The months flew past and everything became routine like and monotonous. Temptations to stab CDS started coming, it was easy kind of, all I had to do was ask someone to sign for me, of course signature will be forged, but I still was unable to do it. you may say it is because I like being honest and avoiding untruthfulness, discrepancies and the likes, you may say I have a very active guilty conscience or maybe it’s the fact that I know that nothing comes free the person who helps me sign today will expect that I repay the “good deed” someday soon and God knows I don’t have such guts. Anyway bottom line is I couldn’t do it , so my trips to Ibadan north local government continued weekly.
The annoying queues came too as well as unending annoying addresses they usually gave, come to think of it, those address hardly benefitted one. It was either the local government inspector was complaining about indecent dressing or he was complaining about certain payments.
There was a time SAED ,skill acquisition training was compulsory.
So compulsory that without a SAED pass from whoever you are training with you are not allowed to sign monthly clearance, which implies that your allawee that month might go missing. So we had to keep up with SAED, some of us go to bribe our SAED trainers for clearance especially those who never attended classes or pay “training money” but then I had to pay training money at some points o. unfortunately the SAED that was compulsory later became optional after complaints got to the ogas at the top I think. You know SAED was actually supposed to be a good initiative initially, people learn handworks and crafts that might be useful to them even if they are unable to get jobs. But like every other initiative or innovation in Nigeria it was turned into an unscrupulous means of syphoning money.
Well there is good in bad and there is bad in good, as some people still benefited from this ventures, one of the good things I appreciate my NYSC experience for , one of the memorable things I participated in then was visits to the orphanage homes. Yes I was in charity CDS. We visited one particular orphanage one time, it was a special orphanage for abnormal children, I was shocked and amazed to see that in Nigeria we still have individuals who believe in disabled children. Everyone at the orphanage (special) that day was touched and withdra
As we sang for them they made gestures which implied that they were excited and happy. We were at least glad that we could do something for them that appealed to their emotions other than give them food and clothing. There are other experiences this Ibadan corper went through….. sharing experience continues
