The maltreatment of Bunmi Adeyera, a Youth Service corper, by security officials has caused outrage among concerned Nigerians. Immediately after the incident occurred, posts with #CorpersAreNotGoats hashtags began to appear on Twitter and Facebook claiming to bring those guilty to book.
Akan Imoh, a former Bunmi Adeyera’s classmate at the Nigerian Institute of Journalism in Lagos, in a contribution to Naij.com calls on fellow Nigerians not to give up and join the fight against unhuman treatment of young people serving their country at NYSC.
When I heard about what happened to Bunmi Adeyera at the NYSC camp the only emotion that came over me was outrage. He was my classmate at the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, Ogba, Lagos. Bunmi, a very gentle young man, one of the Batch “A” Corp members in Nasarawa state orientation camp, was almost slaughtered like a useless goat by security operatives.
The young man was sick, he went to get drugs and food when he was waylaid by obviously inefficient security officials. Without listening to Adeyera’s explanations, they decided to beat the senses out of him until he fainted. This is absolutely unacceptable. This is barbaric and uncouth behaviour of people who are supposed to know better.
It is so annoying that we have agreed to go through the obviously useless and pointless NYSC programme even at the cost of loosing a full year of our lives. We have agreed to serve a country that only pays us back with blood and tears, moreover, we are still tortured, beaten and bullied. The cases of soldiers’ brutality surface every year, but this is the one we will not turn a blind eye to.
Have we not suffered enough? Has our dear nation not tortured us enough? Can one count how many secondary school leavers have lost direction and focus in life due to not being admitted into universities? So many young boys and girls have become “yahoo boys” and “call girls” as a result of sitting at home for so many years waiting to get to school with no avail.
We are being killed, now not only with guns and machetes; not only our blood is being spilled, but our tears are being shed. Our hopes are raised to the sky when we leave secondary schools. We dream about our future, we set goals, make plans. With smiles on our faces, we rush to buy UTME forms, pass the exams. However, then our raised hopes fall back to the earth and shatter into a million pieces when we are told that there aren’t enough student spaces to admit us to our universities.
We finally get into the universities only to be murdered by allowing hungry, unpaid, unmotivated lecturers to teach us. There is no way on earth they will teach us passionately. How then are we supposed to become skilled in our fields? When we graduate, we are called “half-baked”, “unlearned”, “uncultured” and so many other funny names.
Now ask yourselves: are these the youths that will come tomorrow to serve Nigeria in the Youth Corps programme with all their hearts? Never!
We start little businesses that begin to fetch us money. We set up and start struggling to make ends meet. Then we are plucked out of our growing businesses and thrown into strange places to slave for a practically nonexistent scheme in the country to be paid a paltry sum for a year.
The Youth Service programme has lost its value. The lives of our youths are rather being used as pawns in a game of chess. For the whole year, parents are constantly praying for the safety of their children.
If we can not guarantee the lives of our young people serving the nation, if the security operatives who are supposed to be of good conduct act like roadside touts and pounce on the so-called leaders of tomorrow beating them to coma, then we should rather stay back in our homes and pursue success.
I dedicate this article to Bunmi Adeyera and those who have painful stories to tell from their Youth Service days. We demand an apology from the DG of the NYSC and we want the perpetrators of this act be brought to book.
Don’t limit yourself to just reading this article, join our fight. Let’s get our voices heard. Use hashtag #CorpersAreNotGoats in your posts on Twitter and Facebook.
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