You have just finished four (or five, or six — we don't judge) years of university. You survived ASUU strikes, bad hostel water, and lecturers who posted results six months late.

You finally have your certificate. You do your NYSC, sweat through three weeks of camp, get posted to some state you barely remember exists and can only point to it on a labelled map, and spend a year photocopying documents in an office that smells like old files and broken dreams.

Then you pass out, clutch that discharge certificate like it is the Golden Ticket, and step into the job market expecting... what exactly?

Source: Google

Because here is what nobody actually tells you: that certificate does not make you hireable. And the system knew it all along.

A Scheme Built for a Different Nigeria

NYSC was created in 1973, yes, over 50 years ago, by a military government trying to stitch the country back together after a civil war. The goal was national unity, cultural exchange, and rebuilding which is genuinely noble stuff.

But that Nigeria produced fewer than 3,000 university graduates a year. Today, Nigerian universities and polytechnics churn out close to 600,000 graduates annually, and NYSC can only mobilise between 240,000 and 350,000 of them. The math alone should tell you something is broken.

As of 2025, there is a backlog of over 500,000 graduates waiting to even begin their service year, 78,000 from the 2022 batch, 212,000 from 2023, and counting.

Some projections say that backlog could hit 1.2 million by 2027, with wait times stretching to three or four years.

Three to four years of your life, just waiting to start a program that was supposed to prepare you for the workforce. Let that sink in.

The Certificate Trap

There is a particular ironic situation we don’t seem to talk about. Employers demand the NYSC discharge certificate as a job requirement, but very few of them can tell you what skill it actually certifies.

It doesn't prove you can code. It doesn't prove you can write, manage a team, analyse data, or do literally anything useful in a 21st century workplace. It proves that you showed up, wore khaki, attended CDS meetings, and survived. That is it.

We have turned a document that certifies compliance into one that supposedly signals competence. And the system just rolls with it.

Meanwhile, over 60% of corps members, according to a 2024 study, reported that their service postings had nothing to do with their field of study.

An accountant teaching in a primary school. A computer science graduate filing papers in a local government office. An engineer watching the clock in a health centre that has not seen new equipment since 2009.

Nobody is being developed. People are just being placed.

The Year That Could Have Changed Your Life

Let us talk about opportunity cost. Twelve months is a serious amount of time.

In that same window, your peers in other countries are doing paid internships, building freelance portfolios, finishing certifications, learning new stacks, launching side businesses and other things that actually show up on a CV and make a recruiter call you back.

What does the NYSC posting system do instead? It displaces you from your city, your industry, and your network.

You get shipped to a state where you know nobody, assigned to a PPA based on what feels like a lottery, and told to be grateful.

Some people get lucky and land a PPA at a real company, make connections, learn something. But those people will tell you themselves that it was luck, or maybe not, and not design. The scheme rewards showing up, not growing.

To put it in perspective, the Nigerian government spent over 83.9 billion on NYSC in 2017 alone, roughly N280,000 per corps member, and yet there is no systematic data tracking whether any of that investment translates into better employment outcomes.

That is not a statistic from a critic, that is the economic reality of a system that has not been redesigned for the economy it is operating in.

So Who Is Actually Winning Here?

The government gets hundreds of thousands of low-cost workers for schools, hospitals, and government offices every year, roles that should be filled by properly paid professionals.

Host organisations get free or near-free labour with zero obligation to train, mentor, or retain the person. And the corps member gets N77,000 a month (up from the old N33,000, but still barely enough to survive), a certificate, and memories.

There is a skills program, SAED (Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development), that has existed since 2012 and has reportedly trained close to a million youths. But independent assessments consistently describe it as underfunded, generic, and disconnected from what the actual labour market needs.

You can't solve an employability crisis with a three-week tailoring workshop.

What Actually Makes You Hireable

Employability, real employability, comes from a track record. It comes from projects you can show, problems you have solved, skills you can demonstrate under pressure, and a network of people who will vouch for your work.

None of that is reliably delivered by NYSC. The graduates thriving after their service year are thriving because of what they built alongside the scheme or despite it not because of it.

The discharge certificate gets your application past the first filter. After that, you are completely on your own.

And the cruel part is that the year you spent waiting for camp, sitting in camp, or counting down days at a pointless PPA is a year you could have been building something real.

Stop Waiting on NYSC to Save You

Is NYSC going anywhere? Almost certainly not. The politics around it are too deep, the symbolism too entrenched, and the government dependency on that cheap labour pool too convenient. Reform is discussed every few years and goes nowhere.

So here is the honest advice: treat the year strategically. Network aggressively wherever they post you.

Use evenings and weekends to build. Take online courses, finish certifications, freelance, document every single thing you do that has value.

Don't let the PPA become your whole life. Your discharge certificate opens a door but what you walk in with is entirely on you.

The scheme gave you a year. The question is what you actually did with it.