Howard’s mother is just happy her problem child has a job. But she has asked him to spare her the details of what he actually does for a living.
He is a ”Green Bomber”, a member of Zimbabwe’s National Youth Service (NYC). Zanu-PF says he and others like him are learning patriotism, morality and service to the nation, as well as skills that will stem the ”unpatriotic” brain drain. But the opposition charges they are President Robert Mugabe’s brutal political enforcers.
Welshman Ncube, founding secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), once said that NYC training camps are there to ”force Zanu-PF garbage down children’s throats”.
But jobs are hard to come by in Zimbabwe, especially if, like Howard, you are a 25-year-old high school dropout with no marketable skills.
So when the local government office in Shurugwi, a central Zimbabwean mining town, posted an advertisement seeking national service recruits four years ago, he put his illegal gold panning behind him.
The official pitch to unemployed youths was that a national service certificate would be a ticket to a civil service job.
”It sounded better to me than rolling around in the mud looking for gold, getting into fights and going in and out of jail,” says Howard. ”Ask my mother.”
His mother, a retired postal worker, agrees. If it keeps him out of jail, she says, ”it’s something better”.
She hardly sees her son now and when on the rare occasions that he is allowed to visit the family avoids ”talking politics”, she says. She is afraid of what she might hear.
Howard now claims a higher calling. ”As youths we are the leaders of tomorrow. But Zimbabwean youths want Western cultures and ideas. Some of us need to maintain our nationalist outlook.”
Wearing the olive-green uniform that gave it its ”Green Bomber” moniker, Howard says the NYC is something every ”patriotic” Zimbabwean must go through.
”I support those of our leaders who say it [the NYC] must be compulsory,” he says. ”Look at me. I’m an example.”
Is he willing to maim and kill to instil his brand of patriotism? ”Do you think the [liberation] war would have been won if the comrades were soft with people who refused to support the struggle?”
But he insists: ”We never kill. I’ve attacked only those who attacked me.”
So what did Howard, and the 20 000 youths government has trained, learn in the camps? The programme’s bible is a manual called Inside the Third Chimurenga, a reference to land reforms beginning in 2000.
Supposedly an account of Zimbabwe’s history, it downplays the role of dozens of liberation war leaders, making way for an embellished image of Mugabe as the one true hero of the struggle.
Much of the manual comprises Mugabe’s speeches, including addresses at party conferences and funeral eulogies for war comrades.
The manual refers to MDC members as ”rough and violent high-density [township] lumpen elements” backed by ”disgruntled former Rhodesians”. The MDC is driven by ”the repulsive ideology of a return to white settler rule”.
And foreign governments are ”enemies” using ”their local lackeys to drive regime change”.
Howard denies this is brainwashing, saying: ”Youths that sit in front of the TV and read magazines all day are the brainwashed ones.”
Howard is taking a break before his unit is deployed to eastern Manicaland, where police say the MDC is attacking Zanu-PF supporters.
”We are going there just to support the police and other security arms. Ours is only a supportive role.”
For this mission he will receive a daily stipend of Z$1-billion — only R30, but still more than the average worker earns in a day.
Howard is now a service graduate. But, with his new national certificate his only ”qualification”, his post-service career options are limited.
He says: ”Maybe after the elections I will speak to some people and become a senior police officer after I leave the Taliban [another name by which the militia is known].”
A report by an MP committee last year gave a disturbing picture of conditions in the training camps. Female trainees live in constant fear of sexual attacks from their trainers and fellow trainees, while the youths live in abandoned military barracks without doors or windows and are fed pap, boiled beans and cabbage, the report said.