Nigeria Is Sending Its Graduates to Serve — and Collecting Them in Body Bags

On the morning of January 9, 2025, a 22-year-old woman named Abasifreke Victor Joseph boarded a commercial bus in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. She had just completed her NYSC orientation camp and was heading to Kogi State to begin her primary assignment. Her sister tracked the journey by phone, calling every few hours to confirm she was safe.

At 2 pm, the sister called again. The number did not connect.

Gunmen had struck along the Enugu-Nsukka Road at Enugu-Ezike, in the Igbo Eze North Local Government Area of Enugu State. They had intercepted three 18-seater commercial buses and dragged out their occupants at gunpoint, abducting at least 35 passengers, including Abasifreke and several other corps members. Nigerian Army soldiers travelling on the same road were not spared; PTE Usoro Ezekiel Paul, PTE Jeremiah Inimbom Thomas, and PTE Victor Itiat Godwin were taken alongside the civilians, according to Sahara Reporters.

Abasifreke’s captors wasted no time. They demanded ₦20 million for her release, threatening to kill her if the money did not come. She spent five days and five nights in their den without food or water.

“We were beaten mercilessly and stripped of our belongings, including our mobile phones,” she said after her release. “It was a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

She made it out. Many others have not. And behind her story, stretching back years across every geopolitical zone in Nigeria, is a pattern of abduction, ransom, silence, and institutional failure so entrenched that the federal agency responsible for corps members once put kidnapping survival tips in its own handbook and then denied it ever happened.

The Numbers the Government Has Not Addressed

The Foundation for Investigative Journalism conducted a systematic review of corps member abductions in December 2023. Its findings were stark: at least 83 corps members had been kidnapped across Nigeria since the programme’s inception, with 63 of those abductions occurring between 2018 and 2023 alone, pointing to a sharp acceleration. Rivers State alone accounted for 40 of those cases. The numbers, FIJ noted, have continued to rise since the report was published.

Between 2023 and 2025, kidnappers extracted at least ₦46.1 million in confirmed ransom payments from the families of abducted corps members, according to FIJ’s follow-up investigation published in March 2025. That figure covers only documented cases where families spoke to journalists. It does not account for the significant number of abductions that, as FIJ noted, “make the rounds on social media and are not picked up by mainstream media, with families scrambling to raise ransoms for their kidnapped loved ones.”

The financial mechanics of these abductions follow a recognisable pattern. Kidnappers open with a demand far beyond what any family can raise, then negotiate downward under the pressure of time and desperation.

Omoniyi Feranmi, a prospective corps member, was abducted in Kogi State on November 2, 2023, while travelling to report for orientation camp in Abuja. His captors initially demanded ₦20 million. His family negotiated them down to ₦10 million and paid it. Aisha Shittu, kidnapped in Kaduna State in November 2023, faced a demand of ₦500 million. Her family eventually negotiated her freedom for ₦30 million in cash, paid directly to avoid digital trails, plus ten brand-new motorcycles demanded by the abductors. The family of Esther Akande, kidnapped in August 2023 while travelling to an NYSC camp in Keffi, Nasarawa State, had friends, coursemates, and staff members at Adeyemi College of Education pool resources to raise ₦1 million after the initial demand had been ₦300 million. Rofiat Lawal, kidnapped while travelling from Edo State to resume at her primary assignment in Ibadan, was released only after her family paid ₦1.1 million, the most they could manage after the original ₦20 million demand was gradually reduced. “They later reduced it to ₦5 million, but the family could only raise ₦1.1 million,” the FIJ report documented.

Beyond kidnapping, the highway death toll tells its own story. More than 50 corps members have died in road accidents over the past four years, according to the NYSC itself. More than 40 corps members have died in avoidable mishaps since 2019 while travelling across Nigeria’s roads on the back of mandatory federal call-ups. In January 2025, Safwan Fade, a corps member serving in Plateau State, was brutally attacked at a township stadium and died from his injuries, adding one more name to a list that the federal government has never published in full.

These are not statistics. Each one is a family that sent a child to serve Nigeria, and did not get them back whole.

The Pamphlet That Said It All

The most damning document in this investigation is not a court record or a leaked memo. It is a handbook that the NYSC itself produced, distributed to every corps member at orientation, and then denied when its contents became public.

The document is titled “Security Awareness and Education Handbook For Corps Members and Staff.” It was produced by Watch-Con Security Consultancy Services in collaboration with NYSC headquarters. Page 56 of the handbook identified specific roads as “high risk,” including the Abuja-Kaduna corridor, the Abuja-Lokoja-Okene route, and the Aba-Port Harcourt road. Its advice to corps members travelling on those roads was a sentence of profound institutional surrender.

The handbook had advised corps members travelling on “high-risk” roads to alert their “family members, friends and colleagues to have someone on hand to pay off the ransom that could be demanded” in case they are kidnapped.

Page 57 went further. Under the heading “Advisory Action When Kidnapped or Taken Hostage,” the handbook instructed corps members to be polite to their abductors, not to antagonize them, to establish personal relationships with the people holding them captive, to advise friends involved in ransom negotiations to be friendly with the kidnappers, and to “take no risk by attempting to escape. DO NOT BE A HERO.”

The handbook also warned corps members not to travel with laptops, tablets, or mobile phones storing financial information, because, it noted plainly, “kidnappers will charge according to your worth.”

When the document surfaced publicly in September 2021, the NYSC’s first instinct was denial. Its management called the content a “fake release” made by “mischief-makers.” Then, under pressure from journalists who had obtained physical copies of the handbook, the organisation shifted ground. The spokesperson, Adenike Adeyemi, issued a short message acknowledging the contradiction: “We realised different copies are in circulation. We are investigating.”

In November 2025, when the document resurfaced and ignited fresh public outrage, the NYSC issued another denial. Its statement acknowledged that a consultant had presented a similar document for consideration in 2021 but said it was “not adopted.” Current and former corps members on social media immediately contradicted this position. One X user, @ola_product, wrote: “Something that is in the pamphlet I was given the year I served, this is one of the things destroying this country.”

The pamphlet first gained public attention in September 2021, when images of its content circulated widely on social media. It advised travellers on “high-risk roads” to alert “family, friends, or colleagues” so that someone would be available to “pay off the ransom that could be demanded” in the event of an abduction.

What the pamphlet reveals, beneath its bureaucratic language, is a confession. The NYSC knew its routes were dangerous. It knew corps members were being kidnapped. It knew families were paying ransoms. And its institutional response was not to secure the roads, negotiate convoy arrangements, or advocate for deployment reform. It was to advise young Nigerians to pack light and have their parents ready with cash.

A Chronicle of Cases the Nation Should Know

The individual stories behind the numbers are necessary reading, because they resist the comfort of abstraction.

In August 2023, eight prospective corps members were travelling from Uyo in Akwa Ibom State to their orientation camp in Sokoto State when gunmen intercepted their bus on a highway in Zamfara State, offloaded the occupants, and marched them into the bush. Three managed to escape from the kidnappers. The bus driver was abducted alongside the eight corps members. The remaining victims spent more than 100 days in captivity before being rescued through a joint effort involving the Nigerian Army, Police, DSS, and traditional rulers in Zamfara.

In February 2023, fifteen corps members were kidnapped at a filling station in Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State after completing their orientation programme. Armed men intercepted their vehicle, triggering days of national anxiety before they were eventually released.

In August 2024, eight more prospective corps members were ambushed on the Funtua-Bisau Road in Zamfara, again travelling from Uyo to Sokoto. NYSC DG Brigadier General Yushau Ahmed confirmed the kidnapping publicly. “They were kidnapped on 17 August 2024 on Funtua Bisau Road in Zamfara State,” he told journalists. The response was a collaborative rescue effort, not a policy change.

On December 24, 2024, Ojo Caleb Temidayo was abducted while travelling home to Ogotun Ekiti for Christmas. Corps member Adewole Paul was kidnapped returning from the NYSC camp in Enugu; his abductors demanded ₦30 million. Another corps member was kidnapped in Delta State, with captors demanding ₦5 million. Wisdom Djagbo faced a ransom demand of ₦3 million.

And then there is Engr. Amaya. He was travelling along the Maiduguri-Gwoza route when Boko Haram insurgents stopped his vehicle. In what survivors described as a deliberate religious targeting, the insurgents released the Muslim passengers and detained the Christians. Amaya, a Christian, was taken. His family received a single phone call from him in November 2024 confirming he was alive. Since then, nothing. His name does not appear in any official government communication about missing corps members. He has not been formally declared missing. The NYSC has issued no public update on his case.

The cases of corps members who were killed, strangled, kidnapped or abused are unending. The NYSC is economical with the truth of what happened or how corps members died. Parents are left in the dark.

The Accountability Gap

The most persistent failure in this story is not security. It is transparency.

When corps member Rofiat Lawal was kidnapped and later released, NYSC spokesperson Eddy Megwa and her father publicly denied that any ransom was paid. The FIJ investigation documented the payment. The gap between the official account and what families actually experienced is not an exception. It is, according to FIJ, consistent across documented cases: “Accounts from survivors and their families consistently point to ransom payments as the primary means of securing their freedom,” despite NYSC’s claims of rescue through security efforts.

Endemic corruption has also risen, as graduates meant to uphold national ethical standards now pay bribes to avoid the programme entirely or to secure postings to safer states. Some prospective corps members present fake certificates and medical documents to be mobilised to favourable places; others induce NYSC officials with cash and gift items.

This corruption is not moral failure on the part of the graduates. It is rational self-preservation in a system that sends young people into danger zones and offers no guaranteed protection. The NYSC discharge certificate, without which most Nigerian graduates cannot access formal employment, has been transformed from a symbol of service into a bureaucratic ransom of its own, payable in either bribery or physical risk.

The choice the government presents is grotesque: gamble with your life or forfeit your future.

The NYSC DG’s most substantive security announcement came alongside the ₦77,000 allowance increase: corps members would no longer be posted to communities facing active security threats. It was a genuine policy move, and it was also a concession that the government already knew where its own programme was sending young people to die. But the posting policy does not protect corps members on the roads between states, in the vehicles between home and camp, in the commercial buses that are the only transport option for graduates who cannot afford anything else.

The Nigerian Senate, in a measure that revealed more about the government’s understanding of the problem than it resolved it, proposed a bill to prohibit the payment of ransom entirely, threatening 15 years imprisonment for anyone who paid to free a kidnapped person. Nigerians rejected the proposal widely, noting, correctly, that the state cannot simultaneously fail to prevent kidnapping, refuse to pay ransoms itself, and then criminalise the desperate acts of families trying to get their children back.

What Reform Must Actually Look Like

The NYSC’s founding purpose, national integration through cross-cultural contact, was genuinely important in 1973 and remains relevant in principle today. The programme is not, at its core, broken. The security environment it operates in is.

The Afenifere socio-political organisation, and a growing number of governors, legislators, and civil society voices, have called for geopolitical zone-based postings, allowing graduates to serve within their home regions. The argument is pragmatic: shorter travel distances, reduced highway exposure, and cultural familiarity that does not require risking a cross-country bus journey through Zamfara.

Others propose a voluntary cross-state posting system, retaining integration as an option for those who choose it, while building in documented state-sponsored security transport for any corps member travelling across volatile corridors. The NYSC orientation camp network, with 37 camps across all 36 states and the FCT, already provides infrastructure that, with political will and coordinated security deployment, could be the backbone of a safer national service architecture.

What none of these proposals require is the erasure of national service. What all of them require is for the government to stop treating the deaths and abductions of corps members as acceptable background noise in an otherwise functioning programme.

While many Nigerians have called for the scrapping of the scheme, others have called on the government to re-organise the NYSC programme so that graduates can perform their one-year service within their geo-political zones.

The corps member who was lucky enough to break down on a Taraba highway at midnight and arrive safely is not evidence that the system is working. He is evidence that survival in Nigeria sometimes comes down to the random mercy of a mechanical fault rather than the protection of a state.

Engr. Amaya is still missing. The NYSC has not said his name in any official statement. His family is still waiting.

A country that cannot protect its graduates while they serve it has not earned the right to call what it is doing national service. It has earned the right to be asked, loudly and without pause, why it keeps doing it anyway.