The foot broke first. Then the silence. But it was breaking the silence that cost Mustapha Kyari the most; he paid for it with humiliation, punishment, and depression.
It started at the Wailo National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) orientation camp in Bauchi State, northeastern Nigeria, during the mandatory three-week camp in December 2023. Kyari had expected structure, care, and some semblance of accountability after he broke his foot. Instead, the fractured foot became a lesson in institutional failure.
When he reported his injury to NYSC officials, Kyari was told to go home to treat himself, but he insisted that they treat him instead. Officials then asked him to sign a waiver indicating that he had refused to go home despite being told to do so and was therefore absolving them of liability. He limped through a year of national service.
Established in 1973 to foster national unity, the NYSC deploys young Nigerian graduates to unfamiliar parts of the country for a year of service, beginning with a three-week orientation camp. The camp typically involves military parades, tactical and physical drills, as well as lectures on nationalism, entrepreneurship, security awareness, and civic duty.
After camp, corps members are assigned to organisations relevant to their fields of study, where they are expected to make meaningful contributions throughout the year.
Since its establishment, over 5.5 million graduates have gone through the programme.
Beneath the patriotic slogans and matching uniforms, some corps members report being inadequately cared for, particularly during their time in the camp.
HumAngle published Kyari’s experience in January 2024. Following the publication, Kyari received a response from the NYSC that he described as retaliation. One official initially claimed that Kyari had never been at the camp. When confronted with evidence, he shifted his position.
“Did you report to the Muslim Corpers Association of Nigeria (MCAN) when you were injured?” he asked Kyari over the phone.
Kyari was baffled. “Am I supposed to report to the mosque or the clinic?” he recalls asking. The call ended abruptly. It would be the last time he heard from that office.
The next day, another senior NYSC official phoned him. Kyari says her tone was confrontational. “Is what you did right? Do you even know what a fracture is?” she asked.
Kyari answered, “It’s when the bone breaks.” Like the other official, she also hung up. It was the last time he heard from her as well.
Punished for speaking up
Under the NYSC 1993 Bye-Laws, corps members who speak to the media without permission risk a 30-day extension of service on half pay, a law that many Nigerians have criticised. Kyari got the punishment. In addition, however, the half-pay never came.
“I knew the risks of speaking up,” he told HumAngle. “But I wanted people to know what we go through. Maybe it would change something.” It did not.
When he received his extension letter, he was instructed to report to the NYSC office in Bauchi, the state capital, a 200-kilometre journey from Dambam, where he had been posted. At the office, officials told him he was “on his own.” When he asked for accommodation, Aminu Bako, head of the disciplinary committee, replied, “Who told you to misbehave?”
After pleading for hours, he was sent back to his original posting, the College of Arabic and Islamic Studies in Dambam, to serve out his extension.
“I was depressed,” Kyari said. “I regretted ever answering the clarion call.”
“If you’re sick, go home”
Kyari’s experience was not a lone one. Ngozi Ada, a recent graduate from Enugu, southeastern Nigeria, was thrilled when her NYSC call-up letter finally arrived. That excitement faded quickly when she saw her posting: Bauchi State. One name stood out on the page — Wailo Camp, Ganjuwa Local Government Area. She had never heard of it.
She says she cried and begged her parents to let her defer, but they convinced her to go. “Just one year,” she remembers them saying. “It’ll fly by.”
After a long, two-day journey, Ada arrived at camp. A few days in, she fell ill. Repeated visits to the camp clinic yielded only paracetamol prescriptions and vague advice to “rest.”
“I thought it was the drills, the sun, maybe stress,” she said. “But I got weaker. I couldn’t eat. I was dizzy all the time.”
Then, one night, she collapsed, and fellow corps members carried her to the clinic. This time, she was hooked on a drip. By morning, she expected to be transferred to a hospital. Instead, she was asked to go home. The directive also did not come with a diagnosis or referral.
“I told them I couldn’t travel like that,” she said. “Enugu is far. I was afraid I’d pass out again on the road. They responded that there was nothing they could do for me there and that the camp was almost over anyway.”
She had to leave for Enugu without an escort and received no follow-up. Just a young woman, sick and exhausted, who went to manage a medical emergency on her own.
In Katsina State in the northwestern region, Hauwa Mohammad dislocated her foot at the NYSC orientation camp. The injury was severe enough that she couldn’t walk without pain. She described the official’s first response as dismissive.
“They told me to go home,” Hauwa said. “And I told them, ‘I will go, but not by road, because of my condition.’”
Eventually, she was taken to the Katsina General Hospital, but the X-ray department wasn’t functioning. So they redirected her to a private facility, where a scan was finally done at her own expense. From there, she was taken to a local physiotherapist, another service she had to pay for out of pocket.
“The only thing NYSC covered was transportation,” she said. “Everything else, the scan, the physio, I paid for myself.”
Like Kyari and Ada, Hauwa was left to carry the financial and emotional cost of her injury, while the system that deployed her looked away.
Extension without structure
Back in Bauchi, as Kyari served his 30-day extension, another layer of dysfunction unfolded. He found that when extensions are handed out, typically as a form of punishment, the system offers no structure.
Corps members assigned for extension are not provided with accommodations; instead, they are told informally to “find refuge” with religious fellowships, such as the MCAN or the Nigerian Christian Corpers Fellowship (NCCF).
“After everything,” Kyari said, “you’re left homeless unless a religious group gives you a mattress. That’s not service. That’s survival.”
The arrangement contradicts NYSC’s foundational mission to foster unity and cross-cultural understanding. Instead of providing state-backed support, the system outsources care to faith-based organisations, an abdication of duty wrapped in spiritual convenience.
As he served out his penalty, Kyari began to notice something else: inconsistency. While he was punished for speaking to the press, others who had missed clearances or absconded from their duty posts were quietly pardoned, and some were even awarded early discharge certificates.
When he questioned the process, the disciplinary committee responded coldly: “You are lucky [your suspension] is just 30 days.”
He also pointed to a case involving a corps member who posted a false kidnapping claim on a WhatsApp group and was given a 90-day extension.
“They said I should be grateful,” Kyari recalled. “As if there was a scale of misconduct where telling the truth was worse than lying.”
Left to heal alone
Kyari’s injury lingered throughout his service year; he shuttled between Dambam and Maiduguri for physiotherapy, a journey of over 250 kilometres, because Dambam General Hospital didn’t have a physiotherapy department.
In 2016, following the deaths of several participants in Bayelsa, Zamfara, and Kano States, the presidency ordered the inclusion of corps members in the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS).
The NHIS, which the NYSC publicly touts as a safeguard for corps members, covers little beyond the most basic ailments: malaria, stomach aches, and a few common pills like paracetamol, flagyl, and similar drugs.
“That was it,” Kyari said. “Anything more than that, you’re on your own.”
Despite a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2016 between NYSC and NHIS, promising comprehensive medical coverage from mobilisation until three weeks after service, the implementation has been hollow. The policy might exist on paper, but in practice, it is riddled with denial, deflection, and dysfunction.
As of 2024, fewer than five per cent of Nigerians are enrolled in the NHIS. Over 70 per cent pay out-of-pocket for healthcare. Corps members, by default, are added to the scheme upon deployment; however, when they fall ill or are injured, coverage is not fully implemented.
For Kyari, the neglect seemed particularly targeted. He says that when one official realised he was the corps member who had spoken to the press, the reaction was furious and confrontational.
“Is it we who fractured you, and now you want us to cure you?” he recalls the official as saying. “You’re stupid for reporting the case. NYSC is not in charge of your treatment.”
‘An exaggerated account’ — NYSC
When asked about the lack of medical attention corps members face, NYSC officials typically deny it outright. Yet, nearly every corps member has a story: a collapsed colleague, a high medical bill, or medication debt.
“I was lucky I could afford my treatment,” Kyari said. “Most people can’t. They live with the sickness and suffer in silence.”
Kyari’s case reflects a wider gap in NYSC’s medical responsibility. By law, both NYSC and NHIS are meant to split the cost of specialised care. Yet, he was told that he was not eligible.
He completed the rest of the camp on crutches. On the final night, even those were taken from him.
When HumAngle contacted the NYSC Bauchi State spokesperson, Ahmed Wakili, he stated that Kyari had signed a waiver, rendering him ineligible for care. He was referring to the waiver that Kyari was asked to sign after he insisted on staying back at camp to receive the healthcare he felt entitled to, rather than going home as he had been instructed.
The spokesperson also denied any mistreatment and dismissed his account as exaggerated. Officials claimed Kyari could have applied for 50 per cent of his withheld allowance. For him, that was beside the point.
“They knew what I went through,” Kyari said. “Why should I apply for what’s already in the bylaws?”
Of his ₦396,000 service-year earnings, he has spent ₦300,000, over 75 per cent, on treatment and travel.
An outdated by-law
Several commentators argue that the thirty-two-year-old by-laws governing the NYSC are outdated and no longer reflect the needs of today’s reality. A key issue is the disconnect between medical provisions and modern healthcare practices.
The by-laws permit corps members on leave of absence to seek treatment at military or general hospitals using their ID cards. However, hospitals do not recognise this, and as a result, treatment is often denied, leading to medical neglect, a problem that the by-laws fail to address, as they predate the NHIS.
Penalties for violations are inadequate. For instance, taking a double ration of food in camp results in a mere ₦20 fine, which doesn’t reflect Nigeria’s current economic realities or serve as a proper deterrent. The amount hardly buys a small sachet of water today.
More than 50 years after the NYSC Act was established, many of its provisions remain outdated and disconnected from contemporary economic realities.
The Act mandates that employers treat corps members like any other graduate in a similar employment setting, including paying them an equivalent salary. It also requires employers to pay a minimum of ₦250 monthly for accommodation if none is provided, and ₦150 for transport. However, the naira has lost 99.8 per cent of its value since 1973. In today’s naira value, average rent for a one-room apartment in Kyari’s location, for instance, costs about ₦125,000, while transport expenses could amount to roughly ₦75,000.
Experts say that reforms should focus on modernising medical protocols, ensuring adequate NHIS coverage for corps members, and adjusting penalties to be more appropriate for today’s context. These changes are critical for protecting the health, safety, and dignity of Nigeria’s young graduates.
“The scheme [referring to NYSC] was established to promote unity and integration, but corruption has eroded its effectiveness, with corps members often being forced to pay for privileges that should be standard,” Nankpak Cirfat, Public Policy Communications Officer at Connected Development, an Abuja-based advocacy organisation, told HumAngle. “We need reforms that align the scheme with contemporary realities, ensuring it serves the interests and rights of its beneficiaries.”
Nankpak, who is also a postgraduate researcher in public administration at Miva Open University, Abuja, added that the need for these reforms is “urgent.” “Even with the recent minimum wage increase, which impacted the allowances of corps members, it remains insufficient to meet their needs. They are still required to pay for accommodation, feeding, transportation, healthcare, and other necessities while away from home. It has become a matter of survival,” Nankpak said.
As Kyari put it, “I didn’t speak out for money. I just wanted change.” That change can only take root when corps members are protected, not penalised, for holding the system to account.
The names of the corps members have been changed to protect their identities.