Allow me to mourn a fallen heroin- Prof Wangari Maathai

It’s almost 1 AM and for some reasons I can’t sleep, I can’t sleep thinking of you I’m trying to find words which can clearly explain how I felt when I learnt of your death through facebook and near no one to verify or refute the sad news, how I would have loved them refuted as crude joke but no, in my frantic effort to ascertain the then  inflow of traffic from other social network users with more or less shortened updates of RIP Prof, I had to make a call but no my call’s recipient hadn’t received the news yet and so couldn’t dispel or ascertain my fears but somehow they were confirmed and I gauss it must have taken several hours before the news sunk in.

So Kenia as Kenya is popularly known in the global arena is united in mourning one of their own, just the same way we were united in mourning the 1998 bomb blast victims, same way we were united in mourning the Sinai fire victims plus some other prominent leaders that have gone before you, but we are going to mourn you differently because your death is not only felt by Kenyan’s but internationally because your work, sacrifice and commitment did make us proud. You will not be mourned only by human beings but I have a weird feeling that plants and other wild animals will even mourn your death with paining sincerity because you were their mother and their mortal protector who gave so much for them and to humanity in general.

Your death reminds me of how cruel death can be, how unforgiving the ground can be and above all it deepens my fear for cancer. Somehow I don’t want to imagine that you are somewhere lifeless, not moving and not doing what you loved most- planting trees.

You gave life to over 40 million trees, taught us how to be that humming bird who couldn’t  stand to see the whole forest burning down and do nothing about it, so despite its small bick, regardless of the number of trips it had to make and despite the loathing , demeaning and belittling remarks it had from other big animals like elephant who was capable of carrying so much water through its trunk to put out the fire, decided to just do its best- and as mother Theresa reminds us that it’s not God’s intention for us to be the best but just to do our best, I hope your commitment, sacrifice and love for humanity will propel us to always strive to do our best with zeal regardless of the hurdles that we may be faced with.

I join the rest of the world, other renounced leaders and fellow Kenyans in mourning this great heroin, a true lover of nature and human rights, a reformist who did not mind to be ridiculed nor embarrassed while striping naked at the infamous freedom corner just to highlight the plight of others who were then being jailed for no apparent reason.

May the frustrations you went through, your patriotisms, your commitments and sacrifice draw us closer as Kenyans, unify us as one and always motivate us to strive to do our best-always

Eternal rest grant unto her oh Lord, and may your perpetual light shine on her and may her soul rest in peace.

The power of information

People use internet for different reasons and so are social media platforms, I know of a young man who has literally transformed his farming through these platforms- facebook to be precise- an initiative that earned him an interview with the Google team through his ' Mapping fish ponds' project using the android IDEOS smartphone that is now selling like a hot cake in the Kenyan market.

Meet Zack Matera, a farmer from Eldoret Kenya who is demonstrating to the world just what internet can do for you.

And run you must from this social ill- just run away from it, I implore you!

I have dined with the high and the mighty so have I with lowly placed members of the society, I’m neither rich nor poor but I know what it feels like to be any of them none the less. Lately I have been engrossed in these two worlds, analyzing and evaluating them.

Poverty is capable of depriving a man of all spirit and virtue, it can compel you to take very many unnecessary risks with your life that if you had an option you wouldn’t, poverty dehumanizes, humiliates and limits an individual a great deal, and poverty as Mahatma Gandhi puts it, is the worst form of Violence.

The rich and the poor have different worries all together: when you are busy surfing the internet for scholarships to further your education, they are surfing the internet for all the different reasons- to read the profile of the best collages in the world where their kids can study, fee of course is never an issue.

While you waste your precious time in a restaurant mentally computing the total amount that you will part with after taking that meal, that is none of their worry, when they feel like having a proper meal, they check in a hotel and order that food without worrying about the price, later they swipe and just go their way.

While you are worried about going blind by taking an illegal lethal brew a.k.a Yokozuna, they start with tonic water as they order their favorite brands

While you are worried of whether  your makeshift house built on top of petroleum pipeline will catch fire due to some leakage or whether  the city askaris will demolish it while you are asleep because it is built on a road reserve or that it is near the railway line or whether the faulty power lines crisscrossing your  makeshift  in a slum will set your house ablaze, they are busy thinking of how to enlarge their dining room, how to bring in new imported furniture but more importantly they are thinking of how to get rid of you within their neighborhood.

No, they never worry about stray bullets, diseases like cholera, dysentery etc they just wonder why and how they still exist, malnutrition and hunger is almost an extinct vocabulary to them. They have better things to worry about than whether matatu touts have gone on strike.

When you are poor, you become so susceptible to so many things, not only diseases but also to ideas, just about everything is able to sway you, for instance you are the first person to reach KICC  or Nyayo Stadium for Pastor Ojigbani’s husband/ wife prayers, you believe without questioning Loliondo’s medicines, and you easily jump to any church promising instant wealth only to realize later that actually they are the ones milking you dry- just because you let them and partly because they understand your psychology and know just which buttons to press to manipulate you.

If you can (and you have the ability to) please, just run and run very fast- just run away from poverty run and find your freedom, coz with this freedom you will never be any politician’s puppet, you will be in a better position to demand accountability and transparency from your leaders, you will be in a position to say no to committing most crimes but above all you will never have to worry about risking your life unnecessarily just because you do not have an option, so dear brethren-RUN!

My wild dreams :)

No, I haven’t travelled widely, matter of fact I have been to only one country other than Kenya and that is Finland, though in my priority list right now is to leave the country preferably to pursue further studies, but if I could leave maybe on work related grounds even just to volunteer that would be perfect but as I am realizing it is much easier to volunteer in Africa if you are white than it is for an African wishing to volunteer in say America or in Europe reasons for which I believe are clear to you as they are to me. I want to visit different countries, experience different cultures, get the exposure that comes with living in a different country other than yours and ohh even get married to someone from a different nationality and even have an half-cast baby :P

My work offers me opportunity to interact with people from different nationalities, countries, backgrounds etc some stereotype, others reserve their opinions while yeah others are just fun to be around but this is nothing if I had the experience while say living in their respective countries.

 I want to travel the world, compare what we have and what other countries have in terms of governance, infrastructure, their education system, ICT and internet penetration, the people etc.  This maybe will enable me to appreciate what we have more and hone my tolerance levels and above all enable me to embrace different cultures and know how to deal with people of divergent opinions and ideologies and give me the fun of just knowing what it feels to be roaming the wide world.

Just my wild dreams J

Internet as a catalyst for development

"If they mess with the internet, I'll mess them up" that's a friend of mines political ideology when he was asked about his political views, a view that am sure most of us share especially those whose daily activities revolve around the internet.
Internet is quickly becoming an integral part in the day to day activities of most people: entrepreneurs, businesses, academia etc its lack therefore literally stalls/messes up these activities. It holds the key to so many benefits: knowledge, education, employment, political activism and the promise of a better future and a means of empowerment, it is also the link that gives our children access to high quality educational resources; it helps our entrepreneurs and small businesses compete and grow; and the internet holds the promise of better health care and a more affordable entertainment.

Computer literacy and other aspect of computer technology are prerequisites for using internet technology, a fact that has greatly lowed internet penetration especially in rural and slum areas because majority of these people are mostly computer illiterate and are either ignorant or simply don’t know the benefits that can be accrued from the internet. This can also be attributed to the fact that in most rural or slum areas, we have poor infrastructures in terms of power lines etc which thus discourages the use of gadgets like computers which requires electricity to operate.

Internet is quickly curving a niche as a great tool for catalyzing development initiatives, it has a direct link to social, economic and even political developments and therefore the Kenyan government directive that IT be a compulsory course for all students joining public universities is a most welcome move but I would rather it be compulsory right from high school if not primary school to give our young-stars an early start of computer literacy which as I have indicated earlier is a prerequisite for using internet technology.

Development-I believe-is directly proportional to the degree of internet penetration, granted, internet has its disadvantages but dwelling on these disadvantages without looking at the bigger picture is like simply refuting the benefits of computers because it leads to ‘loss of jobs’, a so backward argument that you can only be forgiven because you know not what you are saying!

So what can that poor woman or that poor kid do with internet back in the village/slum yet they don’t have food on the table, shouldn’t they be worrying about better things other than Internet?

Long time ago, we had three main basic needs: food, shelter and clothing others were simply luxuries if you wish, but today, computers, phones and internet are necessities if not needs. You talk internet and you talk information, that poor woman can learn a lot from the internet- from what type of crops to plant during dry season, from how to carry out a first aid of snake bite to save her baby before she can take her to hospital, from how to find market for her produce and sell them at fair prices etc. That poor kid who can’t afford to buy books, can get all that materials from the internet and compete fairly with that boy whose parents can afford, he can learn new programming languages, can learn how to hack, can learn how to play guitar and loads of some other stuff, who knows he can even show the world his musical prowess like Justin Bieber did- see where he is right now.

But the challenge is, if they cannot afford to put food on the table, who will take care of the internet bill, who will buy them computers coz internet and computes go hand in hand? This is where the government should come in, to ensure that every sub location, market place, public school has a library equipped with computers and good internet speed, maybe restrict the time per sitting to say 30 minutes per person but offer the service free to encourage many people to use computers and internet and tap these benefits, the government should have its own innovation hubs and organize events where these people can show the skills acquired from the internet, by so doing, the government will eliminate the worry these poor people go through of how to pay these bills but at the same time foster  an information rich society where people can gain skills to do plenty of stuff without just sitting back and waiting to be employed in a society where jobs are becoming a scarcity, they say nothing is as dangerous as a wounded animal who knows it can survive, I say nothing is as motivating to the poor as knowing they can improve their situation! And internet holds the key to that.

Africa's underdevelopment-could population be a factor?

Over the past few months, media has fed us with several images of desperate children, women and men dying of hunger due to famine which has been declared as the worst to have hit the Horne of Africa in 6 decades. Refugee camps are overstretched with people looking for relief. Kenyans have particularly come together to help their own under the umbrella initiative dubbed 'Kenyan4Kenyans' which raised a whooping over Sh 500 million in just less than 2 weeks after its launching to help the hunger stricken fellow Kenyans starving in Turkana 

Hunger is not a new thing in Kenya and in Africa a s a whole, several projects have been proposed to curb a repeat on this but it appears that the government is either not so keen at implementing them or has other reasons up its sleeve. But all in all, these images have kept me wondering why the Kenyan government cannot feed its own, why Africa is always in a state of dependency- Why Africa is not as developed as it should be.

Several theories and books have been written explaining why Africa is not at par with the rest of the world in terms of development

• Economist Ntahan Nunn argues that slavery is the main culprit. "without the slave trades, 72% of Africa's income gap with the rest of the world would not exist today"
• Oxford University and ex-World bank Economist Paul Collier attributes it to environmental factors such as being landlocked, existence or lack thereof of coastline, being resourceful or resource scarce etc,
• Zambian economist and Ex-World bank consultant Dambisa Moyo in her book "Dead Aid" categorically blames it on foreign Aid
• There is of course the largely unspoken view that the problem with Africa is Africans- that culturally, mentally and physically Africans are innately different. that, somehow, deeply embedded in their psyche is an inability to embrace development and improve their own lot in life without foreign guidance and help
• We also have historical factors like colonialism, the continent's disparate tribal groupings and ethno-linguistic make up has also been blamed, other factors such as absence of strong, transparent and credible public institutions like civil service, police, judiciary etc have also been apportioned blame as part of the problem

What about unregulated population?

Though may not out rightly be the problem, I have a feeling that Africa's constant population increase could also be another contributing factor why we are still scrawling in this development sector.

Take for instance, the Kenya's case where Kenyan population was reported as 38.6 million in 2009, compared to 28.7 million in 1999, 21.4 million in 1989 and 15.3 million in 1979, an increase by a factor of 

2.5 Over 30 years, or an average growth of more than 3% per year.

Kenya is about 580,000km2 in terms of surface area compared to let's say Finland- the 8th largest country in Europe in terms of area at 337,030km2- though relatively small compared to Kenya- in 2000 its population was about 5.2 million, in 1990 the population size was about 5 million. Since the mid 1990s the annual growth has remained under 20,000 persons averaging at about 5.4 million now. 

Though this might not be a perfect comparison, compare their growth rate to Kenya’s and you will notice a very big difference.  Interestingly, regardless of the growth rate, the resources remain constant which means these additional number of people will have to survive on the already limited available resources,  this in my view leads to high poverty levels and makes it even harder for the government to take care of its citizens.

As much as it is the responsibility of the government to take care of its citizens, people should also just give birth to the number of kids that they can comfortably take care of and by so doing developing themselves and the country as a whole

Just how long can you live on hope?

I remembered a friends’ facebook status that I saw some months ago that “It sucks living on hope” and today I have been thinking about that very statement because for some time now, I have been living on nothing but hope-hope that things will turn out for the better and I must admit, sometimes it sucks holding on to hope especially if nothing seems to be working out.

Hope-to desire with anticipation of obtainment- comes to play when circumstances are dire, when things are not going well or at least there is considerable uncertainty about how things will turn out, hope literally opens up and removes the blinders of fear and despair and allows us to see the big picture thus allowing us to become creative and have a belief in a better future…..Wikipedia

Hope has a way of keeping us going, of keeping us alive, of helping us overcome difficult times. A story is told of mother from famine stricken Turkana who could not stand to see her children lose hope in life and die of hunger, she herself new that there was  nothing she could do to avert the situation but she had to give her kids hope,  so she lit fire, put her gumboots in a sufuria, poured water and decided to cook, Kids oblivious of what their mum was cooking started being jovial and expectant that at least they will eat something , the ‘food’ took forever to prepare but when the kids prodded why this particular meal wasn’t getting ready, their  mum replied that it was one huge hard but delicious meal that needed a lot of time to prepare- and so  just when the ‘meal’ was about to be served, she diapered not wanting to see her kids' disappointment and that’s the last time she  saw her kids but at least she gave them hope that saw them through that day!

So today I was just wondering out aloud, how long can one live on hope or otherwise put how long can one live without hope?

                "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."

                                                Martin Luther King, Jr.