NYSC Members' Evacuation: Selective Attention?

Scrap the damn scheme!

Many States in Nigeria don’t consider education a priority. Their citizens snub education and embrace religion. These States demonstrate nonchalance to education by spending their income, (derived largely from the oversized freebie allocations they receive monthly from the Federal government), on religious activities, commerce and white elephant projects.

However, a number of States in Nigeria take education seriously. Sometimes, too fanatically! Their citizens scrimp and save to educate their children and wards to the highest possible levels with little or no help from their state governments or the Federal government.

But at harvest time, the Federal Government is first on the queue. They harvest fresh graduates and push them straight into a post-tertiary scheme, National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), for a compulsory one-year servitude. Now nicknamed “Corpers”, they are posted to States other than theirs (particularly to States that give education the middle finger) to work under unsafe conditions in government and private establishments for a paltry monthly allowance (national minimum wage) paid by the Federal government.

Sadly, a change is NOT gonna come!

Added 23 March, 2025

How wrong I was

Double Talk has been around for 25 years. Inspired by a Mad magazine cartoon, it started as a weekly cartoon feature in The Guardian in 1986 and then later in Prime people magazine, Vintage people magazine, Africaman comic magazine, Foolscap online website and now at the back page of Thisday newspaper. A compilation of Double Talk in a book form is in the offing.

For those who are reading Double Talk for the first time, the idea is to play on how we sometimes keep two conversations going at the same time; one audible (oftentimes insincere) and the other inaudible (oftentimes cruel and mischievous or “sincere”). “We say one thing, when we mean another!” appears as subtitle of Double Talk from time to time to put new readers in the picture.

The double talk cartoons I do nowadays are all about Nigerian politics as indeed all the editorial cartoons in this blog. You have to be abreast of political happenings in Nigeria to fully understand them in context. Although I try to make every cartoon such that it can be understood out of context. Thus, many of the cartoons you read in this blog will be served dry, without comments, because to explain a political cartoon is to mention names, places and circumstances, which I’d rather not do.

It's A Weird, Weird Country!