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!

Detecting New Age baloney

Here are some common statements found in self-help and new age books, films and web pages and what they really mean.

1. I have excluded any scientific evidence to make this book more understandable

Real meaning: I do not have any scientific evidence for what I am saying.

2. The theories described here are outside the realm of science.

Real meaning: I just made this all up and am hoping you will be gullible enough to buy into it.

3. Evolution is just a theory.

Real meaning: I understand neither evolution nor the meaning of a scientific theory.

5. You don’t have to understand it. Just try it.

Real meaning: You have time to waste on something I can’t even explain clearly.

6. Don’t let negative people discourage you from trying out new things.

Real Meaning: Don’t listen to people who criticize my methods. In fact, if you Google my name and the word “sucks” after it, you will likely find more than a dozen hits providing real evidence why I am a fraud.

7. These are natural methods that have been used by our ancestors for generations.

Real meaning: I don’t have scientific evidence that these methods work, so I will resort to a logical fallacy in which I appeal to your sense of tradition. Tradition is not evidence!

8. This method of healing/meditation etc is scientific.

Real meaning: (Common Deepak Chopraish BS). I am presenting ancient religious BS and am trying to modernize it by calling it scientific.

Scientific claims appear in peer-reviewed journals and can be verified or falsified. Many new age Eastern spiritual gurus are notorious for attempting to align themselves with science (especially quantum physics), yet their teachings are far from scientific.

9. This book contains a secret that has been kept away from the public for centuries.

Real meaning: Please buy my book. It contains some “law” that is mentioned in hundreds of other books that are now in the public domain and can be downloaded free online.

10. Big pharmaceutical companies have suppressed this product because it will get them out of business.

Real Meaning: I do not have evidence of any kind that this works. I am trying to appeal to the popular, often mindless, criticism of big business.

Also check out Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detection kit.

Of diesel rocks, miracle babies and other enchanted spirits

There are many challenges that Africa faces as we try to rebuild in the 21st century. I will focus on one of them, which is the hanging on to ancient, often tragic superstitions. In ancient times, humans did not know better, so they made up explanations to explain confusing natural phenomena. For example, before the germ theory of disease, diseases were often considered curses from gods or higher spirits. Our limitations in controlling our own environment (drought, floods, hurricanes) led to the creation of superstitions, many of which we, unfortunately, still hang on to today (even though we should know better). I define “voodoo thinking” as any belief in the suspension of the laws of the universe (whether it is for or against you). While some of these beliefs are decidedly harmless (one may argue that a person who summons the gods to intervene in his favor in a lottery is not really harming anyone, although he might require a lecture in basic statistics). But at some stage we will have to confront the reality that this is not how the world works. You don’t perform rituals to win a soccer match. You outplay the opponent!

In Kenya, Archbishop Gilbert Deya was involved in child trafficking while claiming to be mediating “miracle babies” (see full story here). Tanzania has been haunted by albino killings for various reasons, the least of which is the claim by some witch-doctors that they can make people rich using albino body parts. This is the same country in which old women with red eyes have been killed on charges of witchcraft. Witch-hunts are common in many parts of Africa. Years ago in Zimbabwe, stories of an old woman who could kill people by just greeting them spread across the country, leading to some of the most cruel treatment of seniors ever experienced in the country. Also in Zimbabwe, the famous tsikamutandas still travel the country, allegedly exorcising witches. Governments often turn a blind eye to these proceedings, and, in some cases, they participate.

For example, in 2007, a woman called Rotina Mavhunga convinced senior members of the Zimbabwean cabinet that she could, under spiritual guidance, produce diesel out of rocks in Chinhoyi. The gullible government, out for straws in a collapsing economy, set up a task force including State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa, Defence Minister Sydney Sekeramayi and Home Affairs Minister Kembo Mohadi. Yes, you read that right – a taskforce to ‘investigate’ the claims of a ‘spirit medium’ that she could produce diesel from rocks. Really! Can such a minister who expected diesel through a spiritual healer be serious about promoting science and technology? How optimistic should we be with our leadership in pushing us forward into the 21st century if they are haunted by 12th century beliefs?

Going mystical in 2007! Then governor for Mashonaland West Nelson Samkange takes a “diesel bath” from bogus n'anga Rotina Mavhunga while Security Minister Sydney Sekeramai, Minister of State for Presidential Affairs Didymus Mutasa and others look on. Picture and caption from zimdaily.com

Some stories, as the one above, may evoke good laughs and ridicule, but the truth is that most of the stories are not that funny. Targeting children as witches as has happened in Nigeria is not funny. Poisoning people under the guise of witch-hunts is not funny. Killing people for body parts is not funny. When a church denies modern medical attention to young children, preferring healing by “miracle water,” the laughter stops. But should we wait for the extreme life and death cases to say enough is enough? It is the responsibility of everyone to confront “voodoo thinking” with critical thinking (and, probably, to vote for less embarrassing government ministers). When you hear anyone wishing for a suspension of the laws of the universe on their, or someone else’s behalf, be kind enough to tell them the world does not work that way. That we wish it sometimes does doesn’t make it real.

Everyone today has access to the tools of scientific thinking. For most of us, when we get sick we seek real medical attention. We don’t expect to get anything that we did not work for. When our cellphone battery dies out, we don’t perform rituals and assume the gods must be angry at us. We get another one. Yet many people keep a bag of beliefs that they argue is outside the realm of science. But as the late American astronomer Carl Sagan said in his book The Demon Haunted World, science is not just a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. When we think scientifically, forcing evidence over delusion, we will conclude, not only that nothing is outside the realm of science, but that we face serious problems whenever we try to navigate the world without scientific guidance.

Do hot climates create sluggish economies?

Countries with hot climates tend to be the most economically challenged ones. For most of us, the explanations are routed in the world history of slavery and colonialism. But for MIT economics professor Ben Olken, the story may not be that simple. Olken and his colleagues have examined the temperature-income relationship not just between countries but within countries. What did they find? A negative relationship between temperature and income does exist, although it is much weaker than that between countries. A full paper of this work can be found here, and a full report on the NPR website (including an interesting discussion with many interesting suggested explanations).

Don’t forward that message! Confronting the spam demons among us

Email is one of the greatest connectors of the modern times. But it can also be one of the greatest nightmares. The cause? Evil spammers and scammers out to collect our valuable information, right? Actually most of the time it’s just our good, well-intentioned friends. Ever received that long religious message that then asked you to forward to ten people in order to be blessed by the end of the week? How about that message claiming Microsoft was giving off money to people who forwarded the message to as many people as they could? We all receive them; from self-help pep articles to tips on losing weight or preventing heart disease (most of them not written by health professionals); from the endless social site invitations to proclamations of spiritual or “energy” healing. Some workplaces even have their own version of ‘workplace spam;’ unsolicited, mostly never-opened announcements of birthdays, births, parties – even an occasional email fight copied to the unconcerned. But that is not the worst part. The worst is that most of us actually fall for the tricks and participate in spamming our internet community by forwarding useless messages to our friends. If you rarely invite someone to a party by word, what makes you think they will respond to an evite?

Now, there is nothing wrong with sending an occasional uplifting message or slideshow to a good friend (as long as they don’t object). I have found some of them quite interesting. And frankly sharing inspiring stories with people outside of your circles is indeed one of the pluses of the internet age. But like all good things, it can be overdone. It ceases to be an exercise in sharing if  you become a forwarding center, sending off anything and everything to everyone in your address book. I had to abandon one of my email accounts because I had become part of a vicious forwarding network. Most of the people who do this do not even have the courtesy to blind copy the messages, so each one of their recipients, if they are into the forwarding business, harvests the email addresses, broadening their community of mostly unwilling victims.

If you regularly send forwarded messages to uninterested people, you are a spammer, period. If you send group messages when the message only concerned one person, you are a spammer, and therefore part of the problem in the “E-universe.” Many good email services offer efficient spam filters. In addition, you can create your own filters. I use gmail and have filters that trash all social site invitations as well as mail from certain forwarding culprits I know.  But the ideal would be if the spam filters are reserved for true spam, not from our own colleagues. So, to be a good citizen of the world wide web, have a little respect and don’t be click-happy

1. Only forward messages to your ACTUAL friends. Most of your workmates and business contacts are actually not your friends and many people are too polite to tell you to stop.

2. As a rule, don’t forward messages to people you don’t regularly mail or talk to, don’t assume that others belief the same things you do. There are very few (if any) givens in this world.

2. Never pass on messages on unscientific health schemes, ponzi schemes, natural healing voodoo and superstitious nonsense. If you do, you are merely participating in the disinformation of the world.

3. If for some reason you have to send a message to many recipients, be kind enough to use the BCC (blind copy) to make sure your recipients’ privacy is protected.

To a better internet experience.

“Yes YOU can,” Obama tells Africa

In a speech in Accra, Ghana, on the 11^th of July, US president Barack Obama challenged African to take more responsibility for their affairs. “We must start from the simple premise that Africa's future is up to Africans,” he said before continuing to relate to his audience with his own story; a story of his African grandfather, his father and the challenges they faced in the broader context of the African story.

One of the common themes coming out of Africa, especially in the politically-troubled nations is an attitude of blaming the western world for the political and economic hardships. While acknowledging the hand history has dealt on Africa, Obama challenged Africa to accept a bigger share of the blame for some of its problems, citing recent problems in Zimbabwe.

“It is easy to point fingers, and to pin the blame for these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense bred conflict, and the West has often approached Africa as a patron, rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. In my father's life, it was partly tribalism and patronage in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is a daily fact of life for far too many.”

On the question of aid and cooperation, Obama had this to say. “As for America and the West, our commitment must be measured by more than just the dollars we spend. I have pledged substantial increases in our foreign assistance, which is in Africa's interest and America's. But the true sign of success is not whether we are a source of aid that helps people scrape by - it is whether we are partners in building the capacity for transformational change.” And indeed, building capacity for transformational change is Africa’s biggest challenge in the 21^st century. Harnessing technologies to achieve food security and improve health delivery, improving infrastructure and connectivity through information technology are no small challenges. “Africa doesn't need strongmen, it needs strong institutions,” Obama said.

In the final analysis, the progress of Africa will depend to a large extent on how quickly and efficiently African political systems will evolve from sloganeering dictatorships and patronage politics to real functional democracy that creates opportunities, respects human rights and celebrates talent and creativity rather than suppress it.  It will depend on young people getting more and more fed up. And so Obama’s last message was to the young people of Africa.

“You have the power to hold your leaders accountable, and to build institutions that serve the people. You can serve in your communities, and harness your energy and education to create new wealth and build new connections to the world. You can conquer disease, end conflicts, and make change from the bottom up. You can do that. Yes you can. Because in this moment, history is on the move.”