by Demilade Osoteku

Since its founding as a post-civil-war panacea, the National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, has met with a lot of opposition. The opposition has been fiercer in recent times with lots of arguments for or against its essence.

While some quarters believe it’s a waste of one productive year in unproductive work usually in the classrooms of primary and secondary schools, other have believed that it is a shock absorber for Nigerian graduates before they are met with the realities of the Nigerian  environment particularly unemployment.

Last month, the NYSC announced the digitalization of its online process with voluntary registration for printing of call-up letters online. Under this new arrangement, prospective corps members will have to register online with a fee of N4,000, while having the flexibility of printing their call up letters from any location in the country. This online process will become compulsory as from February 2015.

Take for example, Deji who stays in Lagos and schooled at the University of Jos and was posted to Akwa-Ibom for his youth service. Under the previous arrangement, Deji would have to travel from Lagos to Jos at a cost of N7,000 and 14 hours of road travelling or N23,000 and 1 hour 15 minutes by air travel to get his call up letter. He will then proceed to Akwa Ibom state at a cost of N8,000 to resume for the orientation camp.

Under this new regime of online call up letters. Deji would save N3,000 cost of travelling to Jos since he’ll print his call up letter from the nearest cyber café as well as save himself from the long hours and the natural hazard that comes with travelling on Nigerian roads. Is the N4,000 still evil?

But Deji’s account is not a balanced one. Consider Iniobong who was born and grew up in Calabar while also attending the University of Calabar. It would cost her N200 to get to her campus and pick up her call up letter. That is a whopping N3,800 loss to an unemployed Nigerian graduate. To Iniobong, this is evil of course.

The digitalization of the registration and mobilization stages of the NYSC for me is an anticipated improvement.

The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) took this giant leap in 2012 and registered about About 1,503,931 candidates. According to the JAMB Boss Dibu Ojerinde “JAMB has achieved a drastic reduction in the incidence of incomplete results to 28,069 because of the digitalization process.” The cost of UTME registration is N4,000 too.

How about the case of checking the result for the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) by the West African Examination Council (WAEC)? In the days before the WAEC Scratch cards, both public and private schools were the king, they charged as much as N5,000 for the collection of statement of result from the schools and will have to return years later to collect their certificates, of course at another fee. Digitalization although costs N500 per scratch cards, this exploitation by schools is reduced. Also, WAEC can afford to collect N500 because of the economies of scale, approximately 1.69 million students wrote WASSCE in 2014 alone. In monetary terms, it means that WAEC makes about N846 million in result checking every year.

Yet, a lot of Nigerian graduates participate in the NYSC scheme. Moreso, it is a service to the nation and an academic voyage. The government need corps members more than the corps members need the government. According to the Director General of the Scheme Brig-General J. B. Olawunmi, 200,000 corps members participated in the August environmental sanitation exercise. This number represents probably 60-70% of the total number of corps members which may amount to about 285,000 corps members. The economics of the online registration is about N1.14 billion!

Before we make comparisons, let’s beam our focus on JAMB. 1.6 million candidates registered for UTME in 2014. Since they all paid N4,000 in registration fees, that’s an awesome N6.4 billion in revenue for JAMB.

In comparison, NYSC and their private partner will make N1.14 billion in revenue. This translates to mean that the online registration process makes 34% more in revenue than WAEC although WAEC caters for over 400% of the NYSC registrants. UTME on the other hand makes 457% more than NYSC although they handle 131% more registrants.

Away from the public institutions handling these things. Sidmatech Technologies limited, the private partner of the NYSC e-registration project won the 2012 ICT Company of the Year by Titans of Tech and the 2012 Beacon ICT Indigenous Software Solution Company of the Year by Communications Week. It was started by four (4) co-founders with Mr. Michael A. Olajide the Board of Directors Chairman being a former staff/Consultant for JAMB. Maybe that was why the deal went through, who knows?

Sidmatech also has been a good company. Since its founding year, 1993, it has delivered ICT infrastructures and solution to leading international, government and private organizations like NNPC, ENI, Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), Agip Oil, Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (NIDTA) among others. Sidmatech Specializes in e-registration, Educational management Information Service, Biometric, Human Capital Management System as well as other solutions. Would a company of such repute be toying with their integrity over lots of money? Maybe.

With the aforementioned, did NYSC make an error to introduce the digitalization of the Scheme? Is the N4,000 fee too exorbitant compared to fees by similar organizations? Should the NYSC stick to the traditional method or join the rest of their contemporaries in benefiting from the goodness of technology? All these questions we will all answer.

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Demilade Isaac Osoteku is Libertarian in Training, tech and media enthusiast. He chronicles his NYSC experience at www.kopasTales.com and gets serious on www.spectacles.com.ng

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.