The hullabaloo generated by the posting of some 2012 Batch B Corps members to the ciris-ridden areas of northern Nigeria for their  National Youth Service was considered buried as a result of the reversal of that action, until the Minister of Youth Development, Alhaji Inuwa Abdulkadir exhumed it.  Originally, the NYSC authorities had posted some Corps members to the volatile areas but buckled under the resistance of the Corpers themselves and pressure from some of their parents.  The Minister, citing a section of the Nigerian Constitution, overruled the NYSC authorities and ordered that the Corps members must serve in those areas, q.e.d.  The unsolicited intervention of the minister raised some fundamental issues but showed glaringly that in Nigeria, no one was in charge of anything and reminded us of the gap between the leaders and the led.  It told us that here its ‘everybody to his/her tent and God for us all’. When Chinua Achebe wrote his novella: ‘The Trouble With Nigeria’, he did not imagine that what he believed was bad at the time was a child’s play to what his country would become in his lifetime.

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