Claudia Ayodele, a former National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member recently discharged has narrated her unpleasant youth corps experience during her year in service.
The former corper who passed out on Thursday, took to Instagram to share her frustrations, even as she highlighted some of the positive parts of her service year.
She started off by noting how she couldn’t wait to get out of her “horrible government uniform” and how she would not be showing off her NYSC certificate.
In a separate but longer post, which she titled, ‘A brief recap’, Ayodele shared how often she thought about quitting the service but kept reminding herself of the reason she registered for the programme in the first place.
See a summary of her posts below:
“A brief recap
Honestly the last 11 months were not a joke.
I don’t know how many times I wanted to literally quit NYSC but I kept reminding myself why I actually started
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Why? Because you just never know when Nigerians want to make your life miserable in the future. On the positive note, I learnt a lot about the way of life in this country
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Got to experience going to a state without an airport in its near vicinity. Got to experience what it’s like to be in the deepest jungle bush where even google maps imaging cannot capture the road. Got to experience how deeply ingrained corruption and indiscipline is in Nigerians from young to old. Got to experience how simple queueing, is not possible… Over and over again
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Respect rarely exists. Humility rarely exists. Shame equally rarely exists. Self-Interest exists. Before anyone gets hurt by this finding, honestly there’s a big difference between poor and middle class not to talk of upper class
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They say Nigeria has a high number of graduates, I say Nigeria has a high number of graduates who were not taught quality education and lack basic common sense
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They say the problem with Nigeria is it’s old leaders, I say Nigeria faces an even bigger problem when the young already show traits of the older generation clinging on to power
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For the first time I got to fully interact with Nigerians from all walks of life and it has been a truly humbling experience. I am grateful to those who pushed me to do NYSC because now I know up until a year ago, I lived in a bubble when it came to ‘knowing’ my country.”