Henry Makori*
Is God good all the time? Is God all-loving, compassionate and always acting in the best interest of human beings, the cream of His creation? Is every human being valuable in the eyes of God? Then why did God allow tens of thousands of innocent people to perish in such a dreadful fashion in Haiti? Is God all-powerful and in control of everything than happens in the universe, including the dropping of a leaf from a tree branch? Does God know everything? Why then couldn’t He use such awesome knowledge and power to protect the people of Haiti?
Is everything that happens part of God’s plan? What is the divine purpose of the horrendous carnage? What was the divine purpose of the Indian Ocean Tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people in 2004? What divine purpose had God in mind in Rwanda in 1994 when He let nearly a million people die? And the Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed? And all the suffering that human beings undergo everyday? Where, really is God?
Believers in an all-powerful and all-loving God who created the universe and is always in control of it attribute problems/suffering to human beings who ruined God’s perfect creation by their own negligence or evil acts. God is always innocent. This is the reasoning of American evangelist Pat Robertson of The 700 Club television programme. He said that when Haiti was a French colony, freedom fighters "swore a pact to the devil," saying, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French. And so the devil said, ‘Okay, it's a deal.’” Ever since, Robertson continued, "they [Haitians] have been cursed by one thing after the other."
Of course most religious people cringed at this thesis. But, truth be told, every person who believes in an all-powerful and all-loving God accepts that God is always on the side of those who believe in Him. The corollary is that nonbelievers forfeit God’s protection, thereby exposing themselves to all manner of suffering. The problem with this view is that religious people suffer as well. Evil continues, prayers notwithstanding. Kenyans will recall that before the apocalypse of 2007 there were lots of prayers (some held nationally) for peaceful elections.
In the wake of the Haitian horror, the Anglican Church’s second highest ranking cleric, Ugandan-born Archbishop of York John Sentamu, chose silence. “I have nothing to say that makes sense of this horror - all I know is that the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus is that he is with us,” he said. The simple question to Archbishop Sentamu is this: Jesus is with us doing what?
Catholic theologian and physicist Lorenzo Albacete tried to answer just that question. He did not hide his own frustration. “[Religious] officials keep coming out assuring the victims of the tragedy that their “hearts and prayers” go out to them. Prayers? To Whom? To a God who could have simply prevented this from happening?” Knowing that there is actually no adequate religious explanation for the Haiti tragedy or indeed any other human suffering, Fr Albacete nevertheless said: “I can only accept a God who “co-suffers” with me. Such is the God of the Christian faith.”
What exactly is the meaning of that, a God who “co-suffers” with humanity? I thought God was all-powerful, all-knowing, beyond suffering of any kind, the answer to every human question? How does he again “co-suffer” with wretched humanity that looks up to Him for salvation? Doesn’t that sound like an end-of-the-road theological speculation?
In a discussion forum on one web site, a student wrote: “In our school this week we have been asked to say prayers for the people of Haiti. Why? I truly, truly do not understand it. God must have known it was going to happen, mustn't he? And why, now, does he need to be asked to help before he will help the people of Haiti? If God exists, why did he allow that earthquake to happen? Was he powerless to stop it? Or could he have stopped it, but choose not to? I simply cannot understand how God could be real and let this happen. My faith is rapidly running out.”
What is religion’s answer to this student?
[*The writer is a journalist in Nairobi]
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this section do not necessarily represent the opinions of CISA.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
OPINION: Mobile continent: Africa’s Telecommunications Revolution*
Abigail Frymann
Africa has shrunk now that one person in three owns a mobile phone. Already the effect on families, business and even governance has been extraordinary, but the telecommunications revolution has only just begun.
Over the single piece of cloth that George Kamakei Olodopash, an illiterate Masai farmer in Narok, Kenya, wore wrapped around his torso and thighs, hung a mobile phone from a thin black belt. Through an interpreter I asked him what he used it for. He looked at me as though I was from a previous century.
“If I’m out in the fields and I’m going to be late home, I can phone my wife and tell her,” he spelt out. How did he charge it? “I have a solar panel on the roof of my hut,” he replied.
That was in 2003. Since then the number of Africans buying mobile phones has shot up by 550 per cent, according to the United Nations. The “Information Economy Report” published by the UN Conference on Trade and Development in October, found that mobile subscriptions rose from 54 million to 350 million between 2003 and 2008 – meaning more than a third of Africans now owns a mobile phone.
“Communities have gone from never having used a phone in their lives, or only using one in a kiosk, to where you see someone herding their cows pull a mobile phone out of their pocket,” says Maurice McPartlan, head of Cafod’s Africa programmes, who added that mobiles have made aid work easier and safer, saying: “For us, instead of being out of touch unless you went into a hotel or post office, one of the tools staff carry is a mobile, which is quite a good security measure.”
Two of the main uses of mobiles in Africa are for banking and accessing news. Earlier this year, AfricaNews.com, a news website funded by Western businesses and charities, announced the launch of its mobile news website. It sources and publishes content via mobile devices and says it has more than 400 reporters working – for free – in 35 countries, including Somalia, Algeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). And its coverage is far broader than the formula of coups, famines and safaris worn out in the Western press. One of today’s top stories: “Malawi: cell phone banking to begin.”
Mobile banking enables those with bank accounts to access and transfer money without having to trek to the nearest branch, and for those hundreds of millions of Africans without bank accounts to move money around without the high charges of the ubiquitous Western Union. Other businesses have benefited from mobiles too. Isolated farmers in East Africa access information about disease and weather patterns; they can also find out the going rates for their livestock or crops so the middleman can’t rip them off. Cloth weavers in rural Nigeria save days on wasted journeys by pre-arranging visits to their intermediaries by phone. Mobiles have had a psychological impact too.
“People feel less vulnerable; there’s a willingness to take risks,” says Nigerian-born Abi Jagun, a researcher on technology markets and society. He explained that anxious parents can phone a relative’s medically trained neighbour about their sick child in the middle of the night. People feel safer when they travel, adding: “Having mobiles creates an atmosphere where people think and see more clearly.”
At a grass-roots level, mobiles have provided a new line for entrepreneurs. In a village someone a little richer will own a mobile and sell airtime to his neighbours. Street vendors can add to their dusty roadside stalls “recharge cards” – scratch cards to top up credit. In Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, those who own a phone drop it off at a shop and pay 20 Kenyan shillings (15p) to get it charged. Some vendors use car batteries to charge phones.
Tariffs are high, so people on low incomes don’t make many calls. They may “flash” or “miss call” the person they are calling – ring them momentarily so he or she can phone them back. Chauffeurs, home helps and nannies “flash” their employees; Africans “flash” their relatives living in Britain, who call them back using cheap pre-paid phone-cards. The extraordinarily high level of demand, particularly from the poorest levels of society, caught many in the business off-guard. Other factors in the mobile phone industry’s runaway success, according to Richard Heeks, director of the Centre for Development Informatics at Manchester University, are that mobile firms were willing to take risks, cheap handsets and low-cost pre-payment models were made available, and governments liberalised ownership and policy of telecommunications. But the benefits have reached beyond that one industry.
“The success of mobile phones in garnering far more subscribers than companies initially expected has opened the eyes of investors to potential demand for other services in Africa, notably banking and insurance,” says William Wallis, Africa editor of the Financial Times. “They have shown there is a market out there even if the majority of Africans are poor. The advent of mobile phones has been a revolution in Africa this decade – they have empowered Africans and unleashed enormous potential simply by meeting demand.”
Poverty is not Africa’s only scourge to be addressed by mobile communications. Add to that corruption and poor governance. Professor Heeks notes: “One interesting thing to emerge is ‘sousveillance’ – the opposite of surveillance. This means not watching from above but watching from below. Mobile phones have been used by ordinary citizen groups to keep tabs on government – watching polling booths during elections, taking pictures of uncompleted public works that are supposed to have been paid for.”
On the other hand, mobiles have also been a gift to rebel movements, coup plotters and criminals, and in some countries governments have tapped conversations or turned signals off at will. In northern Uganda, which until recently was terrorised nightly by the Lord’s Resistance Army, the signal would disappear whenever a VIP moved in an insecure area, says Sr Fernanda Pellizzer, a Comboni nun who runs a local HIV project.
Back in 1997 in the DRC, residents and refugees in the eastern cities of Goma and Bukavu were left without a signal for a week after the Rwanda – and Uganda-aided installation of Laurent Kabila. Mobile coverage had already spread quickly there, partly because landline coverage is particularly scant. The mobile industry has proved resilient to the most common deterrent to investors – conflict.
“Mobiles aren’t a panacea,” says Dr Jagun. “Literacy matters, disposable income matters. No country is going to leapfrog any stage of development [just because of their proliferation]. Mobile telephony is now being viewed as an enabler of development rather than something that will directly bring it about. When you talk about food aid, mobile telephony facilitates the distribution of that aid.”
None the less, the mobile phone industry boosts infrastructure at many different levels. The same continent that struggles to make millions of its inhabitants food-secure is also home to a swelling urbanised population looking for office work, and a business culture that has long waited to embrace good communications networks.
Virgin Mobile South Africa, launched in 2006, says it has created around 1,000 jobs at different entry levels and now almost its entire staff is made up of locals. Many young people from previously disadvantaged backgrounds have the opportunity to take on their first “proper” job. Lower-level jobs include the call centre agents.
The pleasure of being able to hold a conversation any time anywhere is tempered by the frustration of lengthy delays when calling mobile phone call centres. Virgin Mobile South Africa has tried to address this: its hold messages – which they offer rather than hold music – include a thought for the day, quiz questions and a weather forecast.
Where next for the rapidly changing continent? “The next step is mobile internet,” says Dr Jason Whalley of the University of Strathclyde’s Business School. “If people are on mobile broadband, they have access to internet content.” This, he says, includes distance learning. “The amount of African-generated content has grown over the last few years. Ultimately it could lead to people not emigrating – a halt to the brain drain.”
*The article first appeared as a feature in the Tablet of January 19th 2010
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this section do not necessarily represent the opinions of CISA.
Africa has shrunk now that one person in three owns a mobile phone. Already the effect on families, business and even governance has been extraordinary, but the telecommunications revolution has only just begun.
Over the single piece of cloth that George Kamakei Olodopash, an illiterate Masai farmer in Narok, Kenya, wore wrapped around his torso and thighs, hung a mobile phone from a thin black belt. Through an interpreter I asked him what he used it for. He looked at me as though I was from a previous century.
“If I’m out in the fields and I’m going to be late home, I can phone my wife and tell her,” he spelt out. How did he charge it? “I have a solar panel on the roof of my hut,” he replied.
That was in 2003. Since then the number of Africans buying mobile phones has shot up by 550 per cent, according to the United Nations. The “Information Economy Report” published by the UN Conference on Trade and Development in October, found that mobile subscriptions rose from 54 million to 350 million between 2003 and 2008 – meaning more than a third of Africans now owns a mobile phone.
“Communities have gone from never having used a phone in their lives, or only using one in a kiosk, to where you see someone herding their cows pull a mobile phone out of their pocket,” says Maurice McPartlan, head of Cafod’s Africa programmes, who added that mobiles have made aid work easier and safer, saying: “For us, instead of being out of touch unless you went into a hotel or post office, one of the tools staff carry is a mobile, which is quite a good security measure.”
Two of the main uses of mobiles in Africa are for banking and accessing news. Earlier this year, AfricaNews.com, a news website funded by Western businesses and charities, announced the launch of its mobile news website. It sources and publishes content via mobile devices and says it has more than 400 reporters working – for free – in 35 countries, including Somalia, Algeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). And its coverage is far broader than the formula of coups, famines and safaris worn out in the Western press. One of today’s top stories: “Malawi: cell phone banking to begin.”
Mobile banking enables those with bank accounts to access and transfer money without having to trek to the nearest branch, and for those hundreds of millions of Africans without bank accounts to move money around without the high charges of the ubiquitous Western Union. Other businesses have benefited from mobiles too. Isolated farmers in East Africa access information about disease and weather patterns; they can also find out the going rates for their livestock or crops so the middleman can’t rip them off. Cloth weavers in rural Nigeria save days on wasted journeys by pre-arranging visits to their intermediaries by phone. Mobiles have had a psychological impact too.
“People feel less vulnerable; there’s a willingness to take risks,” says Nigerian-born Abi Jagun, a researcher on technology markets and society. He explained that anxious parents can phone a relative’s medically trained neighbour about their sick child in the middle of the night. People feel safer when they travel, adding: “Having mobiles creates an atmosphere where people think and see more clearly.”
At a grass-roots level, mobiles have provided a new line for entrepreneurs. In a village someone a little richer will own a mobile and sell airtime to his neighbours. Street vendors can add to their dusty roadside stalls “recharge cards” – scratch cards to top up credit. In Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, those who own a phone drop it off at a shop and pay 20 Kenyan shillings (15p) to get it charged. Some vendors use car batteries to charge phones.
Tariffs are high, so people on low incomes don’t make many calls. They may “flash” or “miss call” the person they are calling – ring them momentarily so he or she can phone them back. Chauffeurs, home helps and nannies “flash” their employees; Africans “flash” their relatives living in Britain, who call them back using cheap pre-paid phone-cards. The extraordinarily high level of demand, particularly from the poorest levels of society, caught many in the business off-guard. Other factors in the mobile phone industry’s runaway success, according to Richard Heeks, director of the Centre for Development Informatics at Manchester University, are that mobile firms were willing to take risks, cheap handsets and low-cost pre-payment models were made available, and governments liberalised ownership and policy of telecommunications. But the benefits have reached beyond that one industry.
“The success of mobile phones in garnering far more subscribers than companies initially expected has opened the eyes of investors to potential demand for other services in Africa, notably banking and insurance,” says William Wallis, Africa editor of the Financial Times. “They have shown there is a market out there even if the majority of Africans are poor. The advent of mobile phones has been a revolution in Africa this decade – they have empowered Africans and unleashed enormous potential simply by meeting demand.”
Poverty is not Africa’s only scourge to be addressed by mobile communications. Add to that corruption and poor governance. Professor Heeks notes: “One interesting thing to emerge is ‘sousveillance’ – the opposite of surveillance. This means not watching from above but watching from below. Mobile phones have been used by ordinary citizen groups to keep tabs on government – watching polling booths during elections, taking pictures of uncompleted public works that are supposed to have been paid for.”
On the other hand, mobiles have also been a gift to rebel movements, coup plotters and criminals, and in some countries governments have tapped conversations or turned signals off at will. In northern Uganda, which until recently was terrorised nightly by the Lord’s Resistance Army, the signal would disappear whenever a VIP moved in an insecure area, says Sr Fernanda Pellizzer, a Comboni nun who runs a local HIV project.
Back in 1997 in the DRC, residents and refugees in the eastern cities of Goma and Bukavu were left without a signal for a week after the Rwanda – and Uganda-aided installation of Laurent Kabila. Mobile coverage had already spread quickly there, partly because landline coverage is particularly scant. The mobile industry has proved resilient to the most common deterrent to investors – conflict.
“Mobiles aren’t a panacea,” says Dr Jagun. “Literacy matters, disposable income matters. No country is going to leapfrog any stage of development [just because of their proliferation]. Mobile telephony is now being viewed as an enabler of development rather than something that will directly bring it about. When you talk about food aid, mobile telephony facilitates the distribution of that aid.”
None the less, the mobile phone industry boosts infrastructure at many different levels. The same continent that struggles to make millions of its inhabitants food-secure is also home to a swelling urbanised population looking for office work, and a business culture that has long waited to embrace good communications networks.
Virgin Mobile South Africa, launched in 2006, says it has created around 1,000 jobs at different entry levels and now almost its entire staff is made up of locals. Many young people from previously disadvantaged backgrounds have the opportunity to take on their first “proper” job. Lower-level jobs include the call centre agents.
The pleasure of being able to hold a conversation any time anywhere is tempered by the frustration of lengthy delays when calling mobile phone call centres. Virgin Mobile South Africa has tried to address this: its hold messages – which they offer rather than hold music – include a thought for the day, quiz questions and a weather forecast.
Where next for the rapidly changing continent? “The next step is mobile internet,” says Dr Jason Whalley of the University of Strathclyde’s Business School. “If people are on mobile broadband, they have access to internet content.” This, he says, includes distance learning. “The amount of African-generated content has grown over the last few years. Ultimately it could lead to people not emigrating – a halt to the brain drain.”
*The article first appeared as a feature in the Tablet of January 19th 2010
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this section do not necessarily represent the opinions of CISA.
OPINION: Education Reform Agenda in Kenya needs a Pragmatic Leadership
Wesaya Maina*
The ongoing confusion with regard to the budgetary allocations for the crucial ministry of education sent me thinking and musing over what New Year resolutions should entail. I have been a keen follower of the education reform programme since 2003. In my occasional musing, I decided to read something to crown my sorrows.
I looked at my humble bookshelf and picked Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”. Reading the initial pages, I came across a key statement that not only the custodians of our public resources need to know but anyone who cares about the future of this nation. The gist of the statement from the book reads: “…any genuine commitment to the values of equal opportunity and upward mobility- requires us to revamp our education system from top to bottom, replenish our teaching corps, and buckle down on mathematics and science instruction, and rescue inner-city kids from illiteracy”.
Reading further, Obama goes further to say… “And yet our debate on education seems stuck between those who want to dismantle the public school system and those who would defend an indefensible status quo, between those who say money makes no difference in education and those who want more money without any demonstration that it will be put to good use”.
This reading put the current education sector confusion in perspective. We have known at it is vividly evident that education as a process, it is a liberating process, either at the consciousness level or the personal capability development level. In Kenya, your level and type of education determines who and what you become.
Secondly, if Kenya is keen on eliminating poverty and the inherent social and economic inequalities we experience, then we must invest more and more in education but that has to be wise and judiciously executed.
Obama animates that revamping education requires replenishing of the teaching army…is the ministry of education listening? How can we truly say as a nation that education and manpower development remains a key driver for the achievement of vision 2030 we have not employed any teacher since 1998- save for replacing those who leave the service through natural attrition? In any investment made, the manpower to realise the efficient allocation and utilisation of resources remain the hub on which the venture rotates.
The instruction and teaching of mathematics and science must remain central to the nurturing of our young ones to have capacity to shoulder the burden and challenges of the future. As a nation, we must increasingly seek to empower those in disadvantaged positions, those in extremely poor conditions or those with special needs and or challenges.
Our way out of the rut we are need cannot start and end with pitting private schools versus public schools. It needs to go beyond such simplistic dichotomies and appreciate the functionality of the education we are offering our young ones then tie it with the dream we have for the nation. This matching and locating must be context specific. We must appreciate that our terrain is uneven and provide for those in whose physical situation, they are trudging uphill while the rest are going downhill. We must be both philosophical and practical in our educational design and orientation.
The taxpayer must not only get value for their money but the type of education offered must serve its intended function of churning out creators and not creatures as the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere once put it his writings on the philosophy of education.
We cannot move forward by denying that wrongs that have bedeviled the past practices within the ministry of education. Resources have not been put to the most efficient use and we need to be magnanimous and acknowledge that we have erred in past but show our willingness to return to the straight and narrow through continually learning and rectifying the mess through a systematic injection of some level of prudence in the management of our hard earned resources.
The ministry of education must convince us today and not tomorrow, why it must continue receiving the largest budgetary allocation if year after year, all we are going to end up with are scandal and fleecing schemes. We are not baying for anybody’s blood but as concerned parties we seek the light and the truth that will secure the future of so may young Kenyans. Professor Keraga Mutahi and Professor Godia must actually be listening…Your word? Who will be the pragmatic one to lead us out of the quagmire? We are all watching your lips and steps very keenly!
*Wesaya Maina is a graduate teacher and the Organisational Development Advisor, Africa Peace Forum.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this section do not necessarily represent the opinions of CISA.
The ongoing confusion with regard to the budgetary allocations for the crucial ministry of education sent me thinking and musing over what New Year resolutions should entail. I have been a keen follower of the education reform programme since 2003. In my occasional musing, I decided to read something to crown my sorrows.
I looked at my humble bookshelf and picked Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”. Reading the initial pages, I came across a key statement that not only the custodians of our public resources need to know but anyone who cares about the future of this nation. The gist of the statement from the book reads: “…any genuine commitment to the values of equal opportunity and upward mobility- requires us to revamp our education system from top to bottom, replenish our teaching corps, and buckle down on mathematics and science instruction, and rescue inner-city kids from illiteracy”.
Reading further, Obama goes further to say… “And yet our debate on education seems stuck between those who want to dismantle the public school system and those who would defend an indefensible status quo, between those who say money makes no difference in education and those who want more money without any demonstration that it will be put to good use”.
This reading put the current education sector confusion in perspective. We have known at it is vividly evident that education as a process, it is a liberating process, either at the consciousness level or the personal capability development level. In Kenya, your level and type of education determines who and what you become.
Secondly, if Kenya is keen on eliminating poverty and the inherent social and economic inequalities we experience, then we must invest more and more in education but that has to be wise and judiciously executed.
Obama animates that revamping education requires replenishing of the teaching army…is the ministry of education listening? How can we truly say as a nation that education and manpower development remains a key driver for the achievement of vision 2030 we have not employed any teacher since 1998- save for replacing those who leave the service through natural attrition? In any investment made, the manpower to realise the efficient allocation and utilisation of resources remain the hub on which the venture rotates.
The instruction and teaching of mathematics and science must remain central to the nurturing of our young ones to have capacity to shoulder the burden and challenges of the future. As a nation, we must increasingly seek to empower those in disadvantaged positions, those in extremely poor conditions or those with special needs and or challenges.
Our way out of the rut we are need cannot start and end with pitting private schools versus public schools. It needs to go beyond such simplistic dichotomies and appreciate the functionality of the education we are offering our young ones then tie it with the dream we have for the nation. This matching and locating must be context specific. We must appreciate that our terrain is uneven and provide for those in whose physical situation, they are trudging uphill while the rest are going downhill. We must be both philosophical and practical in our educational design and orientation.
The taxpayer must not only get value for their money but the type of education offered must serve its intended function of churning out creators and not creatures as the late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere once put it his writings on the philosophy of education.
We cannot move forward by denying that wrongs that have bedeviled the past practices within the ministry of education. Resources have not been put to the most efficient use and we need to be magnanimous and acknowledge that we have erred in past but show our willingness to return to the straight and narrow through continually learning and rectifying the mess through a systematic injection of some level of prudence in the management of our hard earned resources.
The ministry of education must convince us today and not tomorrow, why it must continue receiving the largest budgetary allocation if year after year, all we are going to end up with are scandal and fleecing schemes. We are not baying for anybody’s blood but as concerned parties we seek the light and the truth that will secure the future of so may young Kenyans. Professor Keraga Mutahi and Professor Godia must actually be listening…Your word? Who will be the pragmatic one to lead us out of the quagmire? We are all watching your lips and steps very keenly!
*Wesaya Maina is a graduate teacher and the Organisational Development Advisor, Africa Peace Forum.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this section do not necessarily represent the opinions of CISA.
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