Saki-born communications minister and gubernatorial aspirant of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Adebayo Shittu, has made clarifications over reports surrounding the mandatory National Youth Service Scheme.
The minister, in a statement issued by his campaign office, explained the the law regulatory the youth service in 1979 permitted graduates to replace service with political appointments.
See statement:
OF MISCHIEF AND THE TRUTH: ADEBAYO SHITTU AND THE NYSC SCHEME
‘The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year’ – Voltaire
The attention of the Adebayo Shittu Media and Strategy Office has been drawn to the publication of a horrendous, grossly mischievous, and unduly sensational report by an online medium, Premium Times, where it claimed that the Honourable Minister of Communications, Chief Adebayo Shittu, violated the NYSC laws by not observing the one-year service under the National Youth Service Corps scheme and is thus liable to a jail term. Through that report, and right from its headline, Premium Times played accuser and judge at the same time, thereby usurping the role of the judiciary as the interpreter of the law. We would have expected that the media, as the fourth estate of the realm, would exercise core professionalism, thoroughness, and balance, and not sheer mischief which is what characterizes the campaign of calumny the supposed investigation of Premium Times represents.
Another online medium, Sahara Reporters, also joined the mischief bandwagon by reporting that the Honourable Minister said “I Deliberately Refused to Serve”, even when the Minister did not say so, nor did the online medium or its reporter(s) contact him to verify the news. The actions of these online media lend credence to the claim among media professionals that online journalism in Nigeria is gradually becoming an all comers affair.
It is common knowledge – and an uncommon record and accolades-deserving achievement – that Honourable Minister Adebayo Shittu won election into the old Oyo State House of Assembly at the age of 26, under the auspices of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), while he was still a student at the Nigerian Law School in 1979. It is also indubitable that the Honourable Minister became a commissioner in the same Oyo State at the age of 30 in 1983.
The loophole which the journalist assumed he found was actually his ignorance of the facts behind the reasons why the Minister was not at the NYSC camp but at the hallowed chamber of the Oyo State House of Assembly post-1979. For the sake of the undiscerning public who may have been misled by the Premium Times report, it is necessary to give some clarifications.
The Adebayo Shittu Media and Strategy Office wishes to state, for the record, that the law establishing the NYSC was Decree 24 of 1973, and there have been three different amendments to it; in 1985, 1993, and 2011. As at the time when the Minister was a legislator, the operational law was Decree 24 of 1973 and not the 1985 amendment and/or other amendments which Premium Times and its co-travellers premised their judgment on.
It is important to note that the Decree did not anticipate that there could be a time when a young person who graduates at an age below 30 would win an election in a democratic Nigeria. Suffice to note that the 1973 Decree had some obvious lacunae which the 1985 amendment sought to deal with. It is this obvious lacuna in the 1973 Decree that possibly propelled the then candidate of the National Party of Nigeria, Mr. Bada, to challenge Chief Adebayo Shittu’s victory in 1979, on the ground that he did not observe the one-year NYSC scheme.
In his ruling, the then presiding judge at the High Court of Oyo State ruled that service as a legislator suffices as service to the Nation, in lieu of the NYSC. The ground for the position of the learned Judge was drawn from the constitution, which is the grundnorm in any democratic setting. On the basis of that, this issue is rex judicata – a settled case in law – unless a superior court decides otherwise.
Another argument raised in some quarters is that Honourable Minister Adebayo Shittu was supposed to get an exemption letter, since he did not observe the NYSC one-year service. We consider this argument laughable, as we would have expected the Premium Times journalist to go the extra mile to retrieve the exemption letter of members of staff of security agencies before they were exempted from service through the 1985 amendment.
It is clear that there is more to the Premium Times report than the desire to inform the public. At a time when primary elections are around the corner and for an individual who is the aspirant to beat in the 2019 gubernatorial elections in Oyo State, one cannot but begin to suspect political conspiracy. This nevertheless, the sincerity and honesty of Honourable Minister Shittu to the Premium Times reporter only validates the consensus of all the great people of Oyo State and Nigeria that Chief Adebayo Shittu is ‘THE BAYO WE TRUST’.
Signed
Saheed Oladele
Director, Adebayo Shittu Media and Strategy Office
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