy decision and the data dynamics needed to formulate policy intelligence. 

The biggest requirement for harnessing the requirements of decision science is the political will of governments to go all out in traversing the challenges of institutional reforms, and especially of exploring and exploiting the intricacies of big data analytics in terms of its capacity to improve decision-making and the efficiency of service delivery to Nigerians. There is just no other alternative to the transformation of the policy architecture of the Nigerian government than the political willingness to become proactive in the institutional reform of the public service. Given the economic and governance challenges that the administration is confronting, the reality of the time is really auspicious with regard to the reform opportunities that global best practices have presented the Nigerian government with. There is no alternative to reform, and decision science is the opportunity to make it work for democratic governance.     

…Hints at push for salary review beyond minimum wage age

Today, Nigerian workers join their counterparts worldwide to mark May Day, also known as Workers’ Day.

However, rather than celebrating, workers in Nigeria find little cause for joy. Like many other citizens, the worsening socio-economic situation has further deteriorated their living conditions, leaving many impoverished.

Summing up the plight of Nigerian workers, the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, lamented that since the current administration took office, workers have been under severe strain.

According to NLC: “It has been one anti-worker policy after another. From last May Day to today, it has been excruciating and painful.”

Speaking on the situation, NLC President Joe Ajaero stated: “It is unfortunate, but the reality is that within the capitalist system, we are constantly compelled to live in a society divided into two classes: the oppressed and the oppressors; the bosses and the workers; the haves and the have-nots. That situation has only worsened since the last May Day celebration. We have been impoverished and dehumanized.

“The struggles we face as workers and as citizens of Nigeria are immense—from neoliberal economic policies that impoverish workers to relentless attacks on labour rights.

The ruling elite have ganged up against the workers and the masses. They belong to virtually one party and speak with one voice—one that promotes impoverishment, exploitation, and slavish wages.

“Today, the Nigerian worker stands at a crossroads—not just in a national crisis but amidst a global assault on labour. Capitalism, in its insatiable hunger, devours jobs, strips dignity from work, and widens the chasm of inequality. The state, which should be the guardian of justice, seems to have become the enforcer of exploitative and oppressive policies dictated by Bretton Woods institutions.

“Amidst all this, however, our movement remains the strongest and most vibrant on the African continent. We have remained united despite numerous attempts to sow division among us. We worked together to negotiate the National Minimum Wage and have remained steadfast in our engagements with the state.

“Even in this darkness, we find our purpose. The trade union movement was not born from comfort—it was forged in resistance. Our power does not come from the benevolence of the elite but from the unity of the exploited. We must not forget the struggle to compel the state to agree to a N70,000 National Minimum Wage, which is being implemented in breach by many state governments and even the federal government.

“The fight for the full implementation of the National Minimum Wage is ongoing across many states. We must brace ourselves to ensure that all states and the private sector comply with the law, even as we begin to push for a wage review beyond the minimum to address the widespread hardship.

“To those who still doubt: the time for hesitation is over. Every worker must awaken to the truth that our liberation will not be gifted—it must be won. We must act not only for ourselves but for future generations. The ruling class fears only one thing: our collective refusal to remain in servitude. Let us build a movement that does not merely negotiate for crumbs, but demands a fair share of the bread we have baked.”

[Vanguard]

On May 22, 1973, the military government of Yakubu Gowon instituted the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) by Decree No. 22. This took place in the context of the unrest and fragmentation that led up to and was exacerbated by the civil war after which reconciliation and reconstruction were supposedly taking place. The NYSC was created as a vehicle to aid in that reconciliation process, targeting young people, with the ideal outcome being the creation of ties amongst Nigerians such that national unity would be promoted. To do this, the NYSC posts the graduates of tertiary institutions to a state other than that of their state of origin where they are expected to remain for the one-year duration of the programme. During this time, corps members or “corpers” are posted to places of primary assignment (PPAs) and they participate in various avenues of community development under the Community Development Scheme (CDS) of the programme. All of this constitutes their one-year, mandatory service to the nation.

While incredibly idealistic in its outlook, like any Nigerian ventures, the NYSC is not without its issues. In fact, the case can be made that the scheme is riddled with more problems than its total utility to the nation. For many people, the NYSC is just the next thing to tick off the list, a chore to be carried out. After more than five decades of the scheme, there is very little to show in terms of national unity and/or social development in the nation. Today, the NYSC perhaps stands as an example of some sunk cost fallacy, a scheme that probably has no place in its current state in the modern-day nation of Nigeria and there are a few reasons why.

One of the things the NYSC hopes to do is to inculcate patriotism into those who join its ranks. However, everyone with functioning observational skills can see that the nation gives particularly young people reasons to not be so patriotic or at least ambivalent with respect to the topic of loving one’s country. So, what does the NYSC do to remedy this? A North Korea-esque campaign of hammering patriotism into the minds of those who become corps members. At the orientation camps which can perhaps be referred to as benign versions of “re-education camps”, the NYSC ceaselessly spews what can only be described as pro-patriotic propaganda, an attempt at the indoctrination of corps members which requires them to disregard the observation of their eyes and ears and to eschew good judgement and to profess love for the nation above all else.

This is so pervasive in the scheme that it affects the things corps members are allowed to publicly say, with camp officials repeatedly emphasising that corpers must only speak of Nigeria in a good light, never to criticise the nation, never to criticise public officers. In many ways, this messaging and its dictates mirrors the plight of a helpless wife in an abusive marriage who is not allowed to freely speak of her husband’s abuse of her. Contravening the NYSC’s “rules” in the matter of what can and cannot be said, carry steep penalties for the individuals involved. Some of the justifications given as to why corps members must only speak good includes the notion that “even developed countries have slums and they only show us the good parts”, as though most of Nigeria isn’t an eyesore to any person who has had the opportunity to see and/or experience better. The policy of muzzling and/or directing the speech of corps members is rich coming from a scheme that regularly sends young people into literal wildernesses that are barely touched by government benevolence and expecting those individuals to have overwhelmingly positive things to say about the country and its government.

The most recent, widely known example of the NYSC’s speech smothering tactics was the case of Raye, a Lagos state corps member who protested the cost-of-living crisis in Nigeria online and was met with the immediate fury of NYSC authorities. The NYSC constantly admonishes corps members to “not use social media”, or to only “use social media in a way that speaks positively about Nigeria”. No fair criticisms by corps members are tolerated – a corper isn’t even allowed to simply openly acknowledge a bad situation such as the terribly cramped and often inhumane conditions in the orientation camps that one would really only see in refugee camps.

During the first phase of the service year, the orientation program, corpers are mandated to participate in the Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development program where of different, often informal skills are taught, all within a 2-week window at best. These skills include tailoring, beadmaking, catering, graphics design and so many more. Needless to say, for a person who has never been trained in any one of those skills, 2 weeks is an inadequately short period of time to gain any sort of proficiency that can allow for commercial success. Furthermore, introducing a program like SAED at the NYSC level, illustrates further the depths to which the Nigerian establishment has failed to invest in the future of its youth. How is this the case?

Well, in secondary schools in Nigeria, it is mandated that all students take a trade subject, the rationale being that it would begin the process of cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset in young people and give them something to fall back on should they be unable to proceed to tertiary institutions or to get formal employment. All fair and good in its intentions. However, upon proceeding to tertiary education, entrepreneurship is taught as a course in much of the curriculum in universities. In some cases, students would encounter entrepreneurship as a course more than once during their university education. The rationale again, is to give students the skills to start businesses after their education should they be unable to obtain formal employment. After having done a trade subject in secondary school, taken entrepreneurship courses at least once in tertiary institutions, young Nigerians proceed to the NYSC and there, SAED is waiting to be forced down their throats.

Over the course of the orientation program, NYSC officials make it a point to remind corps members that their degrees and/or diplomas are essentially worthless and that they must take up a skill or two to rescue themselves from economic ruin. Statements like “Bachelors na water”, or “Having a certificate does not guarantee a job” are incredibly common, belittling the years spent struggling through Nigeria’s often dysfunctional education system, telling people that most of that struggle was likely for naught. While there is no issue with acknowledging the dire state of Nigeria’s labour market per se, the continuous parroting of this pro-entrepreneurial propaganda by the NYSC and other levels of Nigeria’s ruling establishment is a tacit admission of the country’s failure to secure the future of its youth and a surreptitious reminder to young people that they are on their own.

Central to the NYSC scheme is the primary assignment, the organisation wherein the corps member will be employed for most of the service year. The NYSC says that they try their best to match places of primary assignment to the disciplines of individual corps members but the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. There are a variety of reasons why including the fact that there just aren’t enough opportunities available to absorb the numbers of people coming out of tertiary institutions every year on the basis of discipline alone. Furthermore, a lot of important facets of Nigerian society are, odd as it may sound, lacking in manpower, chief amongst which is education, especially in the suburbs and in rural areas. These factors make it so that the vast majority of corps members are posted by the NYSC to carry out their primary assignments as teachers in schools across the country.

It also should be noted the ethics of such postings are questionable. The vast majority of graduates did not train to be teachers and the NYSC offers no such training to corps members – how could it? Thus, employing thousands of people to be teachers despite no formal training in that regard is a quite suspect, perhaps dangerous practice. Furthermore, it seems to imply that the position of the NYSC as to the teaching profession is that it is one that requires almost no training and hence is a low skill occupation – just about anyone can do it. This couldn’t be further from the truth, of course, the teaching profession is one that demands a lot of attention and professionalism but the NYSC, the education sector and school owners are perfectly fine with having untrained individuals carry out the job of dispensing education.

The issue with the NYSC and the labour of the people under its employ doesn’t just end at questionable postings, it also can be looked at as a state sanctioned exploitative scheme. Thousands of young people, sent to states where they aren’t resident for one year, while being paid a monthly allowance that’s barely $50 today and only mandating employers of corps members to provide accommodation or an allowance in lieu as well as transportation without requiring them to pay actual salaries for the roles the corps members occupy within those organisations. Even the requirements of employers to provide accommodation or an allowance in lieu is often not adhered to and when it is, the allowances are barely able to cover the purpose for which they are given. But the NYSC is mandatory for all graduates of universities and polytechnics and so, there’s not a lot of ways to wriggle out of it even with the knowledge of these absurd conditions. In other words, the NYSC and its partner organizations are able to extract labour without fair compensation on a nationwide scale which essentially constitutes exploitation.

The goal to encourage intercultural ties and integration amongst Nigeria’s youth is the foremost focus of the NYSC. It has been over 5 decades of the scheme and one cannot necessarily point to its successes on a societal level. It can even be said that many of the suspicions and animosity many Nigerian ethnic groups have towards each other have only deepened in all this time. One can say that Nigeria is not any more integrated and/or united today than it was at the founding of the scheme and that the only thing preventing a large-scale conflict on the level of the Civil War is the inability of aggrieved or agitating groups to organise effectively. Perhaps the percentage of Nigerians who participate in the NYSC is far too little for the effect of integration from the scheme to have any real perceptible effect on the general situation of Nigerian cohesion.

The nation needs to have serious conversations on the scheme and its place in the current day. Perhaps, the NYSC can be reformed, as it should be rather than an outright scrapping. But it is important to evaluate its rather imperceptible successes, if any at all and scrutinize its glaring issues. This is Nigeria, however. Not much is certain to change regardless.

A series of explosions rocked the Giwa army barracks in Maiduguri, causing panic and palpable tension across the Borno state capital city. 

In a statement, Reuben Kovangiya, acting deputy director of army public relations, said the incident was caused by excessive heat amid sweltering temperatures.

He added that collaborative efforts of the Borno state fire service and other security agencies’ fire units curtailed further damage.

Kovangiya advised the public to disregard any rumours of an attack within the Maiduguri metropolitan council and to remain calm.

“The Headquarters Joint Task Force North East Operation HADIN KAI Maiduguri, wishes to inform the general public of an incident involving the explosion of ordnance in one of our ammunition storage facilities located in Giwa Barracks,” the statement reads.

“The explosion was due to the current high temperatures in Maiduguri, which led to the explosion of some munitions.

“The situation has, however, been brought under control with the combined efforts of the Borno State Fire Service Department and other fire trucks from security agencies.

“Troops of Operation HADIN KAI have been deployed to protect the public and prevent miscreants from taking advantage of the situation.”

The police command in Borno said the incident was caused by a fire outbreak.

Nahum Daso, the police spokesperson in Borno, said a fire erupted in the ammunition facility of the barracks, leading to the detonation of some munitions and loud bangs.

Daso said a combined team of security and fire service personnel was quickly deployed to the scene.

He added that preliminary investigations suggest that the high ambient temperatures currently experienced in Maiduguri sparked the fire.

The police urged the public to remain calm and not to panic, adding that the situation is now fully under control.

[TheCable]