Four NYSC members and two other travellers were burnt to death today in a road crash in Adamawa State. Their bodies were unrecognisable.
This is not the first time the NYSC scheme has delivered young Nigerians into danger. It will not be the last. But maybe, after today, the question should finally be asked: why are we still forcing graduates to travel across a country that cannot guarantee their safety?
A Pattern That Has Been Building for Years
The deaths in Adamawa did not happen in isolation. They arrived in a long line of tragedies that have accumulated over years, while the national conversation about NYSC reform has moved in slow, cautious circles. 
In 2019, corps member Precious Owolabi was killed during the protest over the detention of Ibrahim Yaqoub El-Zakzaky in Abuja, shot while on duty. In 2025, Shuaibu Adamu, who was also a serving corps member, was ambushed and killed in Abuja by suspected motorcycle snatchers who attacked him on the Abuja–Lokoja highway. Samuel Chidiebere Orji, was also killed during the deadly suicide bombings that occurred in Maiduguri, Borno State. Corps members have been kidnapped in Zamfara, attacked in Borno, and killed in road accidents on the dangerous highway routes that connect posting states to home.
The North has become particularly fraught. Bandits operate openly on major roads in Katsina, Sokoto, Zamfara, and Kaduna. Kidnapping rings treat highways as revenue streams. Young corps members posted far from home, often unfamiliar with the terrain and without adequate security, are not equipped for the environment they are being sent into.
The NYSC allowance is ₦77,000 per month. That is what Nigeria pays a young graduate to risk their life in an active insecurity zone.
The Case for Scrapping It
The argument for suspending or scrapping NYSC is not complicated. The scheme was conceived in 1973, three years after a civil war, in a Nigeria that needed deliberate national integration. Young Nigerians crossing state lines, living and working among people from different regions, was a genuine peacebuilding exercise in that specific historical moment.
That moment is not this moment. The security architecture of Nigeria in 1973 is not the security architecture of Nigeria in 2026. A corps member posted to Katsina in 1980 could travel by road and arrive safely. There were no bandits staging mass kidnappings on that road. There were no communities where strangers with unfamiliar accents were immediately identified as potential targets.
The scheme has not adapted to match the country it now operates in. People are dying because of that gap.
SEE ALSO: 65 Cars for the First Lady, Zero Rescue for 46 Kidnapped Citizens
The Case Against Scrapping It
The loudest voices defending NYSC tend to be from older generations—people who served in eras when the programme functioned closer to its original design. They went north and came back with friendships, with perspective, and with a genuine sense of having encountered a Nigeria beyond their own state.
That experience was real, and it mattered. Nobody is disputing that.
What they are being asked to reckon with is whether the programme that gave them that experience still exists or whether what remains is a bureaucratic structure that sends young people into danger and processes their deaths with condolence statements.
The Middle Ground Most Nigerians Are Landing On
If the government will not scrap NYSC entirely, a large and growing number of Nigerians are arguing for a specific reform: post corps members to states geographically and culturally adjacent to their home states.
Someone who has lived their entire life in Lagos does not need to be posted to Katsina to understand Nigeria. Post them to Ogun. Post them to Oyo. Let the integration happen at a scale that does not require a 14-hour road journey through bandit territory.
The argument is not about comfort but about survival. Integration cannot be the goal of a programme that is killing the people it is meant to serve.
SEE ALSO: Wike’s Aide Under Fire for Emeka Ike INEC Data Leak
What Needs to Happen
Four corps members are dead in Adamawa, and the Oyo kidnapping victims are still unaccounted for. The security situation across the North and other places has not improved; by most metrics, it has worsened.
NYSC can be reformed, suspended, or scrapped. What it cannot be is left exactly as it is, unchanged, while the body count grows and the government issues condolences and moves on.
These were young Nigerians with degrees, futures, and families waiting for them to come home. The scheme that sent them there owes them more than a press release.
About The Author
