The National Youth Service Corps Foundation has announced that it’s searching for 75 ex- Corp members who took between N300,000 and N400,000 loans to start small businesses during their service years and refused to pay back.
The ex- corp members used their certificates as collateral to get access to the loans. But almost four years after, they have refused to return the loans and have abandoned their certificates with the foundation.
The NYSC Foundation Chief Executive Officer, Bako Ventim, confirmed this on Monday during the opening of Skills’ Acquisition and Entrepreneurship Development workshop at the NYSC Orientation Camp in Kubwa, Abuja.
The director said, “We have been providing loans to corps members and our interest rate is one digit. There is no collateral except the NYSC certificate and two guarantors. We make the conditions very flexible so that the corps members can benefit from these loans.
“We have a challenge where corps members have refused to pay back the loans. We have over 100 corps members who took the loans but some of them have not paid back and we still have their NYSC certificates with us. They have not come to claim these certificates for a number of years.
“We give as much as between N300,000 and N400,000 depending on the business proposals. From the records, we have over 75 corps members that have defaulted and we are pursuing them.”