This year is the 25^th anniversary of Nigeria's National Youth Service. In Nigeria you must be a University graduate to serve. When Garba received his call to NYS he was sad, as he viewed it as a year of suffering and hardship, and did not want to be deployed from the north to the southwest - it was a long way from his parents.

The programme initially involved two to four weeks of orientation which he went into with a biased viewpoint, but after which he felt he had learnt a great deal, and gained a sense of national identity and unity with his fellow service members: "I went in a Northerner and came out a Nigerian". The scheme promotes tolerance between people of differing ethnic, religious and social groups, each group learning to understand and respect the others' differences, and so helping promote unity.

The actual service `the primary assignment', lasting eleven months, helped him to develop his leadership skills through co-ordinating different groups and projects. He was posted to a remote village with no transport, no electricity, no clean water and poor sanitation. He had to stay and learn how to survive, because the assigned location cannot be changed. He felt that the experience made him an adult. Money was minimal, so he had to use his wits and recourse to his Elementary School carpentry skills to build a bed, and make a mattress from the grasses. His demonstration of mattress-making inspired the whole village to make mattresses. As sanitation was poor, with the sewage going into the drainage system, he worried he would get sick, so he built a pit latrine (there were no facilities prior to this). He also helped the villagers to dig mini-wells to find clean water - "The community learnt a lot from me and I learnt a lot from the community". His experience showed him that NYS is very valuable, and should be made an institution.