Walk into any NYSC orientation camp in Nigeria today and the picture that greets you tells its own story. Overcrowded dormitories, unreliable water supplies, healthcare facilities that barely function, and sanitation blocks that would embarrass a secondary school. These are the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of young Nigerians have been completing their mandatory orientation programme — and, according to a growing coalition of former corps members, no amount of ambitious reform talk will mean anything until those basics are sorted.
The Association of Former Members of the NYSC, operating alongside a cluster of civil society organisations under the banner of the Reform NYSC Campaign (RNC), has issued a pointed call to the Federal Government: increase funding to the Scheme and rehabilitate its crumbling orientation camps before entertaining any broader restructuring agenda. The message, delivered in a joint statement signed by RNC Coordinator Comrade Godsown Aigbe and Spokesperson Princess Mariam Idris, is blunt and deliberately sequenced — welfare first, grand plans later.
The groups are not opposed to reform as a concept. What they are opposing is the particular flavour of reform currently circulating in policy discussions — proposals they warn could push the NYSC’s annual running costs well beyond N1 trillion. That figure, they argue, is difficult to defend in a country still wrestling with competing developmental priorities across health, education and infrastructure. Adding expensive new layers to a Scheme that cannot yet provide corps members with clean water or adequate medical care is, in their view, getting the sequence badly wrong.
The RNC’s demands are grounded in practical reasoning rather than sentiment. The groups are calling on the Federal Government to commission a full assessment of every NYSC orientation camp in the country and to produce a phased rehabilitation plan that brings each facility up to a credible national standard. Alongside that, they want higher annual budget allocations directed at the Scheme’s core obligations: corps member allowances, healthcare provision, transportation, security and insurance. These are not luxury demands. They are the minimum conditions that make a year of national service dignified rather than punishing.
“The immediate reforms required in the NYSC are clear,” the statement read. “Government must improve funding and rebuild and modernise the orientation camps. These are the pressing issues that directly affect the welfare, safety and experience of corps members.” The groups were equally direct about the danger of getting distracted by structural tinkering. “Any reform that does not address these fundamental challenges but instead creates additional layers of expenditure risks turning the NYSC into an increasingly expensive bureaucracy without necessarily improving its core objectives.”
The RNC directed specific appeals beyond the presidency. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was urged to place corps member welfare and camp rehabilitation at the centre of any repositioning effort, while the National Assembly was called upon to sharpen its oversight of NYSC funding appropriations — a function that has historically been exercised with insufficient rigour. State governments, private businesses and development partners were also invited into the conversation, with the groups proposing public-private partnerships as a practical route to accelerating infrastructure upgrades without placing the entire burden on a stretched federal budget.
Underpinning all of this is the coalition’s firm belief that the NYSC remains one of Nigeria’s genuinely valuable institutions — one of the few mechanisms that routinely brings young people from different ethnic, religious and regional backgrounds into a shared national space. That is worth protecting. But protecting it means treating the young Nigerians who pass through it with a basic level of seriousness. Cracked walls, broken taps and understaffed clinics are not the foundation on which national unity is built. The federal government has been told what needs doing first. The question now is whether it is listening.