In June, Abuja changed how corps members are posted. The reports cited here do not set out a new arrangement for protecting graduates on the trip to camp.

On 29 June, the Federal Executive Council approved what the Youth Minister, Olawande Ayodele, called the “first holistic review” of the National Youth Service Corps in its 53 years. Part of it was risk-based posting. President Tinubu said deployment to security-challenged states would be guided by risk assessment. Priority would go to indigenes, residents, graduates of institutions in those states, and people from neighbouring states in the same zone.

That’s a rule about where a graduate is sent. On Thursday morning, graduates from Ibadan were on commercial buses heading to orientation camps in Uyo and Bende, and gunmen stopped both at Umunoha in Imo State.

The council also told the Attorney-General and the Youth Ministry to amend the NYSC Act to give the changes legal effect. No report cited here says that amendment has happened. Within Nigeria reported on Saturday that, months after the approval, there’s no indication NYSC has started to implement the new arrangement.

Five weeks earlier, on Wednesday 26 August, gunmen blocked two buses on the Aloma-Egane expressway in Ofu, Kogi State. They took passengers who were mostly corps members returning from the Bayelsa camp to Abuja. Security forces rescued them on 31 August, the presidency said.

Student leaders want a different arrangement. The Southwest Zone D of the National Association of Nigerian Students said on Friday that Nigeria in 2026 is not Nigeria in 1973, when the scheme began. Its statement, signed by zonal coordinator Adeyemo Josiah, asked the government to consider state-based and zonal service options. It also asked for long-distance interstate deployment to be voluntary until security improves.

Oyo’s government says the graduates are from Oyo, and that it’s lending Imo what it learnt from the Oriire school abduction. Information commissioner Dotun Oyelade said that includes the report of a judicial inquiry Governor Seyi Makinde received on 29 September. The inquiry heard 72 witnesses. Its chairman, Justice Mojeed Owoade, said it covers preventive security, intelligence gathering and cooperation between governments and agencies. He named a review of forest reserves, including the Old Oyo National Park, as a major recommendation.

Oyelade added that the focus should be on the federal government, “particularly on the actions taken within the first 72 hours of the incident.”

The graduates were travelling to camps for the 2026 Batch C Stream One exercise, Pulse reported, when the buses were stopped. Nothing in the reports on the June reform cited here says how the trip to camp is protected.