NYSC @50. Time to give Prof Nwala his credit for the programme

In 2012, sitting in his office in Utako, Abuja, and talking to me across the desk in front of him, he reached into a drawer, rummaging for a document he didn’t find.

He got up from his seat and stepped across to a chest of books arranged on the shelf and came back to his seat with a file.

As he opened the file, he said, “Ikenna, this is the confirmation document of the story I told you

I was solely the harbinger and originator of this NYSC scheme as it later became. I put it into writing in my handwriting.”

Then in 1970, typewriting wasn’t common, especially to a man that just escaped the ravages of a very bitter and sanguinary war, a full-blown genocide on his people.

This was a few years after Timothy Uzodinma Nwala graduated from the Department of Philosophy of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN)

He however had served in the Biafra army as a fresh graduate.

Meanwhile, the campus of the University was a battlefield with some marks still there now.

After preparing this document with a clear motive – to serve as a programme meant for educated young people of Nigeria to serve after graduation in parts of Nigeria order than their place of origin, he found his way to submit it to the administrator of East Central State, Ukpabi Asika in Enugu through UNN where he was a postgraduate student.

Asika looked through the document and saw a prospect in it.

He was the one that paid the bills for young Tim Nwala to take it to the Head of State, Yakubu Gowon in Lagos.

Nwala was sent alongside Prof EN Ukpabi, then Dean of Students Affairs, a certain Ukwuije the president of the UNN Students Association, and another who endured the torture of the horrible road and arrived in Lagos that late September.

But they were not allowed to see Gowon with the excuse that he was busy preparing for parades for the 10th Independence anniversary.

His office collected the documents and asked them to leave without any compliment or even paying their transport fare. But the office signed to acknowledge receipt of the manuscript.

They came back, reported to the man who sent them and made phone calls to back up their mission. Asika followed up on it and ensured that Gowon himself got the document Nwala brought.

In the late 1972, two years after Gowon got Nwala’s manuscript, the government of Nigeria announced the commencement of what was later called the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC)

It took off in 1973, 50 years ago. The content of that new programme was just what Nwala submitted.

But in the usual triumphalism of Gowon against everything from that part of the country that wanted secession, Gowon swallowed the credit due the young man, not even a letter of commendation acknowledging the bright idea and efforts at reuniting Nigeria to date.

The product of this interview was published in The Sun Newspaper the same week.

We also published photo of the manuscript Nwala sent Gowon.

However, his claims were proven true because neither Gowon nor members of his regime ever faulted Nwala after reading the interview 10 years ago.

I reached out to Nwala by phone to remind him of this interview and he was glad I still remembered the details.

The old professor who turned 81 last March is the founder of African Philosophy as a field of study and was in the lead in the ASUU strike in 1981 to press for better funding of the universities in the days of President Shehu Shagari. He still sounds upbeat in his fighter’s spirit.