The death of a 26 year old corps member in a bomb blast in Maiduguri has prompted a human rights organisation to renew its demand for the abolition or fundamental restructuring of the National Youth Service Corps, describing the scheme as a system that continues to expose young Nigerians to preventable death without adequate protection or accountability.
Chidiebere Orji, an indigene of Amurri in Enugu State, was killed in a bomb explosion that rocked parts of the city last week. His remains were returned to his hometown and buried amid what the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) described as public grief and growing anger over a death that should never have happened.
In a strongly worded statement, HURIWA said Orji's killing was not an isolated incident but part of a pattern of institutional negligence that has claimed the lives of too many corps members. The group cited recurring deployments to high risk areas without adequate risk assessment, emergency response mechanisms or security coverage, describing the practice as reckless. "Nigerian youths, trained through the sacrifices of their struggling parents, should not be sent into harm's way under a programme that has outlived its purpose," the statement read.
The association recalled that the NYSC was established in 1973 to foster national unity and cultural integration after the Civil War, but argued that nearly five decades later, those objectives remain largely unmet while the dangers faced by participants have grown significantly. It pointed to cases of corps members abducted by armed groups, others killed in road accidents linked to poor travel arrangements, and a pattern of inadequate institutional support that it said reflects systemic failure at the level of both the NYSC Directorate and the Ministry of Youth Development.
HURIWA said an opinion poll it conducted found that 85% of Nigerians support the abolition of the NYSC, and called on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to act decisively by either unbundling and restructuring the scheme into a safer, more relevant programme or scrapping it entirely. The group stressed that continuing with the current structure would produce more avoidable deaths and further erode public trust in government institutions.
The deaths of Chidiebere Orji and others before him represent the human cost of a policy conversation that Nigerian authorities have repeatedly deferred. For the families of the nearly one million graduates mobilised by the NYSC each year, that conversation can no longer wait.
