National service between law and morality

The debate on whether the refusal by some university graduates to participate in the mandatory one-year national service was right or wrong was, last week, re-opened again when the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) raised the alarm that one of the ministers recently appointed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is currently a serving corps member in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme. The Director, Press and Public Relations of the NYSC, Eddy Megwa, disclosed that the Minister of Arts and Culture, Mrs. Hannatu Musawa, who is currently doing her one-year youth service is occupying the ministerial position in breach of the NYSC Act. Megwa confirmed to reporters that the minister is eight months old in the scheme, and that she is serving in the FCT.

According to Megwa, it is against the NYSC Act for any corps member to pick up any government appointment until the one-year service was over. He explained that Mrs. Musawa was originally mobilised in 2001 for the youth service to Ebonyi State where she had her orientation programme but later relocated to Kaduna State to continue the service. Megwa said it was when she got to Kaduna that she absconded and didn’t complete the service. Reacting to Megwa, Mrs. Musawa said she has not contravened any law; a statement she later refuted.

Before Hannatu Musawa, two other ministers, Kemi Adeosun and Shittu Adebayo, had hitherto been caught in the same controversy of NYSC certificate. In the case of Adeosun, she forged an exemption certificate many years after graduation; an act that compelled her to resign her appointment as Nigeria’s Minister of Finance under the first tenure of former President Muhammadu Buhari. Mrs. Adeosun graduated in 1989 at the age of 22 from the Polytechnic of East London (which late had its name changed in 1992 to University of East London).

When Adeosun eventually returned to Nigeria in 2002, she did not participate in the NYSC scheme but still got a job at a private firm, Chapel Hill Denham. Realising she might one day need the NYSC certificate, Mrs. Adeosun procured a fake exemption certificate sometime in 2009. She possibly didn’t know that the NYSC does not issue exemption certificate to anyone who, like herself, graduates before his 30th birthday. Having been found liable for certificate forgery, Adeosun eventually resigned her appointment as minister in 2018.

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Barely a week after Mrs. Kemi Adeosun’s resignation, the then Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, was also accused of not serving in the NYSC scheme after his graduation at the age of 25 from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU) in 1978. Shittu completed his programme at the Law School in 1979, and was elected in the same year into the Oyo State House of Assembly. Like Hannatu Musawa, Shittu insisted that he deliberately skipped the national service; adding that he did not need to participate in the scheme since he had been elected a lawmaker. “The constitution provides for the qualification needed for state assembly members, NYSC is not there. I didn’t need it to become a member of the state assembly, and that is already a service”, Shittu reportedly said.

Since the appointment of persons who should have but didn’t serve in the mandatory NYSC scheme as ministers, the argument has been whether their refusal to participate in the scheme was right or wrong. While those who look at it from the legal perspective say it’s legally right, ethically-minded others say it’s morally wrong. But could one thing be right and wrong at the same time? Yes, of course. For instance, Slavery in America was once legal; yet, that did not stop it from being immoral. However, this case as analyzed here, is legally and morally wrong.

The extant laws of the NYSC which make participation in the NYSC scheme mandatory are clear. Were the one-year national service not compulsory or skipping it not an offence, the NYSC Act wouldn’t have prescribed punishment for anyone who absconds from the scheme or forges its certificates. Although Shittu and Musawa both believe that they have not flouted any laws for being ministers without completing or participating in the NYSC scheme, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Femi Falana, said it was a violation of the law for anybody who is still serving in the NYSC to accept a ministerial appointment. In a statement titled: “A Youth Corps Member is not Competent to be a Minister in Nigeria”, Falana said by virtue of Section 2 of the NYSC Act, every citizen who graduated from any tertiary institution in and outside Nigeria and was not 30 years old shall be mobilised for the one-year compulsory national youth service.

It would be recalled that Mrs Musawa was rejected in 2020 by the Senate Committee that screened nominees for appointment as commissioners into PENCOM for her failure to present NYSC discharge certificate. Although the 10th Senate asked Musawa to take a bow during the last screening exercise, it’s dishonourable that she presented herself for the second time without NYSC discharge certificate. Because of the moral burden involved in this matter, we advise Mrs Musawa to return to her place of primary assignment to complete her national service. Thereafter, she could pick up her ministerial gown and return to the Federal Ministry of Culture.

From the ethical angle, it is scandalously ridiculous, unreasonable, and therefore immoral, for a citizen that deliberately refused to answer his country’s call to mandatory national service to re-appear, thereafter, to accept to serve the same country he once objected to oblige its call. If a citizen felt it was lawful for him to refuse to serve in the mandatory one-year national service, why then should it interest him to serve the same country when such had become a matter of choice? Whatever made him to shun the compulsory national service should still inspire him to reject his appointment as a minister. After all, it is voluntary in the second instance.

In the religious sense, a Muslim who deliberately refused to observe the five obligatory prayers, for example, or failed to fast in the month of Ramadan which is an obligatory requirement would have lost every legal and moral justification in either cases to observe superogatory (nafilat) prayers or fast voluntarily. By the same token, a prospective corps member would have legally erred and morally ‘sinned’ for skipping the mandatory national service only to afterwards accept a ministerial appointment which is discretionary. May Allah guide us to prioritize obligations over voluntary duties, amin.