By Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D

They were not travelling for holidays. They were not adventurers ignoring security warnings. They were young Nigerian graduates answering a call from their country.

Their destination was the National Youth Service Corps orientation camps in Abia and Akwa Ibom States. Their journey began in Ibadan. But somewhere around Umunoha on the Owerri–Onitsha Road in Imo State, gunmen intercepted the two buses carrying them and marched several of the prospective corps members into the bush.

Today, their families are living every parent’s nightmare. Reports indicate that the kidnappers demanded ₦50 million for each victim. Even the precise number still being held has become contested. Some reports put it at 19, while parents insist 20 remain in captivity and dispute official accounts that some passengers were rescued, saying they escaped during the attack.

Meanwhile, police say drones have helped locate the suspected kidnappers’ camp, but intelligence suggesting that the area may have been planted with improvised explosive devices has complicated rescue efforts.

Beyond the immediate and overriding concern of bringing these young Nigerians home safely lies a question Nigeria can no longer avoid:

What duty does the state owe young citizens whom it compels to serve it?

The NYSC was established in 1973 in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Nigeria desperately needed institutions capable of rebuilding national cohesion. Its philosophy remains admirable. Young graduates should encounter Nigerians beyond the boundaries of ethnicity, religion and geography. The scheme seeks to develop common ties, remove prejudices and promote national unity and integration.

Indeed, its governing framework provides that, as far as possible, young Nigerians should be assigned to states other than their states of origin.

That is precisely what gives today’s security question its urgency.

Nigeria cannot build a compulsory system around sending young people beyond familiar environments and then treat the dangers involved in reaching those destinations as entirely their private responsibility.

This is not the first warning. In August 2023, eight prospective corps members travelling from Akwa Ibom to begin national service in Sokoto were abducted along the Funtua–Gusau Road in Zamfara State. Their ordeal dragged on for months. The final victim was not rescued until August 2024.

Now another group of young graduates travelling to answer the same national call has been abducted. At some point, recurrence must become policy evidence.

This is why the argument should not be reduced to whether NYSC should be scrapped. Following the latest abduction, activist and politician Omoyele Sowore called for the immediate suspension and eventual abolition of the scheme. He argues that government cannot compel young Nigerians to serve across the country when it cannot guarantee their safety.

That position deserves debate. But insecurity should not automatically be allowed to destroy one of Nigeria’s longest surviving instruments of national integration.

The better question is whether the NYSC model has sufficiently adapted to the Nigeria of today.

The Nigeria into which NYSC was born in 1973 is not the Nigeria through which corps members travel in 2026. Kidnapping for ransom, banditry, terrorism and violent criminal networks have transformed the security environment across significant parts of the country.

Public policy must respond to changed reality.

NYSC already advises prospective and serving corps members against travelling at night. That is sensible, but advice cannot substitute for a comprehensive duty of care.

If government requires graduates to report to orientation camps across the federation, why should there not be designated and protected transportation arrangements from regional departure points during mobilisation periods? Why should deployment decisions not incorporate constantly updated security risk assessments? Why should prospective corps members be left individually to navigate routes that security agencies themselves may consider dangerous?

There should also be clear protocols determining when postings to particular areas must be suspended, relocated or made optional because security conditions have deteriorated.

And where credible danger exists, requesting redeployment should not require a young Nigerian to prove that he or she is married or medically vulnerable before safety becomes relevant.

The state cannot eliminate every risk. No government can guarantee that no citizen will ever encounter crime. Corps members are also adults with responsibilities for their personal safety.

But compulsory service changes the equation. When the state requires a citizen to undertake an activity, directs where that citizen should report and makes completion of that service consequential to the graduate’s future, the state assumes a heightened responsibility to anticipate reasonably foreseeable risks and mitigate them.

Patriotism must carry reciprocal obligations. Nigeria asks these young people to leave their homes, cross cultural and geographical boundaries, live among strangers and devote a year to national service. In return, they are entitled to more than khaki uniforms, orientation drills and monthly allowances. They are entitled to a system designed around their safety.

That does not diminish the ideal of NYSC. It may be necessary to save it.

For more than five decades, the scheme has brought Nigerians together in ways few other national institutions have managed. Friendships have been formed, marriages have begun, prejudices have been challenged and young Nigerians have discovered parts of their country they might otherwise never have known.

Those achievements are worth preserving. But preserving NYSC cannot mean preserving it unchanged.

The young Nigerians now held somewhere in the forests of Imo State did not create Nigeria’s insecurity. They should not become collateral damage of a national programme that has failed to adapt adequately to it.

The immediate responsibility is clear: every lawful effort must be made to bring them home safely.

Afterwards must come the harder conversation. Not simply whether Nigeria should retain or abolish NYSC, but whether compulsory national service in an age of widespread insecurity requires an entirely new architecture of protection. Because if the state insists that its young citizens have a duty to serve their country, one obligation must be equally non-negotiable.

The country has a duty to protect those who serve it.

Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D, FIMC, CMC
Email: lemmyughegbeofficial@gmail.com
WhatsApp ONLY: +2348069716645

When what organisations say collides with what people experience, reputation is decided by experience.

By Dr. Omolaraeni Olaosebikan

There comes a point in every reputation problem when better communication is no longer the answer. It is an uncomfortable admission for those of us who have spent our careers helping organisations communicate. We understand the power of language. We know that silence creates vacuums, that poor communication can turn manageable problems into crises, and that even good decisions can lose public confidence when they are badly explained. But there is another truth organisations sometimes discover rather late: communication can clarify reality; it cannot indefinitely compete with it.

This distinction matters because organisations have become extraordinarily sophisticated at telling their stories.

Governments have communication teams. Companies have corporate affairs departments. Leaders have media advisers. Brands have agencies, influencers, content calendars and carefully constructed campaigns. We have more channels through which to communicate than ever before, yet trust remains remarkably difficult to secure. Perhaps the problem is not always that organisations are communicating too little. Sometimes, what they communicate and what people experience are telling two different stories.
Consider the ordinary customer. A company tells her that she is at the heart of everything it does. The advertising is beautiful. The campaign speaks about care, convenience and exceptional service. Then something goes wrong. She calls customer service and waits endlessly. Her complaint moves from one person to another. Nobody takes ownership. Eventually, the company she has been told is obsessed with her experience begins to feel remarkably indifferent to it. Which message will she believe: the campaign or the experience?

The answer seems obvious, yet organisations repeatedly spend considerable resources trying to solve an experience problem with a communications solution. When perception deteriorates, the instinct is often to increase visibility: more media, more advertising, another campaign, another press release, perhaps an influencer or two. Sometimes that is precisely what is required. But before prescribing more communication, there is a harder question worth asking: is the reputation problem actually being created by what people are hearing, or by what they are experiencing?

Reputation is often treated as something managed primarily by communications professionals. In reality, communications may manage the articulation of reputation, but the organisation itself produces the evidence from which reputation is formed. The chief executive contributes to it. So does the receptionist. Product quality contributes. Pricing contributes. Human resources contributes. The technician who arrives at a customer’s home contributes. The employee who responds to an email contributes. Long before the communications department writes the story, hundreds of seemingly ordinary decisions have already begun writing it.

Reputation is not what an organisation says about itself. It is the conclusion people reach after comparing what it says with what they experience.
The same principle applies beyond business.

Governments can announce programmes, policies and achievements, but citizens ultimately interpret those messages through their own lives. Leaders can speak convincingly about accountability, sacrifice or inclusion, but the language becomes credible only when behaviour provides supporting evidence. Institutions can declare values on walls, websites and annual reports, but employees learn the organisation’s real values by watching which behaviours are rewarded, tolerated or punished.
This does not make communication less important. It makes strategic communication considerably more important. Good communication provides context. It explains difficult decisions. It corrects misinformation. It helps people understand complexity. It gives visibility to actions that might otherwise go unnoticed and, crucially, it allows organisations to listen. The mistake is believing that communication possesses some magical ability to create permanent trust independently of organisational conduct.

Trust is accumulated through consistency. One good advertisement cannot manufacture it. One bad encounter may not destroy it either. People build judgments gradually, through repeated encounters between promise and performance. Every time those two align, credibility earns another small deposit. Every time they diverge, something is withdrawn. Eventually, an organisation discovers that reputation is the balance left in that account.

This is particularly significant in today’s information environment. The organisation is no longer the sole narrator of its own story. Employees speak. Customers post. Screenshots travel. Reviews remain searchable. A single experience can move from a private interaction to a public conversation in minutes. Corporate communication therefore operates in an environment where institutional claims can be compared almost instantly with human evidence.

Instead of beginning with, “How do we make people see us differently?”, perhaps the conversation should begin with, “Why are people seeing us this way?” Those questions may sound similar. They are not. The first assumes perception is the problem and communication must correct it. The second allows for a more difficult possibility: that perception may contain information the organisation needs to hear. Sometimes the public has misunderstood. Sometimes a good organisation has simply failed to explain itself well. But sometimes the market, employees, customers or citizens are accurately describing an experience that leadership would rather communicate away.

That is where strategic communication should increasingly sit—not at the end of the organisational process, polishing decisions already made, but close enough to leadership to bring stakeholder reality into the room before decisions become reputational problems.

The communicator of the future cannot simply be the organisation’s loudspeaker. He or she must also be one of its most disciplined listeners.

When this happens, communication stops being cosmetic and becomes diagnostic. Reputation stops being something organisations attempt to manufacture and becomes something they consciously earn. Perhaps that is the reputation question more boardrooms should ask before approving the next campaign: if we stopped telling people who we are, what would their experience tell them?

Because eventually, every organisation reaches the point where the story it tells must meet the story people live. When those two stories reinforce each other, trust becomes possible. When they repeatedly contradict each other, even the finest communication eventually stops working. And that is why the narrative matters.

Dr. Omolaraeni Olaosebikan
Strategic Communications & Reputation Management Expert | Founder, The Narrative Matters®

By Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D
Nigeria is a poor country sitting on extraordinary wealth.
Beneath the feet of millions of Nigerians struggling to afford food, healthcare, education and decent shelter lie mineral resources the Federal Government estimates to be worth about $700 billion. Gold, lithium and other critical minerals increasingly coveted by industries powering the twenty first century are buried beneath a country still searching for the prosperity its natural endowments have repeatedly promised.
That contradiction should haunt us as Nigeria signs a new critical minerals framework with the United States.
The agreement, signed in New York by the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, and United States Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, seeks to encourage American investment across Nigeria’s mining value chain, including exploration, mineral development and processing, infrastructure and technical capacity.
There is much to welcome. Particularly encouraging is Alake’s declaration that Nigeria does not intend to remain merely a source of raw materials from which other countries create value. Government says the ambition is to strengthen local processing, develop skills, create jobs and expand opportunities for Nigerian businesses.
Those are the right objectives. But Nigeria has been wealthy beneath the ground before.
For more than six decades, oil promised transformation. Hundreds of billions of dollars flowed from the Niger Delta into government accounts, yet many communities sitting above that wealth remained poor, environmentally damaged and inadequately developed. Nigeria exported crude oil while importing refined petroleum products for years, surrendering much of the value that should have been created at home.
We cannot afford to reproduce that history with solid minerals.
The global race for critical minerals presents Nigeria with an unusual opportunity. Lithium, rare earths and other strategic minerals are increasingly important to batteries, electric vehicles, renewable energy, electronics and defence industries. Competition for secure mineral supply chains gives countries possessing these resources bargaining power.
Nigeria must use that leverage wisely.
The question should not simply be how much foreign investment we can attract, but how much Nigerian value every dollar of that investment creates. How much processing will take place here? How many Nigerians will acquire technical skills? How much technology will be transferred? And what will communities living above these resources have to show when the minerals beneath them are gone?
These questions are urgent because the reality of mining in Nigeria remains far removed from the glittering figures announced at investment conferences. Illegal and informal mining remain widespread. Smuggling deprives government of revenue. Environmental degradation threatens communities, while poverty drives vulnerable Nigerians into hazardous artisanal operations.
The recent tragedy involving suspected illegal miners in Niger State makes the contradiction especially difficult to ignore. Reports indicate that many of those arrested were teenagers.
Whatever eventually emerges from investigations into their deaths in custody, another question precedes their arrest: why were children and teenagers working around dangerous mining operations in the first place?
There is something fundamentally wrong when minerals beneath a community can be worth billions of dollars while children above them are poor enough to risk their lives digging for fragments of that wealth.
Government appears conscious of some of these problems. Alake has proposed a Mine Emergency and Community Development Fund as well as an African safety facility intended to help formalise artisanal mining, encourage cooperatives and improve safety.
Formalisation is important because simply criminalising artisanal miners will not solve the problem. Many are poor Nigerians operating at the lowest and most dangerous end of a lucrative value chain from which more powerful actors often derive greater rewards. They need regulation, training, cooperatives, access to legitimate markets and basic safety standards. Criminal networks exploiting them and illegally exporting Nigeria’s resources require a different response.
There must also be transparency. If Nigeria’s mineral wealth is entering a new era, citizens should be able to follow the money from licence to mine, from mine to processor, from processor to export and from revenue to government accounts.
Mining licences cannot become political patronage. Communities cannot discover that rights over the land beneath their homes have been allocated without meaningful consultation. Environmental obligations cannot exist merely on paper, and agreements with investors must contain enforceable provisions for rehabilitation when mining ends.
Most importantly, host communities must not become spectators to wealth extracted from beneath their feet.
Nigeria should have learnt this lesson from the Niger Delta. Communities that see enormous wealth leaving their land while poverty, pollution and unemployment remain behind will eventually question the legitimacy of the system. Community development must therefore be built into the economics of mining from the beginning, not introduced years later as compensation for accumulated grievances.
The Nigeria US framework can be an important opportunity. American capital, technology and expertise can help Nigeria develop a modern mining industry. Nigeria needs investment, and there is nothing inherently wrong with foreign companies earning legitimate returns on capital and risk.
But partnership must mean more than extraction.
The old model in which Africa digs, ships and watches others manufacture must end. A tonne of mineral ore leaving Nigeria represents one value. What that mineral becomes after processing, refining and manufacturing represents something considerably greater. The difference is where industries, technology, skills and prosperity are built.
That is the wealth Nigeria has too often exported.
Alake has acknowledged that signing an agreement is the easy part and implementation the harder task. That may prove to be the most important observation surrounding this framework. Nigeria has never lacked ambitious agreements or declarations of intent. Our graveyard of economic promises is already overcrowded.
What matters is what remains in Nigeria after the speeches in New York are forgotten.
The minerals beneath Nigeria ultimately belong to Nigerians. Success will not be measured merely by billions of dollars in investment attracted or tonnes of ore exported, but by the value created above the ground.
If this new mineral economy produces Nigerian industries, skilled jobs, safer mining, thriving businesses and prosperous host communities, the country may finally turn geological fortune into human development.
But if we export the ore, export the value and leave behind poverty, dangerous pits and damaged communities, we will merely have exchanged one resource curse for another.
Nigeria already knows what it means to possess enormous wealth beneath widespread poverty.
We should not have to learn that lesson twice.

Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D, FIMC, CMC
Email: lemmyughegbeofficial@gmail.com
WhatsApp ONLY: +2348069716645