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A category focusing on the issues that plaque that African continent. All you need to know about poverty, malaria, HIV/AID, african stereotypes, africans struggle in the west, bad leadership at home
Success is a marathon, not a sprint. But many of today’s youth do not know this, or they know but not make it a maxim in running their life race. If we take things easy, and act as purposely and positively as we can, success will surely come our way.
There are rules for success, and one of them is: ‘Never rush’. If you look around you, you will discover that those who have made it to the top are not only those who inherit wealth, fame or name. Yes, wealth, fame, and popular name can open door of opportunities for some folks, but the lack of them, abinitio, does not lock such doors and windows of opportunities either.
If you want to make it in life, as we all make efforts to achieve greater potentials and accumulate better aspirations of life, the rule , ‘never rush’, applies. What do you want to make in life: intellectual progress or social mobility? The best and possibly easiest way to make it in life is to make it slowly but surely.
With this recommendation, I am not saying we should be lackadaisical about life, or that we should sleep off all the twenty-fours and expect miracles to come, what I am saying is that we should organise ourselves, and see our dreams come true one by one.
Remember the scriptural axiom that the battle is neither for the strong nor the race for the swift, but that time and chance happen to them all. In the year 2006, I gave a speech at the orientation event organised by the Student Leadership Development Programme, SLDP, at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. The coordinator of that novel student programme, who read my modest citation on that day, is today the Chief Economic Adviser to the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. I am talking about
Prof (Mrs) Precious Kassey Garba, a woman of substance; respectful, respected, and respectable scholar and teacher.
Prof. Garba always told us to believe in ourselves, and that no matter how big a challenge could be, determination can melt it. At the event mentioned above, I spoke about why and how the youth can take their destiny in their own hands. I said the youth should always plan their time and time their plan. I said the youth should always choose their friends and make library one of their friends. I reminded the youth about what Prof Adedoyin Soyibo used to tell us, that when you add value to yourself, the distance from your success is reduced by miles. We can make it slowly but surely. Nothing is worth-worrying or worth-rushing about in life.
The biggest god most people worship is money. Money is good but money is not god. How you get is more important. Remember Napoleon Hill, who wrote in Think and Grow Rich that ‘Quick riches are more dangerous than poverty’. What we need most of the time is organised planning, faith, hope, and action, and slowly but surely we shall make it.
Another World AIDS Day has come and gone. This day serves as a call to action to remember the millions of people in communities all around the world that are affected by HIV and AIDS.
However, AIDS weighs on my mind far more than once a year. It wasn’t until four years ago that I even knew a person who had been impacted by AIDS. I had heard all of the statistics. I knew the severity of the pandemic, especially in counties such as Swaziland and South Africa with some of the highest prevalence rates in the world.
But the severity of the disease and the broader impact on life in affected communities was beyond my comprehension. That was until 2006, when I traded in my comfortable Los Angeles existence working in TV commercial production for a one-year volunteer stint in a rural South African village. My new home at NextAid’s Community Center construction site was located in the rural township of Dennilton, Mpumalanga Province.
During my first year of living there, Dennilton had an estimated 30 percent HIV prevalence rate. This number, while astounding, still didn’t fully resonate with me until I was able to hear the stories of the locals who were shouldering the burden of a village ravaged by the disease.
NextAid’s pilot project in South Africa, where I was volunteering, was intended to provide a home to children and youth who had been orphaned by AIDS. While I was familiar with the term “AIDS Orphan”, the gravity of these children’s reality was not really fathomable to me until I found myself living among ten or so children who had lost one or both parents to “the disease”.
One heartbreaking story after another is the reality of life in Dennilton during the time of AIDS. One boy, at age 11, had to take his mother to the hospital in a wheelbarrow where she later died. Ambulances and even regular cars are beyond the reach of most. A family of young teenage girls were living as a “child-headed household” in order to care for their younger siblings.
Among these countless stories, one can’t help but wonder why? Why here? Why still? It wasn’t for lack of awareness about the disease. Upon driving into the town of Dennilton, you are bombarded by a series of odd roadside billboards. Each of these signs promotes HIV prevention through some quirky slogan and graphic. Dennilton had an advantage over many rural South African communities in that it had a government hospital as well as a non-profit community clinic focused on treating HIV/AIDS. This clinic was privately funded by Dutch donors and received U.S. government PEPFAR funding. Several community-based organizations, including NextAid’s local partner in the community center project, were active in addressing various aspects of the disease such as home-based care or school and church-based prevention campaigns.
As my year in South Africa went on, I asked a lot of questions in my attempt to understand why AIDS was so pervasive. I remember one of the first things that struck me about Dennilton was that there were more coffin shops than food markets in the town. Death was a booming business and in this town — it is easier to buy a tombstone for a family member than to shop for nutritious and life-sustaining food.
Many of these examples reflect a system that promotes short-term, welfare-based solutions to a much bigger problem. I don’t claim to have all the solutions, but I do know that if girls and boys received quality education and knew that there would be opportunities for decent jobs in their adult futures; and if women felt empowered to stand up to men; and if there were more ways for people to access nutritious food and be economically self-sufficient, we would be a lot further in tackling the AIDS pandemic in a holistic and sustainable way.
But no singular approach is sufficient for the magnitude of this disease. Without simultaneously working to uplift the community with empowering opportunities such as education, income-generation, and sustainable agriculture, all the billions of dollars from government and private donor funds will not be as effective as they need to be.
Decades from now, maybe and hopefully, AIDS will be an obsolete topic. But if we don’t focus our efforts now on addressing root causes such as poverty and lack of education that are risk indicators for HIV/AIDS in developing countries (and in the U.S.), there will likely be another disease that will disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged populations.
It’s not too late to do something this year. NextAid commemorates World AIDS Day all month long throughout December with a series of fundraising and awareness raising music events and an online campaign on Twitter and Facebook. For more information go to www.nextaid.org/wad2010 .
Wendy Cross is the Program Director for NextAid, a Los Angeles-based NGO
“…I am infuriated by the assumption that to be youngish and female means you are unable to earn your own living without a man” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A humid night two years ago, sitting beside a male friend in his car, and I roll down my window to tip a young man, one of the thousands of unemployed young men in Lagos who hang around, humorous and resourceful, and help you park your car with the expectation of a tip. I brought the money from my bag. He took it with a grateful smile. Then he looked at my friend and said, “Thank you, sir!”
This is what it is to be youngish (early thirties) and female in urban Nigeria. You are driving and a policeman stops you and either he is leering and saying “fine aunty, I will marry you,” or he is sneering, with a taunt in his demeanour and the question so heavy in the air that it need not be asked: “which man bought this car for you and what did you have to do to get him to?” You are reduced to two options; to play angry and tough and to thereby offend his masculinity and have him keep you parked by the roadside, demanding document after document. Or to play the Young Simpering Female and massage his masculinity, a masculinity already fragile from poor pay and various other indignities of the Nigerian state. I am infuriated by these options. I am infuriated by the assumption that to be youngish and female means you are unable to earn your own living without a man. And yet. Sometimes I have taken on the simpering and smiling, because I am late or I am hot or I am simply not dedicated enough to my feminist principle.
I have a friend who is, on the surface, a cliché. An aspirational cliché. She has a beautiful face, two degrees from an American Ivy League college, a handsome husband with a similar educational pedigree and two children who started to read at the age of two; she is always at the top of Nigerian women achievers lists in magazines; has worked, in the past 10 years, in consulting, hedge funds and non-governmental organisations; mentors young girls on how to succeed in a male-dominated world; recites statistics about anything from trade deficits to export revenue. And yet.
One day she told me she had stopped giving interviews because her husband did not like her photo in the newspaper, and she had also decided to take her husband’s surname because it upset him that she continued to use hers professionally. Expressions such as “honour him” and “for peace in my marriage” tumbled out of her mouth, forming what I thought of as a smouldering log of self-conquest.
Another friend is very attractive, very educated, sits on boards of companies and does the sort of management work that is Greek to me. She is single. She is a few years older than I am but looks much younger. The first board meeting she attended, a man asked her, after being introduced, “So whose wife or daughter are you?” Because to him, it was the only way she would be on that board. She was, it turned out, a chief executive. And yet. She lives in a city where her friends dream not of becoming the CEO but of marrying the CEO, a city where her singleness is seen as an affront, where marriage carries more social and political cachet than it should.
Another friend is a talented writer, a forthright woman who makes people nervous when she speaks bluntly about sex, a woman who describes herself as a feminist, and who talks a lot about gender equality and changing the system. And yet. She earns more than her husband does but once told me that he had to pay the rent, always, because it was the man’s duty to do so. “Even if he is broke and I have money, he will have to go and borrow and pay the rent.” She paused, rolling this contradiction around her tongue, and then she added, “Maybe it is because of our culture. It is what they taught us.”
There is, of course, always that “they”. Two years ago, we were slumped on sofas in his Lagos living room, my brother-in-law and I, talking about politics as we usually did.
“I think I’ll run for governor in a few years,” I said in the musing manner of a person who only half-means what they say.
“You would never be governor,” he said promptly. “You could be a senator but not governor. They won’t let a woman be governor.”
What he meant was that a governor had too much power, and was in control of too much money, none of which could be left to a woman by that invisible “they”. And yet. I realise that 15 years ago he would not have said, “you could be a senator.” Civilian rule brought greater participation of women in politics and the most popular and most effective ministers in the past 10 years have been women. In the next decade, my brother-in-law could be proved wrong. In the next three decades, he will certainly be proved wrong. But she would have to be married, the woman who would be governor.
My first novel is on the West African secondary school curriculum. My second novel is taught in universities. One question I am almost always certain of getting during media interviews is a variation of this: we appreciate the work you are doing and your novels are important but when are you getting married? I refuse to accept that the institution of marriage is what gives me my true value, and I refuse to come across as silly or coy or both. The balance is a precarious one.
“Would you ask that question to a male writer my age?” I once asked a journalist in Lagos.
“No,” he said, looking at me as though I were foolish. “But you are not a man.”
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Africa’s political independence was accompanied by a common clarion call to eradicate poverty, illiteracy and disease. Fifty years after the end of colonial, the question is: To what extent has the promise of that call has been realized for African women? There is no doubt that African women’s “long walk to freedom” has yielded some results, however painfully and slowly.
The African Union (AU) now has a legally binding Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. The protocol spells out clearly women’s rights to equality and non-discrimination in a number of areas. It has been ratified by a growing number of African states, can be used in civil law proceedings and is being codified into domestic common law. The AU has also issued a Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa, under which member states are supposed to regularly report on progress.
The protocol and declaration both reflect and reinforce developments at the national level. Many African states have moved to enhance constitutional protections for African women — particularly on women’s rights to citizenship and equality. And the last two decades have seen the emergence of legislation to address violence against women, including sexual violence.
Political representation
These normative developments have been accompanied by improvements in African women’s political representation. The AU adopted, from its inception, a 50 per cent standard for women’s representation, reflected in the composition of its Commission.
Again, this standard drew from and reinforces efforts to enhance women’s representation at the national level. South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda have reached the 30 per cent benchmark for their legislatures. Rwanda has gone further — with 50 per cent representation, one of the best in the world. A few countries, including Nigeria, have seen women assume non-traditional ministerial portfolios, in defence and finance, for example. And Liberia has made history (“herstory”) by becoming the first African country to elect into office a female head of state, Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson.
Progress is evident, particularly in countries that have electoral systems based on or incorporating proportional representation. However, enhanced women’s representation has been harder to achieve in first-past-the-post electoral systems.
But even where there has been progress, the question is whether increased representation of women is catalyzing action by the executives and legislatures in favour of gender equality.
Education, poverty, health
Gains are most evident in African women’s education. Girls and boys are now at par with respect to primary level education. Efforts to get girls into school were accompanied by efforts to keep them in school and to promote role models by developing gender-responsive curricula. Gender gaps are also narrowing in secondary education. The real challenge now lies at the university level, both in the enrolment figures and in the areas of focus to benefit young African women.
Gains for women are harder to see in that call’s “poverty” element, however. It is true that since independence investments in micro-credit and micro-enterprises for women have improved women’s individual livelihoods — and therefore that of their families as well.
Yet there was a critique of such investments, especially in the decade of the 1980s when governments withdrew from social service delivery as a result of structural adjustment programmes. In that context, such investments essentially enabled redistribution among the impoverished, rather than at a macro-level, from the enriched to the impoverished.
The end of that era thus saw a new focus on gender budgeting: looking at where national budget allocations and expenditures could enhance women’s status in the economy. Unsurprisingly, this approach has led African governments back towards public investments in social services.
It is now agreed, for example, the benchmark for public investments in health in Africa is 15 per cent. The African women’s movement has called in particular for this to be directed towards reproductive and sexual health and rights. That is of critical concern to women given the impact of HIV/AIDS, maternal mortality and violence against women, particularly in conflict areas. It is also of concern since African women’s continued lack autonomy and choice over reproduction and sexuality lie at the heart of all pandemics.
Where next?
Where to over the next 50 years then? In light of the experience so far, politically the African women’s movement will be focusing not just on political representation, but the meaning of that representation for advancing gender equality and women’s human rights. And given recent retreats in Africa (such as the rise of the constitutional “coup” and “negotiated democracy”), it will also be focusing on democracy, peace and security more broadly, that is, the nature of the political system itself and not just getting into that system.
Economically, women will continue to focus on the macro-level, but in a deeper sense. What has emerged from gender budgeting efforts is the need to actually track budgetary expenditures, not just being informed about allocations. The aim must be to ensure that Africa’s growth will have real meaning for enhancing African women’s economic livelihoods.
Finally, the women’s movement will be focusing on reproductive and sexual health and rights. The battle over choice (including over gender identity and sexual orientation) is now an open one in many African countries. It is no longer couched politely in demographic or health terms.
African women’s “long walk to freedom” has only just begun.
L. Muthoni Wanyeki is a political scientist who works on development communications, gender and human rights and has published in these fields. She currently works as the Executive Director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), a national, non-governmental organisation that works to promote all human rights of all Kenyans through research and advocacy as well as civic action
Six in 10 say malaria a very serious problem in Africa
A recent Gallup survey finds that roughly 6 in 10 Americans say malaria is a very serious problem in Africa right now, but they are much more likely to view HIV or AIDS and poor nutrition as very serious problems for that continent. When asked more broadly about the seriousness of malaria worldwide, significantly fewer Americans, only about 3 in 10, consider it a very serious problem, ranking it at the bottom of a list of global health conditions that includes HIV or AIDS, cancer, poor nutrition, and tuberculosis. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say malaria is a serious health problem in both Africa and around the world more generally.
Overall Results
HIV or AIDS and poor nutrition are, by far, perceived as the most serious health conditions in Africa right now, of the five tested in the poll. Nearly all Americans, 96%, say that HIV or AIDS is a very serious problem in Africa, and 88% say poor nutrition is a very serious problem. A smaller percentage of Americans, but still a majority, say malaria (62%) and tuberculosis (53%) are serious problems facing that continent. Only 30% say cancer is a serious problem in Africa.
On a worldwide basis, at least 8 in 10 Americans say HIV or AIDS, cancer, and poor nutrition are very serious problems around the world right now. Americans perceive tuberculosis and malaria to be less serious problems, with only 31% saying tuberculosis and 28% saying malaria are very serious problems in the world.
The public is almost three times more likely to say cancer is a more serious problem around the world (87%) than it is in Africa (30%). Conversely, Americans perceive malaria (62% vs. 28%) and tuberculosis (53% vs. 31%) to be much more of a problem in Africa than in other parts of the world. Americans are equally likely to say AIDS and poor nutrition are serious problems in the world and in Africa.
Rice is a central part of many cultures and some countries even credit
rice cultivation with the development of their civilization. It is the
staple food for more than half of the world population. Rice is the
world’s most consumed cereal after wheat. It provides more than 50 percent
of the daily calories ingested by more than half of the world population.
It is the most rapidly growing source of food in Africa, and is of
significant importance to food security in an increasing number of
low-income food-deficit countries.
International Trade in rice is only around 28 million tonnes [less than 8%
of global production]. Africa and Asia import over 85% of the
internationally traded rice volume.
Dear Sir,
With a vision to spur the development of competitive sustainable and
inclusive rice industry and rice business in Africa as a pathway to
increased economic growth and food security in the continent, rice-Africa
(A PPP, Not-For- Profit Initiative of Leap Domiciliares Limited) will
host, 1st International Conference on Rice for Food, Market and
Development in Abuja, Nigeria, March 3-5, 2011.
We seek to facilitate the regional integration of rice value chain and
strengthening of rice- industrial linkages that improve opportunities for
added value and serve as effective means of achieving economic
transformation and sustainable livelihoods.
The conference will bring together STAKEHOLDERS from Africa, Asia, South
Asia, South America, Canada, and China that deal with the specificities of
Rice Producers, processors, Grain Merchandisers, Equipment manufacturers,
Exporters, Importers, Traders, Brokers, Freight Brokers, Commodity
Surveyors and Inspector, Procurement Official, Importers, Shipping
Industry Officials (liner and Bulk), Fertilizer and Agro-chemicals
Suppliers, Seed Suppliers and Scientists.
IN VIEW OF THE ABOVE WE REQUEST FOR YOUR Publication of our Press Releases
on site.
Please find enclosed our recent press releases and the full up-to-date
programme on our website www.rice-africa.com.
Christians in Ghana gathered at the Dome of the Accra International Conference Centre on Sunday for the Jubilee 1st Oil Thanksgiving Service.The sermon follows. It’s long, but I hope the holidays will help. Enjoy.
Beloved in Christ, we have come here today to offer thanks to God for the discovery and first commercial pumping of oil in our country. Our oil is a resource created by God. He is the owner of the earth and it resources so it is right that we pause and offer thanks to Him for His goodness to us. Let us thank God in the words of Psalm 136:1–3 (NKJV) —
1 Oh, give thanks to the LORD, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever. 2 Oh, give thanks to the God of gods! For His mercy endures forever. 3 Oh, give thanks to the Lord of lords! For His mercy endures forever:
Beginning from 1896 we started the process of exploration for oil. After more than a hundred years of effort, on Wednesday the 15th of December 2010, we marked the formal start of oil production in commercial quantities from our Jubilee fields. We have named our oil, Jubilee Oil. Jubilee. That’s an interesting word. It is a loaded word. It means celebration. But not a careless celebration. In the scriptures it implies a celebration that comes from liberation. It is a celebration of new freedom and new responsibility. The Jubilee year was a year when old debts were cancelled and slaves were set free.
For a slave that was freed under the laws of Jubilee in the Old Testament, he had to face the reality of fending for himself and his family. To him jubilee was a time of Thanking God for his freedom and Thinking about how to not end up again in bondage. That is what I believe Ghana should do. We should thank God and think. Let us celebrate what God has blessed us with and think about the new responsibility He has entrusted to us. We can sing and dance today but after that, we must sit and think before we act.
When we recite our national pledge, we make a “promise to hold in high esteem our heritage won for us through the blood and toil of our fathers”. It is right that today as we celebrate the first pumping of oil of oil from our jubilee fields, we hold in high esteem those blood and toil brought us this heritage.
We thank God for our Nation Ghana and the resources he has given us particularly the ocean out of which our oil is drawn. We thank God for all our leaders under whose watch the prospecting, discovery and production of oil happened – beginning from various colonial Governors to President Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister Kofi Busia, General Kutu Acheampong, President Hilla Limann, President Jerry Rawlings, President John Kuffour and President John Mills. We thank God for our Jubilee Partners who executed much of what we celebrate today – Anadarko, E.O Group Ghana Ltd, GNPC, Kosmos Energy, Sabre Oil and Gas and Tullow Oil. We thank God for all public servants, technicians and labourers who devoted time and energy towards this resource. Each one of these many more played their part and pushed for us to get where we are today.
Now the long awaited oil is here.
I will paraphrase the lyrics of a popular 1970’s hit song and ask, ‘now that we’ve found oil what are we gonna do?’
First of all it is important to note that although there is reason to thank for our oil find, the reality is that Ghana’s oil find is currently quite small. The projected yield of what we’ve found so far is not sufficient by itself to create any dramatic change in our national economy. It is very obvious that the economic transformation we seek for will not come from oil. Oil is good but it is not the final answer to our challenges.
The future of Ghana will not be determined by our oil find. The future of Ghana will be determined by our foresight, wisdom and planning.
Ladies and gentlemen, the key to our development does not lie at the bottom of the Ocean; it lies in the center of our heads. The key to Ghana’s development is not black gold; it is gray matter. Our greatness lies in the wisdom we can harness as a people to turn this tiny oil resource into a huge industrial boom for our nation.
Our fourth scripture reading today from Proverbs 24:3 states, ‘through wisdom a house is built’. Isn’t that interesting? A house is material. Wisdom is immaterial. A house is visible. Wisdom is invisible. A house has components of cement, bricks, iron rods and fittings. But those materials cannot constitute themselves into a building. What puts the materials together is wisdom. Ideas. The value and beauty of a house is determined by the ideas of the architect. Through wisdom a house is built.
Your wisdom will determine whether you put up a cheap building that falls apart or an elegant building that stands the test of time. Wisdom is the builder. Similarly, oil cannot build Ghana. It is wisdom that will build our nation. What kind of wisdom will be build with?
The great Greek storyteller, Aesop, told a story about a farmer who found that his goose had laid a yellow egg. He picked it and realized it was as heavy as lead. He was going to throw it away, because he thought a trick had been played upon him. But he took it home on second thoughts, and soon found to his delight that it was an egg of pure gold. Every morning the same thing occurred, the goose laid a golden egg. Soon he became rich by selling his eggs. As he grew rich he grew greedy; and thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find nothing. There was no egg and the goose was dead.
There are two kinds of wisdom at play in this story. First is the wisdom of patient and measured acquisition. Second is the wisdom of instant gratification. One kind of wisdom guaranteed sustained revenues whilst the other destroyed the source of revenue.
Can we learn some simple lessons about resource management from Aesop? I hope so.
Our oil find is relatively small compared with what other nations in Africa have. Currently Ghana has identified seven major offshore oil fields believed to contain reserves of over 1.8 barrels of oil and gas. That is not very large. Currently expected production rate of 120,000 barrels per day, we are ranked about beyond the 11th in Africa. It is clear that our oil resource by itself cannot provide the needed capital to appreciably grow our economy. Yet, although what we have is small, it can be significant if we manage it wisely. So what can we do with our oil?
We can either ingest it or invest it.
What does it mean to ‘Ingest it’? In colloquial Ghanaian English, we would say, ‘chop it’. We can decide to spend it to achieve immediate satisfaction. I am not implying corruption here. I am referring to the kind of spending that is similar to what happens when a starving man finds food or a dehydrated man comes upon water. We’ve all seen that before. A starved person finds food and hurriedly gorges himself on the food till he chokes on it or vomits it out or worse still dies. The reason is simple. After going without food for so long, your digestive system is unable to process a lot of food at a time. The wise thing to do is to have a graduated intake as you rebuild your systems to properly use what you’re feeding it.
Proverbs 21:20 (NKJV) reads,‘There is desirable treasure, And oil in the dwelling of the wise, But a foolish man squanders it.
The alternative to ingesting or squandering our oil resource is investing it.
Investing our oil money requires that we think about sustained long-term returns. Our third reading today was from the Gospel of St Luke Chapter 19:12-26. Jesus told the parable of the minas. In the parable, ten servants were given ten minas each. A mina in the days of Jesus was about three months wages. The instruction the noble man gave to his servants was, ‘do business till I come’. The servants were expected to work profitably with the minas they had been given. Those who increased the value of their minas, received additional resources. Those who failed to use their minas profitably were deprived of their minas altogether. I believe Ghana can apply the lessons of this parable to the way we manage our natural resources. Let’s do what Jesus recommended – Do business till I come.
We must not ingest our resources; we must invest our resources for profit. We must carefully weight the return on investments on every venture we commit any of our natural resources to.
I am aware that after years of economic difficulties, almost all sectors of our nation’s economy have been starved of sufficient resources, making it extremely difficult for our national planners to prioritize. As a result every sector of our economy has become a priority. However, in the midst of all of these pressing national demands, we must identify the sector from which a chain reaction of development can grow and impact the whole.
It is my considered view that education must be seen as the crucial sector that propels the engine of growth for an improved Ghana. Through wisdom a house is built.
If we continue to provide mediocre education, we will continue to have mediocre citizens who are incapable of delivering the human resource capacity for real social change. To build a modern industrial society, we must emphasize on the appropriate subjects and courses. Mathematics. Chemistry. Physics. These are the subjects needed for manufacturing and industrialization.
Over 2,000 years ago a young Greek artist named Timanthes studied under a respected tutor. After several years the teacher’s efforts seemed to have paid off when Timanthes painted an exquisite work of art. Unfortunately, he became so enraptured with the painting that he spent days gazing at it. One morning when he arrived to admire his work, he was shocked to find it blotted out with paint. Angry, Timanthes ran to his teacher, who admitted he had destroyed the painting. “I did it for your own good. That painting was retarding your progress. Start again and see if you can do better.” Timanthes took his teacher’s advice and produced Sacrifice of Iphigenia, which is regarded as one of the finest paintings of antiquity.
Like Timanthes, we can also do better if we put our minds to it. We can do better if we shift our focus from what is already there to what can be there. Many times the good is the enemy of better; comfort is the enemy of innovation. For Ghana to be innovative it must shift. It must do things differently. Our old model of hasty, unplanted and untested development has retarded our progress for too long. Let us start afresh and create a new masterpiece.
Ladies and Gentlemen, current picture of Africa is not a good one. The original joy and hope that the founding fathers of Africa’s emancipation announced after the attainment of independence appears shipwrecked by our own acts of irresponsibility. In the place of hope and happiness has arisen a spirit of self-doubt and passivity.
In a sense, it is understandable that our politicians bear the brunt of our national frustrations. In addition to politicians, our religious leaders and institutions have also had to respond to the society’s disillusionment with the moral and ethical failures of the clergy.
It seems obvious that the general citizenry of our Continent hold political and religious leaders in high regard. They expect us to lead the way.
When the church stands in its prophetic role and leads the way in calling the nation to righteousness, the nation is exalted from reproach to nobility.
Any society does not have a principled reference for the ethical and moral conduct of its citizens, succumbs to the base desires of its people. It is our lack of adherence to clear moral imperatives that has led to the increasing promiscuity, viciousness, crime, unemployment, social insecurity, hardship and family breakup around us today. If the leadership of the church leads in righteousness, the citizens will commit themselves to goodness.
Those of us, who are followers of Christ Jesus, cannot run away from the responsibility of challenging our nation to live up to its potential instead of its lowest common denominator.
Experts have predicted that unless some very radical changes occur in the way our continent responds to its challenges, we shall continue to witness an ever-widening gap between the standard of living in Africa and the rest of the industrialized world.
Money is good, and so everybody wants money. But the proliferation of promos and lotteries by telecommunications companies and even banks, by which many hope to get rich quick are essentially anti-social. While a few might be lucky and start thanking their stars that they are now millionaires in naira, and even in dollars, this get-rich-quick attitude needs to be examined. It is like robbing many to enrich few, not even to talk about allegations that the companies running the try-your-luck games in town often undercut the intelligence of their unsuspecting subscribers.
The Director-General of the National Lottery Regulatory Commission, Mr. Peter Igho, once said that “one of our major telecom operators made a profit of N2 billion from a lottery game and I do not think it gave up to N20 million to the public who played the lottery. Imagine the impact on the people if N1billion had been given to the public as prizes won in the lottery.” (Daily Trust, September 13, 2009).
Aside the cheating claims, the main reason why I think both the telecoms and the participating population should review this kind of lottery is that it tends to promote a materialist and consumerist society. Every young person is made to think that money is everything and the adverts for these lotteries seem to suggest that gambling is the best source of wealth. Instead of focusing on the lottery mentality, telecommunications companies should improve on their services. Call drops, bad networks, undelivered (yet charged) text messages are too common to enjoy the benefits of the global system for mobile communications in Nigeria.
They should use part of the proceeds from these lotteries to execute social responsibility services in schools and health centres. Banks should give scholarships to diligent students and modest loans to indigent ones. Many of our students in public schools cannot afford food and books and when they hear about enrichment by lottery I wonder what they think.
There is no doubt that lottery is a matter of choice, and that there are laws that govern it. Even in the UK some are becoming millionaires in pounds by hitting the jackpot. Yet, the psycho-social impacts of lottery mentality, especially when it is not properly regulated and is being branded as the most normal source of wealth, can only give rise to a material-driven and heavily monetized society, where people, especially the youth, would want to chase money by all easiest means possible.
