National Service: Urban Traffic model replaced with Entrepreneurship and Innovation model

Executive Director of the National Service Secretary, Mustapha Yusif has revealed that the Urban Traffic management model which was introduced to the scheme in 2015 has been replaced with a new model.

He says, the board of directors of the NSS decided to introduce the ‘Entrepreneurship and Innovation model’ to encourage graduates to venture into their own businesses even after their service period.

“For the last five years what we have realised is that we have more than 400,000 service personnel graduated from national service and the question is can the economy, both the private sector and the public sector, absorb these numbers and the answer is simply no,” he said.

According to him, under the Entrepreneurship and Innovation model, service personnel will be assigned to successful entrepreneurs, but the secretariat will pay the personnel’s allowance under this model, unlike the norm where private sector pay service personnel posted to their institutions.

He, however, noted that entrepreneurs are expected to train personnel well enough for them to be able to develop business plans good enough to earn them support from either the National Entrepreneurial and Innovative Programme or MASLOC.

“We deploy the service personnel to you, we national service will take the task of paying the service personnel, it is not your responsibility. But we expect that you take this service personnel through the value chain of your entrepreneurship,” he stated.

He added that “if you’re for instance doing poultry, we expect that the service personnel at the end of the one year of national service should come out with a business plan that is very bankable and feasible for at least 500 or 1000 day old chicks so we can graduate you to NEIP or even MASLOC for a support to be able to set you up”.

Mustapha Yusif noted that the Urban Traffic management model was scrapped because it was done serving the purpose for which it was introduced.

He said the model was introduced to support the police service control the traffic situation at the time since they did not have enough personnel to do that.

“The fact that we are scrapping it doesn’t mean it wasn’t good…the police service themselves are recruiting higher…there was a challenge at that time,” he said.