SADC summit a non-event

The 29th summit of the Southern African Development Community heads of state ended without much to show – no tough talk, no meaningful resolutions and the usual fingers pointing to the west.

The Herald of Zimbabwe is celebrating the summit’s condemnation of sanctions in Zimbabwe. The Herald editorial reads:

Equally poignant was the coming into the fold of the hitherto reactionary government of Botswana, which also identified Western negative attitudes to Zimbabwe as a major hindrance to the country's development.

Botswana has been openly critical of Mugabe’s government and this, the Herald editor believes, constitutes negative attitudes. If criticizing a government that sanctions pre and post election violence, rigs elections, ignores the rule of law, prosecutes opposition, unleashes its army against its own people and destroys the economy can be described as a negative attitude, then positivity is surely overrated. But what would a Herald editor know? It’s all because of the west, right?

Once again the regional body cannot solve the region’s problems and points an accusing finger at the west. Why is this not surprising?

To read the full communiqué of the summit, click here – if anything, you will be amused by the titles of the leaders.

The obsession with photoshopping the African image

We’ve heard it a countless number of times – western media report of an Africa shredded by civil war, corruption, disease and poverty and neglects that “Africa also smiles.” In fact an organization called The Africa Center is launching a campaign called – well, Africa Also Smiles.

The discussions over the western images of Africa arouse strong emotions among many Africans. Yet the Mugabes and Gaddafis are real – political problems and accountability issues are real and poverty is a bigger concern in our continent than it is in most other places. It is not the African image that is the problem. It is the reality. Campaigns such as “Africa Also Smiles” may be alright, and they probably come from a good place, but they are attempts to photoshop an image rather than trying to correct the real picture on the ground. We could campaign in Europe for western countries to see us better, or we could work to make the real picture on the ground look the way we want it to look. I would rather spend more time correcting the problems at home rather than photoshopping our image abroad.

Africa does smile – a lot. But it also weeps a lot and it so happens that the stories of the weeping are what attracts the news, and probably rightly so. To try and play pretend, claiming that the reported problems are exaggerations of western media is childish delusion. Incidentally, it is the dictators who frequently want to go out of their way to fight the image while promoting the reality on the ground. How many times did the Mugabe government claim that “there is no crisis in Zimbabwe” while the country was sinking to a record low?

I prefer to sit with my friends and admit that a lot of things are pretty screwed up in our continent and we need to get to work.

Jonathan Moyo, Joseph Chinotimba and the comedy of Zimbabwean politics

Self-styled war veteran Joseph Chinotimba and former minister of information Jonathan Moyo may appear worlds apart. After all, one is a witty former college professor known for cheesy political sound bites while the other is best known for exactly the opposite (unintelligible gibberish). Yet the two share one common trait in the recent history of Zimbabwe besides having been used as the ruling party’s favorite distractions; they have made Zimbabweans  laugh about issues that were not exactly funny.

While minister of information, Jonathan Moyo destroyed the independent media, enforced “local content” in all state-controlled radio and television stations and authored the most absurd pieces of legislation in the history of independent Zimbabwe. Yet whenever he spoke, even his greatest critics found themselves laughing. When the Danish government threatened to pull out support for the country due to human rights abuses, Moyo accused them of “trying to create a storm in a tea cup.” In a televised debate with opposition members, Moyo went for their linguistic skills by suggesting they did not understand the meaning of the word corruption and were just using it as a word convenient to them. Responding to criticism of the Zimbabwean electoral process, Moyo said, “It is unfortunate that Britain and, to some extent, the EU, has taken the position that in Africa, free and fair elections must be won by the opposition.”

During his years as information minister, Jonathan Moyo was the ultimate expert, commenting on anything and everything. In many situations, his comments were the only bites that made the ridiculously package ZBC news bulletin worth watching – especially because the comments were ridiculous pro-government rhetoric.

Joseph Chinotimba destroyed Zimbabwean farming, led campaigns of chaos and violence and took away whatever decency was left of the public stage. Yet even while he helped in taking the nation to its knees, we still found comedy in his speeches  (not only because of his linguistic challenges in whatever language he chose, including Shona). Currently he is at the center of a cellphone dispute in which he is accusing a deputy minister of stealing his $40 phone (read more on that here).

Chinotimba and Jonathan Moyo will be remembered as two men who kept us laughing while they (and their masters) peed on the country. But perhaps it is time we stop laughing. It is time we stretch our memory far back enough and draw the lessons from history that we need to save the country.  We could learn that such laughs do come at a price, that dictators have employed distractions such as these to perform funny dances keeping us from asking the good questions.

In other news…..

Constitutional committee in Zimbabwe goes on….strike!

The constitutional reform process in Zimbabwe couldn’t be more troubled. Weeks ago the first meetings were disrupted by rowdy sloganeering ruling party supporters opposed to the unity government. But now the disruption is….I don’t know….embarrassing? Read more >>>

Botswana makes the top ten of the Global Risk Survey

The 2009 World Risk Survey is out and Botswana was the only African country in the top ten. Read more>>

In the news

Madagascar; Opposition rejects unity government

Madagascar’s opposition is refusing to enter into a unity government set by interim leader Andry Rajoelina.  The country has endured political turmoil since the removal of Ravalomanana from power. Read more>>

Uganda on track to reduce child mortality by two third by 2015

Uganda is on track to reach the 4th MDG (Millennium Development Goal – click here for more on these goals) according to the World Health Organization. Read more>>>

Work On EAC Single Currency Begins

The East African Community has begun consultations on the setting up of the East African Monetary Union. Read more>>

South African president Zuma presses Zimbabwe on unity government

Southern African Development Community heads of state are meeting in Kinsasha and the region’s bad child Zimbabwe is again under scrutiny. Read more>>

Sudanese 'trousers woman' jailed

The BBC reports that a Sudanese woman has been jailed for a month after refusing to pay a fine for "dressing indecently" by wearing trousers, her lawyers say. Read more>>

The productivity dance part 3: Mind mapping

So you come up with an idea for a killer project to do in Zimbabwe. Your thoughts are still scattered.  You start putting them on paper as they come - what is your project about? Who will benefit? What  are the expected outcomes? If you were making a mind map of these ideas, you’d probably have something like this (click on the map to see it in full):

 

 

 

I made the above map in Mindmanager, one of the popular software programs used in mind mapping and brainstorming. The Wikipedia definition of a mind map is "a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other  items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate,  visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving,  decision making, and writing."  Like most mindmapping software, mindmanager allows you to add notes to any particular topic or subtopic (sometimes called “thoughts”).  You can also expand continuously using one subtopic as the central idea.
Mind mapping has become one of the business productivity buzzwords in the past ten yeas. It is  based on a simple concept; you put your thoughts on paper (or on computer) in a way that  allows you to visualize and build on them. There are many tools that have been developed to  adopt mind mapping to the digital age, and some of them are more work than they are tools. But  some great software programs have emerged that make the business (or art) of thinking and  ideation fun and productive. I will discuss some of these programs. The comments I make about  them programs are, needless to say, my opinions, based on my own (limited) experiences. I chose to show just four major programs because they are the ones I have tried. My comments on them are not endorsements, but they are all, in my opinion, great tools. I single out PersonalBrain because it is slightly different from the others in that it introduces a new way of dealing with incoming information and ideas beyond just brainstorming and idea mapping. PersonalBrain also has a fully functional free version, which the other three listed programs do not, so for students it is a good place to start.

	Pros	Cons
PersonalBrain	- Impressive animated interface - Has great shortcuts to make entering thoughts and brainstorming quick - Fully functional free version available - Has great functionality beyond mind mapping - Works well with Tablet Input Panel - Can import browser bookmarks, word and text outlines as well as mindmanager and freemind maps	- No ink mode - No Microsoft Office integration
Mindmanager	- Good Microsoft office integration - Supports ink mode for tablet PC - Can easily drag map around	- No free version (has 21 day free trial) - Doesn’t seem to allow importing of other maps
MindGenius	- Great focusing tool; ease of use - Good response with Tablet Input Panel - Has quickest thought input system of all tested programs	- Cannot drag map around - No ink mode - Doesn’t seem to have updated much - No free version (21 day free trial)
MindView	- can easily drag map around - Excellent Office integration -has great features for project management	- No ink mode - Poor Tablet Input panel response - No free version (20 day free trial)

To demonstrate how I use maps in my various projects, I included two maps. I drafted this post in Mindmanager and the map for that is show below

I have also included part of a map showing some of the software programs I have been working on and the work I am doing on them (see http://zambezitools.110mb.com/):

I hope this get’s you interested enough to find out more about these tools to see if they can be relevant to your work. Good places to look for more information will be

1. Wikipedia list of mind mapping software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mind_Mapping_software)

2. Various blog on mind mapping.

The productivity dance; a look at systems Part 2

Your world in OneNote

I am making a few assumptions about you since you are reading this. The first is that you are not too stupid to use Google (that is, you don’t ask someone else questions like ‘What’s the distance to the moon?’ or ‘Who is the president of Botswana’ while you are sitting behind a computer connected to the internet). {As it happens, both these questions are quickly answered using Wolfram Alpha, which I discussed in Part 1 of this series}. So where was I – assumptions. Okay, my second assumption is that you deal with lots of incoming information everyday for your job, commitments, studies and hobbies. And third, you probably can use a word processor.

To navigate through your files on your PC, you probably open an application like Word, go to the file menu and navigate to the folder with your file, open it, edit it and remember to save it before exiting the application. To move back and forth between different files, you have to have several windows open. Microsoft Office OneNote is an information management application that changes all that. I call it the information age game-changer.  It is the student’s dream and the business person’s extended mind. One of the first things you will notice is that there is no need to “save” in OneNote since it saves continuously while you work.  Let’s take a look at OneNote and consider what you can do with it.

This is a OneNote 2010 interface, but the basic features I am trying to illustrate are the same. As I have illustrated in pen on the image, OneNote allows you to create different notebooks (shown in the left pane); in each notebook, you can create different sections (top pane) and in each section, as many pages as you want (right pane). I have notebooks for my research, my other projects (like this blog) as well as a continuously running journal. OneNote 2010 (only available as a technical preview) is dockable to the side of the desktop to facilitate taking notes while using other programs (like surfing on the internet).

Even better, Microsoft OneNote support tablet pcs – you can write and draw and (if you want) use their efficient handwriting recognition to convert ink to text. OneNote's flexibility means you can do just about anything from pasting in bits of information while surfing (this can be done via the screen clipping tool or, in the 2010 version, docking it and using drag and drop), writing chapters of your book, thesis etc, keeping your daily journal etc. With mind mapping (a subject of the next post) now gaining popularity among productivity tools, OneNote can be used for paper-type mind mapping on a tablet. It is, in my opinion, one of the best things Microsoft has ever done (I am very biased).

There is also good cross-talk between OneNote and Microsoft Outlook on tasks and meeting notes, making OneNote a key business and productivity tool. Check the Microsoft OneNote website for more information and see this link for cool ideas on improving your OneNote.

The productivity dance; a look at systems Part 1

This is the first of a series of posts that will focus on certain tools that may change the way you get things done. I will admit that I am obsessed with cool tools, and many a times I try out software just for fun. Here are some cool things I have found that may change your relationship with information. I will start with Wolfram Alpha.

Wolfram Alpha

You use a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) to look for information. The search engine gives you links related to your search input and you go through them to see if you can hit on exactly what you want. This works very well most of the time. But sometimes you just need specific answers not links. Lets say you want some quick facts about the Zambezi River (the inspiration behind this blog). If you enter “Zambezi River” on Google, you will get dozens of hits and it may take a few minutes before you can gather all the facts you want about the Zambezi River from those links (hell, maybe all you wanted was the length of the river or the countries it spans). But what if there was a computational engine that gave you specific answers not links. In comes Wolfram Alpha created by Wolfram Research. Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine – it is a computational engine which cross-references many specialized databases to produce specific answers to your query. So let’s try “Zambezi River” again on Wolfram Alpha and this is what we get:

Now this is information you can work with! Try it with many other things. Enter your exact birthday (e.g august 25, 1965); enter a famous name (Charles Dickens, Nelson Mandela, James Watson etc) – or just enter the name of a city to find out quick facts about it. Visit the site and before you know it you will actually be getting things done! (http://www01.wolframalpha.com/). For the business minded, it gets interesting if you type in your favorite company to quickly see how well it is doing.

GTD icon David Allen has often said that we suffer not from information overload, but from lack of meaning of the information. Wolfram Alpha gets you closer to finding meaning with the large pools of information you may have to deal with. Give it a try and you will get hooked. If you are a Mozilla Firefox convert, the story gets even better. There is a Firefox Addon that can allow you to get Wolfram Alpha results from your usual Google search – so you get the best of both worlds simultaneously.

Hope this gets you excited!