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4 The NYSC: History and Rationale If Nigeria is to make rapid progress on all fronts internally, and if she is make her mark on the continent of Africa, and indeed, in the comity of nations, her youths must be fully mobilized and be prepared to offer willingly and without asking for return, their best in the service of their nation at all times.8 Background Faced with a total breakdown of social harmony following Nigeria’s thirtymonth Civil War (1967–70), which followed the unsuccessful attempt by the then Eastern Region to secede from the country, the then Federal Military Government (FMG) realized that having won the war, it was imperative that the peace – of solid and voluntary national unity – be won. It was a clear realization that, even though the constituent parts of this multi-ethnic and multi-religious country have been forced to stay together – as they were forced in 1914 by the British to come together – true feelings of loyalty and solidarity that produce national cohesion and unity upon which national progress and growth are predicated could only be an outcome of a deliberate social process. This, more or less, parallels Williams James’s statement in his famous 1910 essay, ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’, that ‘national service present(s) a means by which a democratic nation could maintain social cohesion without having to go to war’ (Moskos 1988:9). For a country that had already gone to war, the way to avoid another relapse into the ugly past was to engineer ‘new citizens’ united in common allegiance to the nation-state through service. Given the absence of a common ancestry and common national mythologies providing the primordial loyalty upon which nations are often based, national cohesion in Nigeria has to be based on some civic ideal (cf. Moskos 1988:9) or national imaginary. Statism, Youth and Civic Imagination 22 The challenge that Nigeria, with an estimated 374 ethnic groups, faced in the immediate post-Civil War period therefore was how ‘to engage in deliberate social engineering, designing programs and pursuing policies meant to promote national unity, de-emphasize points of discord amongst the constituent groups, and foster greater inter-ethnic understanding and harmony’ (Enegwea and Umoden 1993:2). The citizenship and youth training scheme in Nigeria, dubbed the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), was developed against this backdrop. The fact that the programme was specifically targeted at ‘youths’ points to the fact that the emergent nation-state was investing in its future, particularly in the context of the unsavoury past. As was recognized at the start of the programme , ‘youths constitute a dominant force for national mobilization and growth and as such, have a crucial role to play in the all important task of nation-building’.9 Incidentally, the calls for youth service that presaged this scheme germinated in the very ambience of hostilities. Initially, many youth groups asked for a national youth scheme beginning with provision of relief to the war-damaged and eventually evolving into a permanent agency for national mobilization (ibid.:9). With the end of the war in sight in 1969, the Committee of Vice Chancellors (presidents of universities) called for the institutionalization of a one-year national service scheme for undergraduates after the completion of their first year to ‘inculcate the spirit of service and patriotism’ and to promote national unity (ibid.). This soon became the subject of a major national debate in Nigeria. At the close of the war, as the first head of the NYSC averred, it became abundantly clear to discerning observers of the Nigerian political scene that to build enduring national unity, Nigerian youths from all ethnic groups (a) ought to be mobilized and put in the forefront of the task of nation-building and integration ; and (b) patriotism, dedication to the Nigerian nationhood and mutual respect for and understanding of the different ethnic groups and constitute the people of Nigeria (Adedeji n.d.:20). The military head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, following the cessation of hostilities, announced in a spirit of magnanimity that there was ‘no victor, no vanquished’ in the war, and consequently embarked on a programme captured as the ‘Three Rs’: Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Reconciliation. As Iyizoba (1982:3) describes it, ‘in the interest of fostering national unity, the Nigerian government sought to ease the tensions and animosities among the tribal groups by creating a national unity that would supersede ethnic and tribal loyalties and weaving a spirit of nationalism among groups...

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