Dedicate your hearts

Corper Weee! Waaa!

“Nigeria, we hail thee….”

I could have sworn I did not know the new anthem before camp.

And yet here I was, on the final day of camp, somewhere on the road back to Lagos, with the anthem looping in my head like psychological warfare. First the national anthem. Then the NYSC anthem. Then the state anthem too.

What exactly is the purpose of a state anthem? Who sat down and decided each state needed its own soundtrack?

But somewhere between the endless marching, the bugle calls, and the ritual repetition of songs before sunrise, the words entered my body.

That is the thing about camp.

At first, you resist it.

You resist the schedules. The shouting. The compulsory enthusiasm before sunrise. You resist being almost thirty years old and somehow doing frog jumps in public because someone lacked decorum in the presence of a high ranking officer .

Because nothing prepares you for the humility of being a grown adult doing frog jumps while another grown adult in uniform screams motivational threats at you.

And the crazy thing?

You comply. Immediately.

“Ise ya, Ise ya, Omo Ogun ise ya…”

One thing camp teaches you, whether willingly or by force, is that there is time for everything.

Time to wake, march, queue, suffer.
Time to pretend you are energetic during parade when your soul has already left your body.

Time.

Maybe it is a construct. Maybe not. But there is something deeply unsettling about seeing what human beings become when time is disciplined properly.

Mood becomes irrelevant in camp.

Nobody cares if you are tired. Nobody cares if you are hungry. Nobody cares if your legs have stopped communicating with the rest of your body.

The bugle will sound regardless.

And when it sounds?

You move.

I have seen people shout “JESUS!” while running simply because a soldier said he mustn’t reach a location before them and he breaks into a sprint immediately. Not prayer in the spiritual sense. More survival instinct. The kind where your spirit leaves your body briefly before returning once you realize you escaped punishment.

Because fear lives there too.

Real fear.

There is a phrase people use jokingly: “Please don’t stain my white.”

At first you think it is figurative. A dramatic way of saying “don’t embarrass me.”

Then someone gets the whole platoon into trouble and you drag your white shorts through muddy grass during parade punishment and you realize no, the staining is both literal and spiritual.

And somehow, despite all this, you begin to adapt.

Slowly.

Like rust.

“Youths obey the clarion call…”

I have learned a strange kind of respect in camp.

Not necessarily love for country. Let us not lie unnecessarily. But respect? Yes. The kind born from routine, repetition, and consequences that often feel disproportionate to the crime.

When the anthem starts, you stop moving. When the bugle sounds, conversations end immediately. Your body responds before your brain even catches up.

The respect enters your body whether invited or not.

And in twenty-one days, I met some of the wildest human beings imaginable.

Camp gathers Nigerians the way the internet gathers conspiracy theories, randomly and with alarming confidence.

You meet people with ideas so outrageous you initially reject them on moral grounds.

Then thirty minutes later you are nodding slowly like:

“You know what… this is insane enough to work.”

And somehow, sometimes, it does.

I also learned something important about teamwork.

Put enough strangers together in discomfort and eventually they become a functioning system. A very chaotic system, yes, but functional nonetheless.

There will be friction. There will be disagreements. There will be moments where you question why group work was invented.

But compromise changes things.

Our platoon lost almost every competition in camp. March past? L. Sports? L. Other activities? Let us not discuss it.

The only thing we won was carnival display.

And honestly, that victory came entirely from compromise. A group of exhausted, sleep-deprived people deciding to set aside ego long enough to create something together.

It was one of the few moments where everyone moved as one machine.

Not perfect.

But synchronized.

“Under the sun or in the rain, with dedication and selflessness…”

There is a salute in Attack on Titan: Shinzo wo sasageyo. Dedicate your heart.

At some point during camp, I realized that is really what discipline asks from you.

Not perfection.

Just wholehearted effort.

To keep showing up even when uncomfortable. Even when tired. Even when your skin is burnt ten shades darker and you have lost weight like you narrowly escaped wartime conditions.

And yes, I currently look slightly harrowed.

Like life and sunlight teamed up against me personally.

But somewhere beneath the exhaustion, I know something shifted.

I learned that human beings adapt faster than they think they can. That discomfort reshapes you. That discipline, repeated long enough, enters the body.

And now, as we near Lagos, my thoughts slowly return to where my feet are.

The traffic. The noise. The humidity waiting for me like an old friend with poor emotional regulation.

“Nigeria is ours, Nigeria we serve.”

God help me and this country.

Because honestly, I cannot do it alone.

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