LinkedIn is a social networking site that connects professional job-hunters with their potential employers. It's much like facebook, but you log in to www.linkedin.com to upload your resume, and to let the business world know of your employment status (unemployed and for hire, for example) and skills set.     

CHECK OUT THIS PROGRAMMING WHIZ KID FROM COLORADO, US. It is said that he dreams in code. 

A lot of people can't even write a simple code, let alone dream along those lines. This 14-year-old computer genius, however, could have a programming problem--strangely called a bug--before he goes to bed at night, and will swim right out of sleep with a solution by the next morning. 

If he were on Facebook, his relationship status would read "single". (And I don't even know if he has a profile on the social networking giant) He says that having a girlfriend is a complete waste of time. Santiago spends most of those precious minutes behind a monitor, writing code. He says programming is his first love. 

Yet, "speak" to him in any programming language of your choice and will be able to respond--he's fluent in a dozen of them. You might receive some valuable advice, to boot.  

Santiago Gonzalez is the name of this prodigy. His academic ambition is to get a PhD in computer science. And his professional dream is to be employed by the world's number one brand: Apple.

He currently goes to the Colorado School of Mines--a school of engineering--where he is assistant researcher on an energy efficiency project. 

He was accelerated from the sixth grade to being a full-time college student.

He waxes lyrical about spending his time improving his mind through knowledge. "I really enjoy learning", he says. "To me, I find it as essential as eating. Either you die, or you're pretty miserable without learning", he says.  

He's also developed 15 iOS applications. One of them is a Slide Puzzle. Puzzle allows users to play with friends by using the "built-in voice chat", by the use of the web. Then there is a Space Solar System, which allows users to learn more about the solar system. 

These apps come with a price tag, though. Yet he says literally thousands of iPhone and iPad owners have downloaded his games. Already an businessman. Epic. 

Santiago Gonzalez is a self-proclaimed nerd, and has zero problem about it.

A 16-YEAR-OLD SELF-APPOINTED WORLD AMBASSADOR FOR GIRLS EDUCATION POSES A POLITICAL CHALLENGE TO ZUMA. 

Malala Yousafzai challenged world leaders of respective countries to ensure that children receive a free and compulsory education.

Speaking at the United Nations headquarters in New York, on the day she celebrated her 16th birthday, Malala said that 21st-century inequalities and discrimination based on gender are unacceptable, particularly regarding education.  

In some parts of the world, students are going to school every day. It's their normal life. But in other parts of the world, we are starving for education ... it's like a precious gift. It's like a diamond. 

This word-painted image sounds all too familiar, does it not? The talk about "free, compulsory, equal, and quality education" falls under clause #8 of the Freedom Charter.


Effectively, Malala, a 16-year-old girl, in 2013, is reminding Pres. Zuma, and the African National Congress of Tambo and Mandela, about a revolutionary promise willed with the words THE DOORS OF LEARNING AND CULTURE SHALL BE OPENED. 

Malala said, "this is part of our human nature, that we don't learn the importance of anything until it's snatched from our hands".

She has a Nobel Peace Prize nomination to her name. The winner will be announced tonight in Oslo, Norway.

The head of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo in Norway, Kristian Berg Harpviken, said that "a prize to Malala would not only be timely and fitting with a line of awards to champions of human rights and democracy, but also... would set both children and education on the peace and conflict agenda".

If I win Nobel Peace Prize, it would be a great opportunity for me, but if I don't get it, it's not important because my goal is not to get Nobel Peace Prize, my goal is to get peace and my goal is to see the education of every child.

She also urged the young people of the world to be active students, and get an education. She added: "Let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world". "Education is the only solution," she said.

She has written a book--an autobiography. It is entitled I AM MALALA. 

After all the support, admiration, attention, and fame from across the globe leveled at Malala, back home in Pakistan tempers are flaring against her. Her activism is viewed as the epitome of the free-world's "Trojan horse", out to do away with the Islamic way of life. 

A Pakistani politician, Maulana Gul Naseeb, painted this sentiment this way: "America created Malala in order to promote their own culture of nudity and to defame Pakistan around the world".

Get a load of that!

This young man predicated the possible existence of a particle which gives other particles their mass. His only apparatus was mathematics. The year was 1964, and his name was Peter Ware Higgs.

The elusive particle has been conclusively confirmed experimentally.
 
This week, this 84-year-old man is collecting a Nobel Physics Prize for the work of the young Higgs. All very good for Higgs has lived so long as to see his life's work come to a happy conclusion.

SOUTH AFRICA'S LANDSCAPE OF POLITICS IS GETTING SATURATED, but continues to lack substance. 

A thing that really should keep South Africans of all credo and social status focused on strategies to unite, cleanse our dialogue, and improve our economic life, is a costly commodity for us, it would seem.

Agang South Africa is a new kid on the block--the proverbial new broom. But does it promise to sweep clean the landscape it is claiming its stake on. The answer is an emphatic NO. So much for building South Africa then.  There are no durable solutions being proposed.

Agang SA's claim to political fame is its proportion to zero in on official corruption along the corridors of the departments of government and eradicate it, once for all. Like rooting up corruption is everything--which is not. And if Agang SA believes the country's troubles stem from the cancer of corruption in public life, well they have another think coming. Our ills are bigger than that.

Stealing from the public purse is not itself much of a problem. It's only an outcome of not doing the right things.

South Africans have abandoned the theme of activism which led us to 1994. This was a theme that sought to fuse into the lives of ordinary people the bitter concept that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and White".

Dr. Mamphele Ramphele was in the fold of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) with Steve Biko. The BCM made it its agenda to inflict upon black people a shock-therapy treatment via a crusade of "crude awaking", because, as Biko would say, the idea with a staying power deserves all our energies expended on it than its opposite.  

That used to be what Dr. Ramphele (a medical student at the time) stands for. However, the Black Project of the BCM never came to fruition--Biko died just when it was about to take roots. That vacuum has never been filled since.

So would it not be more relevant to Agang SA to breath new life to that philosophy? Black Africa, even now, is a victim of self-defeating behavioral tendencies. Its sense of historical implications is totally out of step. 

The South African People was never supposed to be passengers in the journey of their own lives. It was never supposed to be an option for the people to be told what was or wasn't good for them. And a good education was supposed to be a compulsory daily ratio for all and sundry--that is what June 16 is supposed to represent.

So Agang SA is proposing to close a gap that doesn't need closing. Put another way, and to paraphrase philosophers, Agang SA is scratching where it does not itch.    

It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realize that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality. The first step therefore is to make the black [people] come to [themselves]; to pump back life into [their] empty shells...to remind [them] of [their] complicity in the crime of allowing [themselves] to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of [their] birth. 

We Blacks, I Write What I Like, 1978. 

THESE ARE INCREDIBLY GOOD NEWS OUT OF OSLO. The feisty teenage girl who got shot in the head for speaking out against religious shenanigans by the notorious Taliban, and advocating for girls right to education in her country of Pakistan, is targeted once more. And the world is intensely rooting for her coming up tops. 

This week the name of Malala Yousufzai is on the list of nominees for the prestigious Nobel Prize for Peace for 2013. The prize comes with a certificate, a medal, and a stupendous sum of $1,3 million.

On hearing the news of her nomination, Malala said she had done nothing for her name to be pronounced in the same sentence as the Nobel Organization. In an interview with City 89 FM, a radio station in her home country, she expressed her disbelief in a modest way, adding that she had a long way still to go.

There are many people who deserve the Nobel Peace Prize and I think that I still need to work a lot. In my opinion I have not done that much to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

While girls her age the world over dream of being a Justin Bieber girlfriend, Malala is evidently not an average teenager. At age 16, hers is a humanitarian dream that involves equality, peace for her people, a dialogue to find political solutions around thorny issues, religious truth, and an education for every child in Pakistan. 

I hope that a day will come [when] the people of Pakistan will be free, they will have their rights, there will be peace and every girl and every boy will be going to school. The best way to solve problems and to fight against war is through dialogue. [The Taliban] must do what they want through dialogue. Killing people, torturing people and flogging people … it’s totally against Islam. They are misusing the name of Islam.

 

 

 

 

IT IS QUITE DEPLORABLE THAT OUR DEMOCRACY HAS TURNED OUT THIS WAY. The ushering in of a new form of government with its attendant business plan was expected to signify a proud achievement of all South Africans--white and black--  an achievement born in the main by a fairly violent clash of our day-to-day comings and goings; and our revolutionary insistence to not "allow a crisis to go to waste".

 

When the incoming Pres. Mandela said, with euphoric abandon, in his inagaural address, and a virgin speech to an emerging democracy, that "never, never, and never again, shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another, and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world", Africa and the world watched in inspired disbelief. The awe felt on the international front emphasized to everyone that the human spirit will triumph time and again. 

 

We, the Rainbow Nation, were beside ourselves at what we had made happen. The possibilities were boundless, or so we felt at the time. And they are--they really are.

 

However, "non-whites" are stubbornly transforming themselves into political "Goliaths", and the rest of the pack, whether white or "non-white", depending on your relation to these "Goliaths", into charity-case "Davids". The phenomenon is looked upon as a meant-to-be outcome of the revolutionary sweat and blood. But it's not. Not one iota, it isn't. Justification? The Freedom Charter.

In the new South Africa, the people that helped produce the Freedom Charter, or at least, the ones who availed themselves to seeing to it that the "Rainbow Promises" got delivered upon to "We, the South African People" are backing off. Effectively, they say the Kliptown Charter is for the birds, all the while shrouding the fact about how that Convent of the People organized us, and world, around the talking point of freedom from "the oppression of one by another". This class of people are, along with their electorate, delivering us to our generational evil.  

 

A bit of political retrospection should help frame a model perspective, because "in the cause of human events" that invariably becomes necessary.

 

In outdistancing himself from a student body dominated, mandated, and ruled by white students, Stephen Bantubonke Biko pioneered a fresh start--an unbeaten path. He thus advocated a rallying around of "non-white" students for a student-body organization they could truly create in their own "non-white" image, the South African Students Organization (SASO).

 

This was to be the paradigm from which to move forward in rejecting the black men's disgust of "standing at the touchlines [and] witness[ing] a game that they should [have] be playing. They want[ed] to do things for themselves and all by themselves."

 

Biko balked at the idea that white and "non-white" students articulate concepts and possible solutions to the broader South African Problem from planks of the same platform, because, as he put it, white people--one and all--are the social problem to black South Africa. Why? Well, the reason was, that every time election time hit, they voted into power the National Party, a party that endorsed White Economic Empowerment in its parliamentary task. 

 

This party was waving a wand of injustice through its biased politics--Apartheid. Yet whites seemed to not care. To be sure, they seemed to express deep gratification via their vote. So that was the source of all evil in Apartheid South Africa. This, I might add, was unparalleled analysis, and it was spot-on.

 

Fast-forward to 2013. Needless to say, you witness the exact opposite of Biko's idea: South Africa's problem is now stemming from the African National Congress, and the people that vote it into power every election time. This was Biko's intellectual story in the last century. That story remains on the loop even today, for it deserves that much airtime. And he stuck to it to his last day of assassination in the hands the Security Police, because for him, "it is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die'.

 

We are going to change South Africa. What we've got to decide is the best way to do that. And as angry as we have the right to be... we are in the struggle to kill the idea that one kind of man is superior to another kind of man... to say we can all build a South Africa worth living in - a South Africa for equals, black or white, a South Africa as beautiful as this land is, as beautiful as we are.[Steve Biko: I WRITE WHAT I LIKE]





 



 

THIS IS A POSITIVE STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. Two South African corporations have come together to manufacture android smartphones and tablets. This joint-at-the-hip initiative is welcome news. Seemahale Telecoms and CZ Electronics are behind this bold and smart venture. 

CEO of Seemahale, Thabo Lehlokoe, said that "this project is a first in Africa as far as I'm aware. It's not right that out of a billion or more phones in Africa, none are made or manufactured [here]. He continued, "Some are designed here, but they're then made in China."

For the joint venture to be a resounding success, ST & CZE are importing the printed circuit boards--the most technical component of their business. 

This item of the breaking news is not on. It means South Africa's entrepreneurial muscle is not yet adequately competitive. We must raise our competitive advantage to the level of a fully-fledged economy, able to strengthen and service its manufacturing activities, from start to off-the-shelf finish. If we continue to lag behind, we will lose  our standing as a developing country to a developing country in the other direction.       

Yet, good news as it may, the situation has another part of it missing--a matter of too little too late.

South Africa's education policy is driving our economy to the ground. With smartphone technology brewing on the business front, the economy will suffer for depletion of technical skills as support system for this development. So the call for young people to engage in technology and innovation comes with a huge burden.

It poses now an urgent challenge to our education system at a competitive-advantage level. It will be interesting to witness how South Africa steps up to the idiomatic plate as well. Because science and technology is a foreground problem, the situation becomes delicate, both entrepreneurially and educationally.    

These 21st-century devises will be available in South Africa starting in 2014. And January 2014 will see pre-order sales opening to the consuming public.

 

THE TALK BANDIED AROUND THAT OFFICIAL CORRUPTION SHORTCHANGES South Africa's poor is absurd. We have to reject it outright; reality is not coached in these words. The poverty-stricken communities have tax numbers reflecting R 0,00 owed to Mr. Taxman. The self-appointed "politicians" tend to fuel such fallacious talk themselves, as a vote-harvesting expedient. The point is that the so-called poor don't pay the institutionalized tithe.

Moral convenience has gotten to be a sickening reality. And as political parties are now prepping and gearing up for next April's elections, we are sure to be fed that rubbish at regular intervals, and with deafening frequency.

The socially disadvantaged are a sad sector of our economy. No doubt about that. However, constant reference to their status, without meaningful and honest intervention, is all the more demeaning.

The inequalities we are used to are a political baggage from our past engineered race relations. Social engineering has delivered us from past to present. It was the whale that offered us its back and delivered us to evil. And that is the very reason South Africans rose up, came together, and defeated their common tsunami of racial hatred and discrimination. 

Touche, politicians who involve themselves in graft are legally intolerable--they do not pay their taxes; what they put in this side of the state machine, they draw out on the other. 

However, and whether or not charity cases do exist, official corruption does not steal from the country's poor, it steals directly from the Principles and Values that got us here in the first place. It seeks to subtract from our nationhood and to diminish us all. It is the enemy of "We, the SOUTH AFRICAN PEOPLE"; and it is an immovable anchor strangling the human condition, itself a crime against the whole of humanity.

All ethnic groups, tribal communities, nations, countries, and the family of nations cannot stay put whilst the universe swings about, breeding new and harder challenges in its aftermath. The progress of man, woman, and child is at stake.


The moral dimension to the corruption dilemma is misplaced, or at least, misconstrued. I will flesh out this point. If South Africa did not count among her population any citizen subsisting on or below the poverty line, would corruption not become a hot potato? Had our employment rate been 100%, would one of our talking points not be corruption? I say, yes definitely. Because corruption is eats away at the potential of the power of a state and a people. And, ironically, it is doing to our future what Apartheid did to our past. It perpetuates man-made inequalities and injustices, predicating these ills on the electoral mandate by a majority vote. By the way, a majority voice carries with it the seeds of potential destruction. Reason. Wild self-interest.      

Morality can only be admissible in this context if it is submerged in our Founding Documents, putting South Africa's Founding Principles and Values on a pedestal.

Then we are posed to fashion our living standards with the whole people, elevating every South African out of the scourge of poverty, and permanently.

   

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE: "A GOLD STATUE SHOULD BE ERECTED TO [THOMAS PAINE] IN EVERY CITY IN THE UNIVERSE."  

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer...” 
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense

 

“WE NEED TO BE CLEAR, THE NDP IS NOT THE FREEDOM CHARTER. The NDP is not a strategy and tactics document of the ANC, and its not a guide book for national democratic revolution. It is rather a national program that  guides our action inside and outside of government”.

The deputy president of the centenarian political Goliath recently came out with guns officially blazing touching the flak leveled at the omnibus schedule outlining the 20/20 vision by the ruling party as its proposed twenty-year goal. Ramaphosa said unequivocally that the NDP is a product free from insinuated contradictions. For this reason, the document merits patriotic cooperation from every sector of our society.

No single citizen, no organization of national politics, no former president, no elder statesman is keen on the idea of espousing the charter of South Africa's FREEDOMS. Fair question: When will the time for the FREEDOM CHARTER come, and who should usher it in?

The break of the new dawn in South Africa was made possible by the now rejected Freedom Charter. In the preamble to the charter, "We, The People of South Africa," made it absolutely clear when we "declare[d] for all our country and the world to know, that South Africa belongs to all who leave in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people."

Today, the African National Congress is intent on moving away from this "will of the people". Safe to say, the ANC has lost its official "claim" to "authority". It then, should it continue in the three capitals of state organs, becomes the enemy of "We, the South African People".

If the National Development Plan will emphatically not fulfill the promises of the Kliptown Perspective, why the f*** does it hog the national debate? How long shall the South Africa People wait to build their "beloved country" along the lines of the charter? Who needs must face the proverbial music for three decades to secure for us our promised land? The list of whos and whys is perennially long.

When the still-born Freedom Charter was adopted as embodying the aspirations appropriate to the times, the representatives present were supposed to have love for their people and country, much so that this ultimate battle-cry was to spur them on, and to lead them to the resolution that "THESE FREEDOMS WE WILL FIGHT FOR, SIDE BY SIDE, THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES, UNTIL WE HAVE WON OUR LIBERTY".   

 

 

SO THE FIRST CITIZEN OF SOUTH AFRICA DOES NOT BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY AFTER ALL. From where Pres. Zuma is standing, the ills facing the South African people can only be corrected through the instrument of abominable dictatorship. Through his political lens, the democracy his organisation helped achieve, with his own contribution, falls deplorably short.

 

As he got the ball rolling regarding his party's campaign trail this past June, Zuma articulated that the Kliptown perspective (The Freedom Charter) seems to have failed to live up to the expectations of liberation activism. The perspective, we all are aware, elevates "the government of the people, by the same people, [for themselves]" above any other on the landscape of being politically up and about. 

 

It appears the African National Congress, via Zuma its chief mouthpiece, is being consumed by an hectic desire to retrogress. Speaking to troubled mothers, eager young people, and the elderly in Soweto, the president opined that if it all depended on his monopoly of wisdom, there would be zero social discomfort resulting from criminal ill-discipline. In isiZulu, he went on to tell his audience about his newly found inspirations for the "rainbow nation":  

 

"If I were a dictator, I would force all members of the population in our jails today to acquire a diploma or a degree from an institution of higher education. This condition I would impose as the passport to legal amnesty. Inmates would comply and walk free, otherwise perpetuate their state of incarceration. Well, I am not a dictator. So they are all off the hook."  

Effectively, democracy is bad for the rest of us. With a 20/20 hindsight, we were mistaken to think that it would unchain us. And all of us are to blame. Because everyone chipped in to the struggle, across all demographics, well, a second round of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is in order. We all need to account for our aspirations from the past. And TRC II should absolve us all. 

If indeed Zuma deems democracy to be inadequate, it comes as no surprise. After all, he is not a veritable democrat: his circle of  friends is untouchable; his waving of the official wand is Apartheid-like; and criminal charges never seem to stick on his slick personality. All this proves right Plato's theory that human power and goodness are mutually exclusive endowments. If he thinks that the South African people are keen on the past setting and feeling an intense sense nostalgia, he is wrong. I mean, the electorate needs to balk at that sicking suggestion. CUT! Says a producer on set if she feels things are getting out of control.

In his critically acclaimed book THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES, Karl Popper treats this historical phenomenon of opposition against civilization. He cites Plato as one of the enemies of this "open society". On that consideration, Plato and Zuma, and all others, occupy various planks on the same platform.

Popper wrote: "it is high time for us to learn that the question ‘who is to wield the power in the state?’ matters only little as compared with the question ‘how is the power wielded?’ and ‘how much power is wielded?’ We must learn that in the long run, all political problems are institutional problems, problems of the legal framework rather than of persons, and that progress towards more equality can be safeguarded only by the institutional control of power."

So not only is Zuma off the mark about the power principle, he is also mistaken on the context within which that power subsists. Plato slated a democracy for having persecuted his mentor, Socrates. In our own era, and in his first term in office, Zuma is slamming the democratic paradigm for not being enough of a corrective dynamic in comparison to the problems which plague it.  

Another aspect about the Zuma character which warrants a mention is the fact that what he expresses in isiZulu, he never repeats in the English language.

So the populist ideologues are continuing to play with the emotional apostasy prevalent across the country. We have lost the art of substantial engagement. We have upped and gone "awol" from our national life. And we have abandoned our civic duty on feeding healthy and nutritious fodder to the national debate. Little wonder our body politic is starving to death.    

  

 

 

  

 

Exactly thirty-six years ago, on September 12, 1977, the Black Consciousness Movement philosopher lost his activist young life in Apartheid police custody. He had been captured "lawfully" the previous August. The charge against him had not been enunciated unambiguously when he died.

 

James Thomas "Jimmy" Kruger, Minister of Justice and the Police at the time of Steve Bantubonke Biko's passing, enthused at the development that Biko was no more, in his own living words: "It leaves me cold". Need I say that Kruger's expression was in their beloved Afrikaans. Practically the whole of Afrikaner population applauded that inhumane apathy.

 

The logic by which Biko deduced his conclusions concerning the conditions of respective "non-whites" should count amongst the most accurate in the history of "Ideas Agriculture". It rivals, arguably, that of the Ancients as Plato, Aristotle, and them. Yet it is was driven by the legendary source of energy--disarming anger. The cancer that is anger has disarmed good and honest men throughout recorded history of their much needed problem-solving capabilities.

 

"Black man, you're on your own!" 

 This is the one theme that really typifies the point I am driving at. It seemed to have declared supposedly way beyond the shadow of a doubt that the analysis of the human condition in pockets of "Black South Africa" in "White South Africa" had been cut and dried. Far from it. And I argue that the facts will lay bare my contention. Just two should suffice.

First, when any reader, anywhere in the world, sits down and opens the book titled I WRITE WHAT I LIKE, the images conjured teem, or should teem, with Donald Woods. He was personal friends with the theorist of the famed Black Consciousness Movement. He did his true friend Biko the ultimate act of loyalty ever, surpassing biology itself. And the world is the grateful heir.

Biko did not, as innumerable others before him, write a book. To be sure, Socrates didn't. Yet the legend that has become Biko is immortalized in the addresses that he had delivered, or was to deliver at the time of his arrest. And between Biko's utterances and the publisher's desk some where in Europe is the man of undeserved obscurity--Donald Woods. Woods acted wisely on the Apartheid stage of uncertainty and distrust. He arrogated the unclaimed right of being a conduit between two consecutive scenes; old and new, transitive and durable. So Biko, the black man, was not on his own entirely. Even he had Donald Woods. 

"A person is a person by mere coexisting in a community of other persons". The adage is as current as the HUMAN PROJECT to better the human experience. The archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has perfected a version of his own, "I am because you are, for we can only be human together". This African tag will always hold, even to the last syllable of recorded time. 

The principle means that every human being has the right to exist for as long as the community into which he is born holds the right to perpetuate itself legitimate. It proposes to give each human the opportunity to account in the mist of the community for the decision to act or not. It actually deprives any one being to shuffle off their own mortal coil, this judging by the outrage displayed by a community regarding the act. Principles cannot be broken, we are able only "to break ourselves from principles"

A parent who is no good and treats their offspring like dirt is frowned upon by their neighbours. A nation that makes of their own sub-humans receives alienation from the world community. The human feeling of sharing guards our interests, while we may feel wise enough to belittle it from time to time.        

Facts are on the table. Anybody who is not impaired in any way will be able to read and to hear about them. Can I get a witness?
 

 

 

 





 

The National Development Plan (NDP) is supposed to be the omnibus blueprint to take South Africans from the abyss of underdevelopment to the soaring heights of a creative economy of technical industry, cutting-edge services, and better aligned agriculture.   

 

But alas! That opportunity has been missed again; and how embarrassing does the pongy Humpty Dumpty feel on our faces.

 

The opportunity was missed for two all-important reasons, i.e. on the diagnostic and on the whole dimension of modernism.

 

At the gut-feeling level, the ANC government purports to know the social scene of every nook and cranny of every community, in all of South Africa. The Zuma Adminitration seems to have conducted a country-wide research (who knows the duration of it) behind our back. And it's now shoving it down everyone's throat. 

 

Once again, and considering the e-tolling system on Gauteng's motorways, we are being dictated to. We are being told of our own condition and future without us ever making "grassroots" contributions. Suppose that's what the recent census-taking did for the Rain Nation. Point is, that consultations are not a part of this country's order of democratic day. Our problems are what the ANC tells us they are. And we are to accept that outcome as the only truth, the whole, and nothing but the truth. So help us hopelessness.

 

We are and must always be a resource-intensive economy. This is one of the dictates contained in the schedule for development. The NDP can be safely depicted as just a semantic document--big technical words that sound nicer than the problems they're communicating.

 

The NDP does not touch--not one bit--on how to improve the appalling education paradigm which the ANC has messed up so badly. It doesn't say how to industrialize this economy with enthusiasm and rigor, after thrust it in with the big industrial powers. It ignores the productivity aspect of agriculture and arable land use.

 

The buzzword seems to be getting all adult South Africans in to jobs, and at whatever pay--the quality of these jobs flies out the window. And entrepreneurship is spoken of as the snake oil to each problem at hand. At its core, the entrepreneurship is predicated on the fact that economy will pick up momentum once each South African hangs their shingle.

 

South Africa is the "s" in the economic formation called BRICS. All other BRICS nations are manufacturing economies and export their products. Except for us. We just consume what we are not producing ourselves--as charity cases are suppose to. To be fair, we hand over to them our raw materials at nominal prizes, and pay exorbitantly for what we need from them. Our textile industry is fast going south.

 

"Cry the beloved country" indeed.    

 

 

 

       

THE NEXT ROCKSTARS

To be a computer geek or not to be is soon to be a social question. The question is to be answered by everyone who's got a huge urge to stay cool. But wait, how about the guys who are depending more and more on the internet either as entrepreneurs or just as students. I dare say that these people too, by their own standards, are themselves geeks; they simply define it way too loosely.

 

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee of the UK weaved the internet in 1989. He could be now said to be the greatest humanitarian of our precarious age. And judging by the knighthood he received from the British Royalty in 2004, this observation is not far off the mark.

 

Now the world wide web has spawned a whole new "Big Bang". These days you are sure to eavesdrop on private conversations about business ventures online. And you would be excused for doing so too-digital migration is a legitimate buzzword. In several countries, and on all seven continents, falling behind while the world marches on as it picks itself up and dusts itself off in the aftermath of this "Big Bang" will be a guaranteed suicide by nukes.

 

Only this time will the "Big Bang" be properly mathematized. Only this time will the laws of physics be democratized. Only this time will everybody stand a chance at being a true superstar scientist.

 

In the States a short film has been shot with the intent to socialize this very idea. The film is called WHAT MOST SCHOOLS DON'T TEACH. It is available for viewing on YOUTUBE.

 

Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Founder and CEO, had been computer illiterate. In the film, computer programming is touted as the "new literacy". The meaning should be obvious: each one of us is in dire need of an education all over again. We can ill afford to embrace complacency. So the next time you find your hands being weighed down by a load of unoccupied hours ticking away, just contemplate the fact that coding is a fresh sing-along to rock to.

 

Yet kids need more of this kind of literacy than adults do-they have a longer stretch ahead of them. Along with math and science, coding ought to be taught in school. In maintaining the human civilization, problem solving will be in greater demand. And one territory to be conquered is Artificial Intelligence (AI). It's going to be a necessary tool to possess. Just as the free world needed the nuke energy to stop Hitler's Germany and her menacing comrades in their tracks, so will the human condition require us to be active more, to think more creatively, and to educate the human mind more along the lines of computer power.   

 

 

 

  



 

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited; imagination encircles the world." 

These words ring as true and inspiring today as they were first  uttered. The punch they deliver to the imagination is for all future time: it can't be escaped. Just as the beauty and ghost-like mystery of an equation.

 

This deep message was delivered by one the most beautiful minds ever to receive an education. It also brought us ever closer to the truth about the world we inhabit. It taught us that mass is equivalent to energy, and went on to capture this lesson in the equation that been spoken of a "celebrity". The equation itself looks more like E=MC2.

 

Albert Einstein had a beautiful mind indeed. Naturally, he said these words. Not only that. He also postulated that gravity is not a physical force. Say what? So Newton was wrong, after all. Not necessarily. What Einstein said about gravitation back in 1915 was that the behaviour of falling objects in the space-time continuum shows that the continuum is curved; and that the effects of gravity and those of acceleration are the same. With the occurrence the eclipse in 1919, he was proven right.And the theory is known as General Relativity Theory.

 

But this is not to claim that knowledge or education is intrinsically for the birds. To be sure, the speaker would not have unlocked the mysteries of the universe as he did, had it not been for a superlative education he'd picked up. Only that when education is not shaped and rearranged in the mind, it seems to lose its magic.

 

Which brings me to my central point of this article. Children of school-going age need constant help with developing this all-important imagination. I propose to call the intervention "I Do my Math Everyday Campaign". With it, we could get to witness the future today. Wait until I motivate. Each one of us can be a genius, if that's the word you wan to use. Why? Well, because human being are known to have been since Jurassic Park. It's what we are supposed to be doing. It's the Human Project. And it happens to be the business of a long human day.

 

Because we have got problems to solve. A civilisation to enrich and maintain. And I say, that with the study of math, we stand an epic chance to pull this project off. 

 

And as long as human beings retain sanity, human imagination will progressively soar the universe, both known and unknown.