From: Ali Abare, Gombe
Members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) will, henceforth, be empowered through skills acquisition for self-employment after the service year, Director-General of National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Brig-Gen Suleiman Kazaure, has said.
Kazaure stated this while on an inspection visit to ongoing construction of NYSC Integrated Skills Acquisition and Vocational Centre for the North- East zone in Gombe on Thursday.
He said the centre would be replicated in each geopolitical zone of the country.
He said the aim of the project is to empower corps members to acquire skills that would enable them become self-employed and employers of labour after completing the service year.
“When we came onboard, we discovered that we have problems of post camp training in skills acquisition, we now decided to initiate a project in the six geo-political zones.
“If we finish this one, we are going to South-south, already we have established one in the South-west to meet demands of the corps members out of white-collar jobs.
“If you look at the numbers of corps members we are producing no government or private organizations can employ them all.
“We decided to establish six acquisition centres so that they can be trained and to be self-employed”, Kazaure said.
The project is in collaboration with Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Bank of Industry (BOI).
Kazaure expressed satisfaction with the level of the project and its quality, urging the contractor to maintain the pace.
Mr Ibeh Chidube, NYSC Gombe State coordinator said the centre has the capacity to accommodate 500 corps members and 20 facilitators at a go.
He explained further that the idea to establish the skills acquisition centres in the six geo-political zones of the federation is to expand the Skills Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development (SAED) through the establishment of more skills centres and greater stakeholder involvement for skill and material support.