Every year many corps members are posted to different parts of the country to serve their fatherland for one year. The deployment of corps members to their places of primary assignments is a much more difficult task. The camp-officials manually select corps members and deploy them to different organizations for their primary assignments. The manual method used is very cumbersome, time consuming, and also prone to errors and irregularities due to human nature. Irrespective of the time consumed in this manual deployment some of the corps members are being deployed to where their disciplines are irrelevant to their place of primary assignments thereby leading to their rejection and for making the service year wasted. In this research, a web-based multicriteria decision model was designed to considerably take care of the aforementioned problems. The multicriteria decision system provides an automated process for posting corps members to their places of primary assignments appropriately. The model also provide avenue for organisations to register their request for corps online and the corps can check their places of primary assignment from anywhere they are.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

The National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) is a programme that involves Nigerian graduates in the development and integration of their country. There is no military conscription in Nigeria, but since 1973 graduates of universities and later polytechnics have been required to take part in the NYSC programme for national service (Marenin, 1990). It was explained that one of the expectations of the programme is that corps members should be posted to cities and states far from their homes and states of origin. They are expected to mix with people of other tribes, social and family backgrounds, to learn the culture of the indigenes in the place they are posted to. It is a way to engender unity in Nigeria, to help youths appreciate other ethnic groupings in the country. During the period of service, there is an "Orientation" period of approximately three weeks which is spent in a camp away from family and friends. There is also a "passing out ceremony" at the end of the year and primary assignment followed by one month of vacation.

The programme also help in creating jobs opportunity for a lot of Nigerian youths. An NYSC forum dedicated to the NYSC members was recently built to bridge the gap amongst members serving across Nigeria and also an avenue for corps to share job information and career resources as well as getting loans from the National Directorate of Employment. The NYSC programme is a programme that prepares youths to work after tertiary education in universities, polytechnics and their equivalent. This program is suffering a lot of setbacks such as posting a graduate of science programme to non-science oriented place of primary assignment and like wise

other disciplines. Some corps members, due to lack of information, do not effectively perform their service. It is expected that this study would help to profer solution(s) to these problems.

1.1.2 National youth service corps (NYSC) Deployment

Every year more than 5,000 corps members are deployed to each state for one year service. This deployment is in three (3) batches namely batches A, B and C. Batches A and B corps members are usually more in number while batch C corps members are fewer. Out of this number some will relocate from the state they are deployed to another state because of certain reasons like marital status and health condition.

The result of the interview from some NYSC official states that there are two types of NYSC deployment of corps members. The first type is National level deployment where qualified graduates from institutions of higher learning are deployed to the various states they will serve. The list of the graduates is gotten through the student affairs officer of the institutions that is responsible for the preparation of eligible students for service. In this type of deployment, corps members’ state of origin, marital status and health conditions are considered before posting the corps members. The second type is done at state level which involves deploying corps members that are posted to the state after orientation to the places of primary assignment. To process this second type of deployment, organisation requests, marital status and health condition are considered.

1.2 Research Motivation

Decisions on deploying corps members to the places of primary assignment are made by committee constituted by NYSC zonal inspectors and mobilisation officer by considering some factors such as organisations requests, corps discipline and qualifications, gender, tribes and marital status.

Faced with the multiple criteria (organisations requests, corps discipline and qualifications, gender, tribes and marital status), the deployment committee annually evaluates every corps member against the requirement before deploying the corps members. This process is cumbersome and time consuming. Moreover, the corps members are deployed to places that are not relevant to their disciplines. This, for most of the time, renders their one year service wasted. With manual processing, the deployment is bound to be tedious, time wasting, inaccurate due to human error and at times deliberate manipulation to achieve personal aim or to favour some friends like deploying corps from influential people to urban centers or better places and others to rural areas.

The problems associated with manual system of corps members’ deployment give rise to the need for development of computerised model that can be use to carryout the deployment process with a view to: reduce the time it takes to process the deployment of corps members to their places of primary assignment; have fair and impartial deployment, placement and to minimize the incidence of rejection of corps members by organisations.

1.3 Research Objectives

The main objectives of this thesis is to develop and implement an online deployment of corps members to their place of primary assignments using NYSC corps members-deployed to Kaduna State as a case study. The specific objectives are to:

(i) develop a multicriteria decision deployment model for NYSC; and

(ii) implement a web-based NYSC multicriteria decision system of deploying corps

members to their places of primary assignment for Kaduna State.

1.4 Research Methodology

A review of related literature on recruitment, human resource management, selection and screening processes and existing NYSC deployment manual system was done. Some of the Zonal coordinators and camp officials were interviewed about the process of manual method of deployment of corps members to their places of primary assignment. A multicriteria decision model for deploying corps members to their places of primary assignments was developed using parameters such as corps members’ disciplines, genders and tribes among others. The parameters were related with requests from different organisations/institutions/company/governments to match corps members to their respective places of primary assignments. The system was implemented using Apache as the web server, PHP as script language, MySQL as the relational database system with windows as operating system.

1.5 Contribution to knowledge

The study established a multicriteria decision system for deploying corps members to their place of primary assignments thereby reducing/eliminating the errors, stress and time wastage in the manual deployment of the corps members.

1.6 Organisation of the thesis

This thesis is in five chapters. Chapter one covers the background of the study, statement of the problems, research motivation, research objectives, research methodology and contribution of the study to knowledge. In chapter two the existing system and related literatures on selection, e-recruitment and human resource management information systems were reviewed. Chapter three presented and discussed the multicriteria decision system model and design of the new system architecture. Chapter four focused on the system implementation. Finally, chapter five presented the conclusion, suggested recommendations and further research.