Varsity Sends Groundnut Sellers For Youth Service - Ojerinde

Corruption has eaten deep into the Nigerian system that hardly will one be able to exempt an institution. Professor Dibu Ojerinde made a startling revelation during a workshop yesterday. The JAMB Registrar said a particular university sent names of some 27 groundnut sellers to his Board for regularization for the mandatory NYSC programme.

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Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), Prof. Dibu Ojerinde, yesterday accused the management of an unnamed tertiary institution of sending the names of over 27 groundnut sellers to his organisation for regularization and mobilisation for the one-year compulsory National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).

The revelation came on the heels of the management of the NYSC accusing the management of tertiary institutions of frustrating full deployment of ICT in the mobilisation of corps members. 

Ojerinde, who made the remark at the 2015 Batch ‘A’ Pre-mobilisation Workshop in Abkhaz yesterday, argued that he equally experienced some frustration from higher institutions and even his board members when he introduced the biometrics system in the conduct of JAMB examination.

“It is good that I have this opportunity to speak to the representatives of the higher institutions. I want to ask whether this trend of mobilising unqualified prospective corps members into the NYSC scheme was this how you were mobilised during your own days?

“There is a university where over 5,000 graduates were mobilised. We have to make a commitment to sanitise the system by doing the appropriate thing. There were 27 persons a particular institution mobilised for NYSC selling ‘pepper nut’ or groundnut in front of the university.

“A corps member was posted to JAMB to serve. The Director under which he would serve said he could not write his name. We wondered how could that be and invited him to my office, asked him which university he attended, he simply replied ‘na UNN. I called the NYSC coordinator in Bwari to come and take your thing because I know he is not a corps member,” he said.

Similarly, the Director General of the NYSC, Brig General J. B. Olawumi, in his opening remarks, accused some CPIs of not living up to the agreement of appropriately sensitising their graduating students on the benefits of the newly introduced ICT registration platform.