NEWS (The Sun) – Cancer In Trouble: NYSC, OCI Mobilise Army, Deploy Digital Weaponry Against Disease (17/08/2025)

Courtesy: The Sun News

17th August, 2025 – by Enyeribe Ejiogu

Link to original article is HERE.

Cancer In Trouble: NYSC, OCI Mobilise Army, Deploy Digital Weaponry Against Disease

Across the country, in orientation camps of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) spread throughout the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (totalling 37 locations), one chant, “We rise, by lifting others” has continued to resound as the current batch of corps members go through the one month compulsory paramilitary training, to prepare them for service to the nation.

The chant has become a motivational battle cry energizing the corps members who voluntarily enlisted into the army, formed under the collaboration between the NYSC and OCI Foundation International to fight against cancer through public awareness campaigns and deep-dive education of university and secondary students, faith-based groups, market associations and communities.

The collaboration between NYSC and OCI became operational long before a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed on August 6, 2025 at the headquarters of the Corps at a brief ceremony witnessed by representatives of the two organizations.

The OCI Foundation team was led by its Permanent Liaison Officer to the NYSC, Alh (Dr) Abdullahi Aliyu Rufai, who was accompanied by Dr (Mrs) Chioma Ezenyimulu, the organisation’s Champion from Anambra State and other Abuja team members of the Foundation, Ms Felicia Dagu and Mr Luter Ikyobo. The NYSC team was led by the Director of Legal Services, who represented the Director General and was supported by other directors and senior officers.

The NYSC, one of Africa’s largest youth organisations, has been in partnership with the OCI Foundation since the collaboration was flagged off on February 4, 2022, in Abuja, by the then First Lady, Mrs Aisah Buhari. The NYSC’s Director General originally approved of the relationship in September 2019.

 The NYSC initiative is being undertaken under the Arm Our Youths (ArOY) Anti-Cancer Health Campaign. Since its onset, the OCI Foundation has reached over half a million Nigerian youths annually. The initiative has been endorsed by the Nigerian Cancer Society.

It bears to note that the anti-cancer campaign has been incubating since 2004/2005, when Associate Professor Onyebuchi Ifediora felt a deep, wrenching pain as a fresh graduate from the Nnamdi Aizikiwe University medical school going through housemanship at Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Idi Araba. It was the kind of pain that comes from witnessing the trauma of another person at close quarters. The experience was made worse, when as a young sympathetic doctor, he found himself helpless and unable to do much to alleviate the suffering of the patient.

Recalling the experience in an interview, Ifediora said: “The lady in question who was in her 40s died. She had cervical cancer. At the time I was in the gynaecology training. The reason this lady stood out was not just that she had cervical cancer but the daughter was basically a lookalike, a carbon copy of her mom. They used to come around in the ward when I was a house officer. By the time she died, I had moved out of that ward into a different unit. One afternoon in the restaurant, I was sitting there while the daughter was crying and narrating to her friends how the mother never knew she wasn’t going to come out of the hospital alive. She was just in her teens. The pain, the trauma, was so painful to watch. That was one case.

The second story was during my youth service, when a friend of mine, a corps member came to me crying that the elder sister was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was also very painful. So, these two events stuck to my mind because it showed me how families can be devastated, torn apart, and our world can be turned upside down. It was a big question in my mind that I felt I had to find an answer to.

When I had the opportunity to leave Nigeria and see how things are done overseas, I realised that I could, in my little way, contribute to the biggest problem we have in Nigeria about cancer, which basically revolves around ignorance and misinformation. That’s how OCI Foundation came about and has been pursuing its dream to fight these two cancers that we know have their roots in the teenage years. I believe that if you empower them young, you find out that they can take measures to prevent this from taking hold.”

OCI’s collaboration with the NYSC started just before COVID. The inauguration was supposed to be in the first half of 2020 but COVID struck and it was postponed.

In an interview via WhatsApp, OCI President, who is an Associate Professor at Griffiths University, Queensland, Australia, and Family Medicine practitioner, said: “By 2021, things began to open up. So, the event was formally kind of launched February 3rd, 2022 at the Air Force NAF Centre in Abuja. At the time, it was Mrs. Buhari, the first lady of the country that oversaw the event.

“The collaboration is basically to find a way to reach Nigerian youths. When we were thinking about a national project, one of our key officers then, Mr. Sam Agwa, who was from Benue State, proposed the NYSC. It was not my idea.

“He also at the time proposed the girls brigade and another institution. So we wrote to all three but the NYSC responded about the time when I was in the country. They got our legal advisor who was with me in a cab and then we drove over the next morning.

“So the reason for the NYSC is because they are virtually everywhere across the country and because our programme is designed to target the youths and also everyone basically in every nook and cranny of the country. NYSC, by their design, is ubiquitous. They are everywhere to help us drive our message to everyone in the country, in all the 774 local governments and across virtually every community in the country.

“Our programme is designed to empower Nigerians with the knowledge against breast and cervical cancers, targeting every Nigerian. Most corps members function as teachers in schools.

“We have thousands of volunteers who have been kind of empowered with the right anti-cancer knowledge. They’ve driven the message across the country in schools, in private and public institutions, in churches. So the coverage is the main thing that the NYSC has done for this project. But beyond that, empowering and inspiring Nigerian youths is also something else that has come about, that many of them undertake our courses.”

To further deepen the initiative and broaden the impact, OCI introduced the CDS group social media contest (leveraging on the NYSC community development service component), where they are encouraged to hold CDS projects in their respective states or places of primary assignments and then share the content. They compete among themselves to promote the programmes. They do that in churches, mosques,  schools, within their families as well as in their hometowns and villages. Basically, the NYSC/OCI army against cancer is effectively fighting against the disease by helping make useful information permeate the fabrics of the Nigerian society in an excellent and successful way.