Sola Ojo, Kaduna
The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) on Friday, distributed thousands of matrasses to corps members who would be serving as ad-hoc staff during the elections beginning tomorrow.
This development might be linked with the recent gory pictures on social media of corps members sleeping on the floor, some in the open on the eve of the postponed elections.
Commenting on the development, NYSC Coordinator in Kaduna, Hajiya Walida Siddique, said, the Director-General of the scheme, Major General Suleiman Kazaure, had insisted on the welfare of the corps members at their residential area centres (RACs) from where they are expected to move to their respective polling stations on the election days.
According to her, the mattresses were to compliment the mats earlier provided for the corps members by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
The coordinator, supported by the Deputy- Director, Human Resources Planning, who is representing the DG as election monitor in Kaduna, added that about 8,000 out of about 10,000 serving corps members in the state were voluntarily participating in the exercise.
She, however, noted that, no corps member was deployed to any of the two local governments identified as volatile namely Kajuru and Birni Gwari.
“We don’t allow any corps members to be posted to the two local government areas where we cannot guarantee their safety. In fact, we withdrew ten of them posted to a community in Chikun because of its proximity to Birni Gwari,” she said.
‘In these RACs, which are mostly public primary and secondary schools, security, matrasses/mats, water, generator, buckets, toilet facilities/toiletries are expected to be provided by INEC.”