A former Director-General of National Youth Service Corps, NYSC, Maharazu Tsiga, has corroborated the position of a former NYSC Director of Mobilization, Mr Anthony Ani saying the Corps couldn’t have approved the request of Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, for an exemption certificate.
Tsiga was Director-General of the NYSC at the time the minister claimed to have applied for the certificate in 2009.
In a telephone interview with online portal, Premium Times, Tsiga, a retired general, further provided clues that further reinforced positions of NYSC’s serving and retired personnel, including a retired director of mobilisation, Anthony Ani, all pointing to the invalidity of the said ‘certificate’.
He repeated the point earlier made by Mr Ani that verifying any certificate claimed to be from the NYSC was an easy task.
“We have what is called strong room. I believe from there they can easily identify if a certificate is issued by the NYSC or not,” he said. On whether anybody who graduated below the age of 30 but applied later to the NYSC for exemption could be exempted, Tsiga said “it is not possible.’’
He said even if one had reached 100 years, one would still have to serve, saying: ‘’In as much as you have not served, no matter how old you are, in as much as you were not mobilised to serve at the time you were supposed to serve, they can never give you exemption.
Speaking in a Channels Television flagship programme, Sunrise, on Wednesday, former Director of Mobilisation at the agency, Anthony Ani, had said there was no way a director-general who left the system in January could have signed a September certificate, among others.
“I don’t know where the certificate comes from but (what) I say is that NYSC cannot make that mistake. The NYSC that I served, that I know, can never make that type of mistake,” Ani said.
