To All Graduates

If you are graduate and every evening and weekend you are drunk, you are the reason Kenya is poor. If you are a graduate looking for an 8 to 5 job you are the reason Kenya is poor. If you are a graduate and you have not done something innovative you do not deserve that degree.

Kenya is not the richest country regionally because of us intellectuals! No, the bitter truth is that while we sit in our comfortable chairs in our offices and banks, and take our kids to private schools and shop in malls and go to the leisure clubs, the hard working high school dropout is opening up a hawking business. The poor, high school graduate is engineering a plane down in Murang’a. As we sip our coffee, the standard 8 graduate who has worked as a mechanic for 2 years is thinking of opening up his own garage or a posho mill. Yes! Kenya is rich because of them, not because of us with our fancy degrees!

If you are an engineer where is the contraption that will help covert our raw produce to finished products? Must we wait for technology from India and Europe? Where is our Kenyan made car, aeroplane, tractors and oil rigs? Why are our roads muddy and dusty? Why are some areas in Kenya still remote? Where are our space flights and satellites?

If you are a medic, where is the cure for AIDS? Are you waiting for western nations to come up with it when it is most beneficial to us? Where is the vaccine for Malaria? Have you become so embroiled in nonsensical short sighted research while forgetting the real problems facing us? Or is your work to strike every day demanding for this or that?

If you have a degree in literature where are your words scorning our lethargy? Inspiring us, making us see the ill of our gluttonous lives? Where are our oral narratives written down? Where is our culture as Africans or are you in cahoots with our enemies who want us to forget who we are?

If you are a veterinarian, like myself, why can’t all Kenyans afford meat? Why are large swathes of prime land unutilised because of trypanasomiasis? Why do we still slaughter each other while trying to steal livestock? And why does 84% of Kenya lie idle when in Saudi Arabia cattle are kept in the desert?

If you have a degree in music, why are we still listening to sexually explicit, ear splitting, and nonsensical imported music? Where is our reggae to the Jamaicans? Where are our traditional musical instruments and songs?

If you are a computer scientist, where is our African made operating systems and softwares for our African made technologies? Why do our industries still use manual equipment or imported technology and associated software?

If you have a degree in mass communication, where are our Kenyan made cartoons? Why do we still prefer and watch foreign soap operas and movies? Where are our intellectual articles and pieces in our newspapers or do you think all we want to see are politician’s shenanigans?

If you are a political scientist why aren’t you promoting ideologies? Where are selfless leaders who are only concerned about the welfare of their people and not about lining their pockets with the poor man’s cash?

As a graduate what are you doing to help those hard working Kenyans who sent you to school? Where is the innovativeness in your field? Where are the Nobel or Pulitzer prizes?

You see they want us to remain lazy. Keep us dependent on their aid. Keep looting our resources until they are depleted. Keep giving us loans until they control everything we do. Keep sending us corruptive songs and movies to replace our values. Keep stealing off, frustrating or killing our innovative minds. Keep sending our scientists in circles on blind ended research.

Yes they are using you. Until you stand up and say no!

Growth

When faced with a new situation, there are different levels of thought that each person goes through. From something being new to understanding it perfectly, making it better and finally asking yourself, can something different  be done.
Everything that happens starts off as a need. This imbalance in life (as is with nature) must be corrected or adapted to.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
As humans, once faced with a need we look to how our fellow human beings are dealing with it. What s happening around us usually determines the next step we take to rectify our need? We ask ourselves how are others doing it and can we do it the same way to satisfy our need? We end up looking for how someone more experienced than us is doing it and copying it.
HOW IS IT DONE?
The next step is trying to perfect what we have seen happen and have been doing for a while. Can you do what you are doing perfectly? Is it yielding the result you wanted?
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
The next step is asking ourselves, apart from how we are doing it, are there other ways to do the same thing? In this phase you research far and wide for other ways to do what you are doing. You may be seeking to improve your process or simply to have choice in your methods. Or you have encountered situations in what you are doing and by correcting them you have discovered newer ways to correct any mistakes that were occurring in your work.
WHICH IS BETTER?
After you have known and researched on the many ways and improvements to your process, you ask yourself which among these ways is the best. For this phase you may come up with comparative tests between different methods or you may hypothesize on newer ways and subject them to tests to gauge their efficacy. In this phase you will have already mastered the different ways to do something and with these ways in mind you test newer ways to see if they perform better or worse.
WHAT IS NEEDED?
This is the final step for many people. You already know all the methods to do something. You might have even discovered newer and better ways to do something. You have already discredited many ways that cause problems. Now you ask yourself, to get what is needed in general is it necessary to go through this method that you have studied so diligently? Or can other methods bring about what you are seeking and may be resolve another need that is present?

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Society

From Wikipedia A society, or a human society, is a group of people involved with each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or social territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societal demands tell us what to do, how to do it and who to do it with. It governs our taboos, rights of passage, . It has the unwritten rules that one has to follow to be accepted in the group.
Inadvertently societal demands affect both our physical and mental health. For example the practice of owning a dog simply for companionship purposes is well developed in western society. It is accepted and expected of of you. Studies have shown that having a pet improves both your physical and mental health. This paper in the psychology and society journal tells you more.
Societal relations affect the level of development in terms of infrastructure, technology, livelihoods of a people. Similar thinking among a people means they have similar approaches to solving problems and similar ideas in the way they want to modify the environment. Thus a capitalistic society like the united states will have better developed infrastructure and technology than a socialistic society.
Societal ideologies also play a big part in implementation of human rights and their abuses. For example most African society consider thieves as evil human beings with traditional punishments being death. Thus in modern African societies where there are laws and defined punishments most people still mete out punishments like mob justice or burning of thieves which are human rights abuses. Police officers also because of traditional ideologies shoot unarmed suspects or even torture them. Ideologies in western countries such as the belief in right and wrong lead to behaviors such as whistle blowing an example being the latest Snowden/NSA saga.
Information and society are closely linked. Indeed the increase in the amount of information available to a group of people leads to modification of societal demands and behavior. Until the colonization of Africa the practice of wearing clothes was unheard of. This was probably due to the relatively comfortable environmental conditions present in Africa unlike the cold temperate climates of western countries where wearing of clothes was a necessity. 
Changing societal mind sets as well as working with them should be considered by governments, NGO's and all other organisations that work with people.
Disclaimer: I am in no way a sociologist. These are just the random thoughts of a bored veterinarian. 

The Dream

I got no sleep yesterday. The little sleep that I got came with a very pleasant dream. I dreamt that there was a better place out there, in deep space, where people exist. I dreamt that the reason that life here on earth is difficult is because we are not from this earth. You see we are from a different planet that is filled with beings of the kindest type. Good people who think about others before themselves, people who are not selfish self centered, evil or ingenious in evil deeds. These people of this planet do not tolerate any evil person in their midst and a long time ago they rounded up all evil people and their seed, traveled them across space and dumped them here on earth.
We are their seed, all of us. Born of evil. Trying to make life work in an evil place. In this dream our ancestors were told that one day, if they were good, they would be whisked away to their original home. Their suffering would end on an unknown day in the future. If they were good.
Yes I admit that the dream had a heavy christian undertone. And that I had fallen trap to the oldest psychological gimmick in the book, that of believing that my problems were caused and would be solved by a supernatural force.
But was I wrong? Doesn't all humanity presuppose the presence of a supernatural force albeit how scientifically incorrect that might be. Does not all religion hold on to rules supposedly written by a God and delivered through a chosen servant?
So if Nostradamus through the great science of astronomy predicted the future, John saw a revelation of the end of days whilst on an island, a girl (later a nun) predicted the death of pope John Paul I then why shouldn't I predict a future right now here on blogger.com?

A round clock strikes noon,
Do not swear by the moon.
When the black scorpion stings,
That day you will sing.

The Village

Check out my book; The Village on Amazon soon.

Set in a neo-colonial village in Kenya, The Village is a satirical look on the life and politics rife in Kenya.