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.