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How to Avoid Life-threatening Mistakes by Learning from the Stories of Others
In Africa, stories are used to teach morals, to entertain, and to uphold core values as a people. At this phase of our development when we are faced with a lot of challenging situations, what we need are stories of hope, not stories of turmoil, crisis and despondency. For this reason, I shall be running stories that are capable of turning your lives around in this series. The title of today’s story is:“An Interesting Funeral”
One day all the employees of a very unusual company reached their office and all saw a big sign on the main door which said:
‘Yesterday, the person who was hindering your growth in this company passed away. We invite you to join the funeral in the room that has been prepared in the gym.’
In the beginning, they all got sad for the death of one of their colleagues, but after a while they started getting curious to know who was that person who hindered the growth of their colleagues and the company itself?
The excitement in the gym was such that security agents were ordered to control the crowd within the room. The more people reached the coffin, the more the excitement heated up.
Everyone thought – ‘Who is this person who was hindering my progress?’
One by one the intrigued employees got closer to the coffin, and when they looked inside it, they suddenly became speechless.
They stood near the coffin in shock and in silence. There was a mirror inside the coffin: everyone who looked inside it could see themselves! There was also a sign next to the mirror that said. . .
‘There is only one person who is capable of setting limits to your growth and IT IS YOU!’
Moral Lesson
Your life does not change when your boss changes, when your friends change, when your parents change, when your husband or wife changes, when your company changes, when your church changes, when your location changes, when your money changes, when your status changes . . .
No, your life changes when YOU change, when you go beyond your limiting beliefs.
Examine yourself, watch yourself. Don’t be afraid of difficulties, impossibilities and losses. Be a winner; build yourself and your reality. It’s the way you face life that makes the difference.
The Black Stars of Ghana were the only African team to get to the knock-out stages in 2010
Football’s world governing body Fifa is meeting to decide how many places each continent receives at the next World Cup in 2014.
Six African nations took part in the 2010 tournament, because South Africa were the hosts.
The continent will almost certainly be cut back to five representatives for the next finals in Brazil.
There is a chance the figure could drop further, with other regions pressing hard for more places.
Africa’s performance in 2010, where of the continent’s contenders only Ghana made it out of the knock-out stages, will count against it.
Political pressures and lobbying in the expected tussle between incumbent Fifa president Sepp Blatter and his likely challenger Mohamed Bin Hammam will also have an impact.
Bin Hammam has been pushing for an increased representation from his Asian Confederation – which had four places plus a play-off against Oceania for South Africa.
Concacaf, the North and Central American and Caribbean region, is also pressing especially hard for more places than the current three plus a play-off spot.
South America is likely to get an extra berth because Brazil are the hosts.
Fifa is set to announce the decision at a news conference on Thursday, following a two-day meeting in Zurich.
Fifa is also going to announce Canada as the hosts of the 2015 Women’s World Cup – they are the only contenders after Zimbabwe pulled out of the running.
In addition, Ghana will find out whether it will host the U17 World Cup in 2013 and the U17 women’s competition in 2014 while Tunisia has bid for the U17 World Cup in 2015 and the U20 event in 2015.
The 2010 Global Go To Think Tank Rankings marks the fourth edition of what has now become an annual report. The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the International Relations Program, University of Pennsylvania has created a process for ranking think tanks around the world. It is the first comprehensive ranking of the world’s top think tanks, based on a worldwide survey of close to 1500 scholars, policy makers, journalists and regional and subject area experts. The think tank index has been described as the insider’s guide to the global marketplace of ideas. All 6480 think tanks in the world were contacted and encouraged to participate in this year’s nominations process. For this ambitious global project, I have assembled a panel of over 250 experts from around the world, across the political spectrum and from every discipline and sector to help nominate and select public policy research centers of excellence for 2010. This group of peers and experts were asked to nominate and then rank regional or global centers of excellence that they felt should be recognized for producing rigorous and relevant research, publications and programs in one or more substantive areas of research.
The Global Go To Think Tank Rankings was launched in 2006 in response to the never-ending requests that I received from journalists, scholars and government officials to provide a list of the leading think tanks in a particular country or region of the world. When I first designed the project it was intended to identify some of the leading think tanks in the world in an attempt to answer these inquiries in a more systematic fashion. Over the last years the process has been refined and the number of institutions and individuals involved in the project has grown steadily.
The primary objective of the rankings is to recognize some of the leading public policy think tanks in the world and highlight the important contributions these organizations are making to governments and civil societies around the world. In five short years the Global Go To Index has become an authoritative source for the top public policy research institutes in the world. Last year’s Report was launched at a briefing at the United Nations University in New York and at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington DC. Over 225 diplomats, foundations and think tanks attended the meeting at the UN and over 100 print and electronic media outlets featured the findings of the study.
Contained in this Report are the results of the 2010 Global Go To Think Tank Rankings. Also included in this report is a summary of the major trends and issues that think tanks face across the globe. These trends were identified through our annual survey of think tanks and interviews with the staff of think tanks and civil society organizations in every region of the world.
Every year we try to respond systematically to comments and suggestions for how we might improve the nomination and rankings process but this year we devoted considerable time and energy to evaluating the entire process. Based on the findings of the evaluation and the other input we received for how to improve the quality and representativeness of the rankings we instituted several changes. Specifically, we made some minor changes to the wording of the nomination and rankings criteria so the meaning was clearer, launched an aggressive outreach effort in Asia, Latin America, Africa and MENA and proposed a set of options for changing the process for the Expert Panel to consider. After careful consideration of how to organize the nominations and rankings process we settled on a mixed approach that was explained in the letter I sent out to every institution in August 2010. This change resulted in turning the process on its head by having an open nominations process in which all 6480 think tanks were invited to submit nominations, rather than having the Expert Panel develop the initial slate of institutions to be ranked as we had done in previous years. The changes dramatically increased the levels of participation from the regions listed above and greatly improved the quality and representativeness of the universe of institutions that were nominated this year. The fact that individuals and organizations from 120 countries participated in this year’s nominations and rankings process is a clear testament to the success of these efforts.
While this year’s selection process is greatly improved, a number of qualifications are still in order. First and foremost, the significant differences between the levels of development and resources in the world continue to contribute to certain regions being underrepresented on the top 50 think tanks in the world list. We suspect that this has to do with the relatively small number of think tanks in developing countries, their underdeveloped capacity and the limited resources available to these organizations. The unfortunate reality is that there are simply more and better-funded think tanks in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries. In addition, the dominant role these countries play in world politics and the influence they exert over political, economic and social thinking is reflected in the global prominence of their think tanks. That being said, the real story is not what organizations make it on the list of the Top 50 think tanks in the world but the ones who make it on the list for the top think tanks in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern and Central Europe.
Despite our best efforts to consult widely and create a rigorous and inclusive process, we cannot eliminate all bias from the selection of the top think tanks in the world. We fully recognize that personal, regional, ideological, and disciplinary biases may have been introduced into the nomination and selection process by some of those consulted for this study. We are confident, however, that our efforts to create a detailed set of selection criteria, an open and transparent
process, and an increase in the participation from underrepresented regions of the world has
served to insulate the nomination and selection process from serious problems of bias and underrepresentation.
It is also important to note that US think tanks (see the list of the top 50 Think Tanks in the US) were not included in the universe of institutions considered for the Top Think Tanks Worldwide list because we felt their inclusion would have a distorting effect on the global rankings. By organizing the process in this way, we were able to further highlight the lesser-known think tanks in other regions of the world.
Finally, we should point out that the data collection and research for this project was conducted without the benefit of field research, a budget or a staff.
Despite these limitations, I am confident that the international experts group and peer nomination and selection process that was constituted for this study has enabled us to create the most authoritative list of high performance think tanks in the world.
2 March 2011 – A United Nations human rights expert today called on the international community to step up efforts to address the impact of the devastating drought in Somalia, warning that the country is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster if action is not taken immediately.
Shamsul Bari, the Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Somalia, noted in a news release that the ongoing drought response is far from meeting the needs of the affected population in terms of access to food, clean water and health.
“The drought situation in the country and the slow international response is extremely serious and may lead to a natural and human disaster,” said Mr. Bari, who visited Somalia, Kenya and Djibouti last month.
“I strongly urge the international community, including the UN, to take immediate and concerted measures to address the dire humanitarian crisis that affects all human rights of the vulnerable Somali population, including women, children and the elderly as well as the internally displaced people (IDP) and minorities,” he said.
The drought is exacerbating an already dire humanitarian situation in Somalia, where civilians have been caught up in the fighting pitting forces of the country’s transitional government, who are backed by African Union peacekeepers, against insurgents of the Al-Shabaab armed group and other militants.
Mr. Bari warned that “the drought is now a cause for displacement in Somalia, in addition to conflict,” and expressed his deep concerns over its effect on the life of the population in many regions of Somalia.
“It was with shock and great sadness that during my recent field visit to Mogadishu, Puntland and Somaliland I learnt from local authorities and civil society from the various parts of Somalia that the drought affected population has sought assistance closer to urban areas, such as Mogadishu, where the ongoing fighting presents increased risk for the civilian population.”
Last month UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos had warned that severe drought in Somalia had led to more people becoming internally displaced and others moving into refugee camps across the border in Kenya, as food and water scarcity worsen.
“People are moving due to the deteriorating living conditions and a lack of a way to make a living. Families are said to be selling their assets, including houses and land, to get by and to facilitate their movement to the refugee camps in Kenya,” she told reporters following a visit to the country.
An estimated 2.4 million people – 32 per cent of the country’s 7.2 million people – are in need of relief aid as a result of drought and two decades of conflict.
One of Ghana’s popular clergymen, the Rev. Mensa Otabil, Head Pastor of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) says for many years he had prayed that Ghana would never find oil. Because he believes that won’t help the country develop the work ethic required to develop a productive society.
Rev. Otabil who also established one of Ghana’s attractive universities, the Central University College told the Financial Times of London that people would become more corrupt when the country finds oil because there will be no barriers.
“For years I prayed we would never find oil. I don’t think it will help us to develop the work ethic we need to structure a viable, productive society. I think people would most likely become very corrupt because there are no barriers,” he told the publication.
Pastor Otabil was quoted saying “I don’t care what America wants and what China wants. I care about what Ghana wants. Because what is going to keep us centered is our values and what we consider is in our best interest. That is what will ground us when this push and shove escalates.”
He indicated according to the publication that he believes one of the best uses of oil revenues would be to give the state the backbone to be a stronger and fairer ar biter of Ghana’s future by investing in the police and judiciary. Yet that will be only one of many competing claims as the pot of petrodollars grows.
Ghana discovered oil in commercial quantities in June 2007 and commercial production began on December 15, 2010.
The country’s Jubilee Oil field has been noted as the largest oil field to be discovered in Africa in the last 10 to 15 years.
In February 2011 Tullow Oil, the major stakeholder in Ghana’s oil sector announced the discovery of oil in its Teak-1 exploration well in the West Cape Three Points license offshore Ghana.
Already, industry watchers are touting the Teak-1 well as another significant find.
Tullow Oil’s Exploration Director, Angus McCoss, said about the Teak-1 well, “Success in all five of the targeted reservoirs, encountering 73 metres of total net pay, is an excellent outcome for the Teak-1 well and a great start to our 2011 multi-well exploration campaign in the West Cape Three Points licence.”
A Kenyan lawmaker, Gidion Mbuyi, has been kicked out of parliament for his bling-bling fashion. The MP dressed with ear studs adorned with precious stones to parliament and an attention grabbing sunglasses.
Mr. Mbuvi, who represents Nairobi, was excluded from a session after other MPs decided that the way he dressed offended the dignity of the assembly.
Deputy Speaker Farah Maalim said the house had never before been entered by a male lawmaker wearing earrings.
“The dress or the manner in which the honorable (MP) is dressed today does not depict, in the eyes and the opinion and the conscience of the chair, the dignity of this house and that of an honourable member,” Mr Maalim was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency.
“Never in the history of this house… have I seen a situation in which a member of parliament, who is a male, come in with earrings or some stuff in the ears or whatever you may want to call it,” the deputy speaker said.
But supporters of the Mbuyi, popularly known as Sonko, a Swahili term describing a rich and flamboyant person , do not see anything wrong with the dude.[ad#Adsense-200by200sq]
Municipal workers on strike at Cape Town, South Africa
Africans and people of the Middle East have spoken; and in their loud and clear voices, they have unambiguously made it clear to their governments that cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and any abuse of state resources and public power for the benefit of the few will no longer be tolerated. At present, demands for political reforms are mounting in Libya despite deadly threats from the current regime, and the people of Yemen, Bahrain, and Jordan are continuing with their struggle for freedom. As expected Zimbabwe’s security apparatus is on high alert and no one doubts its readiness to use whatever means available to crush the people’s demands for true democracy and to keep President Mugabe in power. Today, the first of March is Everybody Hates Bob Day (#EverybodyHatesBob on Twitter) and anti –Mugabe protests have been planned for Harare, Bulawayo and there will also be a demonstration outside South Africa’s National Parliament in Capetown. This demonstration is in response to the arrests of 45 Zimbabweans for watching uprisings footage. The arrested pro-democracy activists have since been charged with treason. Without doubt, only a fearful, paranoid and desperate regimes will respond with such stupidity to a normal act of watching uprisings footage. Unfortunately, this incident and many other instances of violent abuse, intimidation and repression against ordinary Zimbabweans happen under the watch of SADC. Perhaps it is time for SADC to realise that whatever it is trying to do in Zimbabwe is not working and the grabbing of foreign companies as Mugabe launches his “anti sanctions campaign” tomorrow as part of his election campaign clearly shows that he has little regard whatsoever for the regional bloc.
Tunisia’s wave of change currently spreading like wildfire throughout North Africa and the Middle East harshly reminds the entire African leadership that people will no longer accept anything less from them. The revolution is further proof that the people have had enough of bad governance. Going forward, it can not be business as usual and leaders need to vigorously assess the impact the revolts will have in their own countries. Long-serving leaders many of whom have poor service delivery records and dictatorship tendencies need to go back to the boardroom. They need to realise that there is nothing they can do about the present situation. People want freedom and they want it now. Victor Hugo, French poet, novelist, playwright once said “there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come”. This quote captures the mood of Africans at this point in time.
Democratic South Africa was recently forced to engage with the implications of Tunisia’s revolt. In response to a prediction by Moeletsi Mbeki, political analyst and brother of former President Thabo Mbeki that South Africa’s Tunisia Day will be in 2020, the President’s response was “I can tell you there will never be a Tunisia in South Africa. We have a constitutional democracy here. No-one is being repressed; everyone has the right to say what he wants and to vote.” “It is impossible. I use the word again: It is impossible.”
One thing that the protests have taught us is that anything is possible. South Africans through violent service delivery protests have strongly made it clear to the government and the ruling party that constitutional democracy has to deliver on socio economic rights and it has to make it possible for all to live a dignified life with access to basic services like water, electricity, sanitation, health care, and so on. There is widespread acknowledgement that substantial progress has been made in the delivery of basic services to South Africans, however, much more needs to be done. The youth who are behind many of the current protests in North Africa are, for example, the main victims of the unemployment crisis in South Africa. Statistics show that about 50% of young people below the age of 25 are unemployed and have no chance at all of finding a job. Many hope the youth wage subsidy starting in 1 April 2012 will help soften the crisis, but it remains to be seen what its impacts will be. At the launch of the ANC‘s Election Manifesto for the 2011 local government elections to be held before May, the President of the ANC Youth League Mr Julius Malema correctly echoed the sentiments of many including the youth when he said that “this democracy is not a democracy of families; this is a democracy of the people of the South Africa”… “When families are exploiting the resources of this country and are enriching themselves in the name of freedom, when those in political office abuse their power to benefit friends, the youth must rise in defence of the ANC.” This statement comes at a time when there is a strong perception that members of the President’s family especially his 28 year old son Duduzane and the President’s close friends the Gupta family are getting state contracts worth billions of money. Surely it is stories like these that have brought out the wrath of the Tunisian and Egyptian people.
Whether the perception is real or not, what matters is that it exists and it was a contributing factor in the uprisings in North of Africa. South Africa despite its strong democratic institutions and a somewhat better service delivery record is not immune at all to what is happening around it.
Widespread rape and other sexual violence are depriving millions of children of an education in conflict-affected countries, UNESCO’s 2011 Global Monitoring Report warns.
The report, “The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education,” calls for an end to the culture of impunity surrounding sexual violence, with strengthened monitoring of human rights violations affecting education, a more rigorous application of existing international law and the creation of an International Commission on Rape and Sexual Violence, backed by the International Criminal Court.
The international courts set up in the wake of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda have firmly established rape and other sexual violence as war crimes, yet these acts remain widely deployed weapons of war.
Of the rapes reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), one-third involved children (and 13% are against children under the age of 10). Unreported rape in conflict-affected areas of in the east of the country may be 10 to 20 times the reported level. That would translate into 130,000 to 260,000 incidents in 2009 alone.
In the report, 15-year-old Minova from South Kivu province in DRC describes her experience. “I was just coming back from the river to fetch water. … Two soldiers came up to me and told me that if I refuse to sleep with them, they will kill me. They beat me and ripped my clothes. One of the soldiers raped me. …My parents spoke to a commander and he said that his soldiers do not rape, and that I am lying. I recognized the two soldiers, and I know that one of them is called Edouard.”
Sexual violence damages education on many levels. Girls subjected to rape often experience grave physical injury – with long-term consequences for school attendance. The psychological effects, including depression, trauma, shame and withdrawal, have devastating consequences for learning. Many girls drop out of school after rape because of unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and AIDS, as well as other forms of ill health, trauma, displacement or stigma.
Robbing children of a secure home environment and traumatizing the communities that they live in profoundly impairs prospects for learning. Sexual violence creates a wider atmosphere of insecurity that leads to a decline in the number of girls able to attend school.
Many countries that have emerged from violent conflict – including Guatemala and Liberia – continue to report elevated levels of rape and sexual violence, suggesting that practices that emerge during violent conflict become socially ingrained. While the majority of victims are girls and women, boys and men are at risk in some countries.
The report describes monitoring systems for rape and other sexual violence as among the weakest in the international system with United Nations agencies and others relying on a fragmented and often anecdotal body of evidence.
The report calls for change on four major fronts:
An International Commission on Rape and Sexual Violence should be established to document the scale of the problem, identify perpetrators and assess government responses. The Under-Secretary-General for UN Women should head the commission, with national review exercises coordinated through the Office of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict.
All governments in conflict-affected states should be called upon to develop national plans for curtailing sexual violence, drawing on best practices. Donors and United Nations agencies should coordinate efforts to back these plans.
Strengthen United Nations coordination to combat sexual violence. The United Nations Entity on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women — UN Women — should be mandated, resourced and equipped to coordinate action across the United Nations system and oversee enforcement of Security Council resolutions.
The International Criminal Court could play a far more active role in enforcing Security Council Resolutions, and could inform United Nations, regional and national efforts to document levels of rape and other sexual violence, establish benchmarks for combating impunity, provide training, and strengthen the role of women in local and national leadership positions.
Mary Robinson, co-chair of the Civil Society Advisory Group to the UN on Women, Peace and Security, writes in the report: “Children living with the psychological trauma, the insecurity, the stigma, and the family and community breakdown that comes with rape are not going to realize their potential in school.
That is why it is time for the Education for All community to engage more actively on human rights advocacy aimed at ending what the UN Secretary-General has described as “our collective failure” to protect those lives destroyed by sexual violence.” The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education, cautions that the world is not on track to achieve by 2015 the six Education for All goals that over 160 countries signed up to in 2000. Although there has been progress in many areas, most of the goals will be missed by a wide margin – and conflict is one of the major reasons.
The report is endorsed by four Nobel Peace Prize laureates: Oscar Arias Sánchez, Shirin Ebadi, José Ramos-Horta and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Introducing the report, Archbishop Tutu says: “It documents in stark detail the sheer brutality of the violence against some of the world’s most vulnerable people, including its schoolchildren, and it challenges world leaders of all countries, rich and poor, to act decisively.” Of the total number of primary school age children in the world who do not attend school, 42% – 28 million – live in poor countries affected by conflict.[ad#Adsense-200by200sq]
