Lagos Assembly rejects NYSC’s posting of Lagosians to North

By OLASUNKANMI AKONI & EBUN SESSOU

IKEJA – The Lagos State House of  Assembly has rejected posting of batch B of the National Youth service Corps, NYSC, members from the state to the northern part of the country for their service.

Chairman, House Committee on Education, Science and Technology, Wahab Alawiye-King, said this while receiving corps members from Lagos State University, LASU, who staged a demonstration to the Assembly yesterday.

According to Alawiye-King, the House at its plenary on Monday, passed a resolution to the Director General of NYSC, Brigadier-General Nnamdi Okorie-Affiah,  urging him not to post graduates from Lagos State to unsafe Northern states where security of lifes and properyt cannot be guaranteed.

He said: “Lagos State House of Assembly is a proactive lawmaking body which put the welfare of the residents first before any other thing.”

The lawmaker said the Assembly would resist any attempt by the NYSC directorate to post students from Lagos to troubled states in the North for the service year.

The students who thronged the Assembly with placards with inscriptions such as; ‘LASU says no to posting to the North, Katsina State, State of mass killing’, ‘No service in Boko Haram states, like Kano, Borno, Bauchi and Kaduna etc’.

According to the spokesperson of the students,  Mrs. Funmi Sessi,   the rate of killings and bombings in the northern part of the country is unbearable.”

She said: “We have come to meet our lawmakers to please help our students from positing them to Boko Haram states because from all indications the security of lives of our people cannot be guaranteed.”

A letter signed by the union states that; “We write to protest the posting to the Northern states’ crisis-ridden areas and Boko Haram-prone states of the presently mobilised graduates from LASU and other universities from the Southern regions of the country. It is pertinent to note that hundred of last year corps members mobilised to all these areas lost their lives and it was pronounced by government that henceforth, posting to those areas be stopped,” it concluded.

According to Comrade Sessi, “we want the government to take up this issue and draft a new letter that would post the students to crisis free areas. It is not compulsory that they should serve in the Northern parts of the country.

“But, if the government is playing to the gallery, let them also send their children to these crisis areas so that they can feel the pinch of what the parents of these poor children are feeling right now. If the government refuses to take action, then, we will mobilise against the government. We will mobilise in every form we can to reject it”, she concluded.

One of the graduates posted to Taraba State, Layi Adebayo said, it is quite unfortunate and disheartening that considering the spate of violence in the North especially Borno, Yobe, Taraba, they are posting students who are meant to be the leaders to these crisis areas to use our blood as sacrificial lamb for national integration.

“Considering the fact that after the last year election, many students were killed, we are demanding that the government should take a proactive step in addressing this issue”, he said.