The other day, I was briefing my young nephew who is on the verge of joining the National Service (JKT) after completing his secondary education.
He had been informed that if he wanted to know anything about life in the service, he should consult veteran me.
Yes, I had gone through the National Service regime, but that was a very long time ago—actually some 50 or so years ago, in 1974.
It was a few years after some university students protested against the compulsory order for all higher education graduates to go through the service. They allegedly argued that the exercise was demeaning for such highly learned young men and women like them.
Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the then President of the land and Chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam, then the only university in Tanzania, was so infuriated that he summoned the leaders of the protest to the State House.
I do not know what those students thought they were going to do there. Perhaps they imagined that while there, they would sit down with Mwalimu for a cup of tea and some cakes.
But that was not to be. A furious Nyerere lined them up on the floor and physically whipped them on their buttocks before suspending them from college. They were then escorted back to their villages.
He would later pardon them and some in the group rose in the ranks to become prominent and eminent members of the community with responsible jobs.
Among these individuals were the late Samuel Sitta, former long-serving cabinet minister and Speaker of the Parliament; the late Bob Makani, former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank; and the late Wilfred Mwabulambo, a flamboyant and colourful former Principal Secretary.
Actually, Mwabulambo used to brag before me, then a young cub reporter with the Daily News in the late ’70s, that he had a very rare qualification, that of being whacked by President Mwalimu Nyerere. Ha!
No wonder when it was our turn to join the National Service, then a six-month stint, we sheepishly went ahead.
Initially, it was a tough exercise, but in due course, we got used to that ‘military’ life and discipline. Actually, we even began to enjoy and embrace ‘camp’ life to the extent that at the end, calling us ‘veteran soldiers’ civilians was the ultimate insult.
Apart from this toughening experience, two other incidents stand out during my National Service stint. One was our traversing through the vast Serengeti National Park and the experience, for the first time, of watching at close proximity such exotic and abundant wildlife of lions, buffaloes, giraffes, rhinos, cheetahs, leopards, elephants, zebras, wildebeests, wild dogs, and wild pigs, to mention but a few.
We were being transferred from the Bumahema National Service Camp in Musoma to the Oljoro Camp in Arusha using the road that traverses the park. This was indeed an exhilarating experience.
The other is that it was while in the service that I had my first taste of reigned life, and hopefully the last. While on transit in Arusha town on our way to Oljoro, the ‘afandes’ gave us an hour off to ‘stress manage’ in the streets of Arusha.
I and a close friend, the late prominent scribe, Adam Lusekelo, who had vast contacts in Arusha, decided one hour was not enough.
We returned to the bus station three or so hours later only to be told that our National Service bus had left two hours back.
Actually, the bus terminal people wondered whether we were the two soldiers the ‘afandes’ had said had absconded from the army.
Now that is a serious breach of military rules. However, we decided to make the best of our misconduct in Arusha. It was a week or so later when we got rounded up while bump dancing inside the then Babylon Disco below the New Arusha Hotel, and we were immediately whisked to the Oljoro National Service camp remand facility.
We spent a whole week in that facility, surviving the nightly mosquitoes’ blood-sucking feast off our tiny bodies.
But then, I told my nephew that this is a very old experience. Surely many things must have changed since then. However, military discipline remains the backbone of any army and for that matter life itself. And this he has to always keep in mind.
