Category: east africa

things related to EA

inspiratio

meegan2.jpg "Then Where Is Your God?"

"Don’t worry, all will be well. It’s ok. This god is here. That god is in you. That God is what you’re going to do about this suffering. God is in this people. The more you live in Africa, the more you realize the power of faith in these countries. That’s the wonderful thing. You don’t leave Africa overwhelmed with despair, in tears. You leave Africa inspired, because you realize that this continent is so powerful. It’s so strong, has so much love, so much energy…"

Dr Michael Meegan, international director of ICROSS, in an interview with BBC Hardtalk’s Stephen Sackur sometime earlier in 2005.

I came home from a play at the theater last night and still had some energy left to be wasted in front of tv when I came across this interesting interview on BBC World with Michael who is said to be in Kenya since 27 years now. Despite of the interesting and commendable work he does in assisting the people living or even dying with HIV+, his words and content smile speak for themselves: the man has found his place.
In addition, I think his criticism towards international aid & dev. organisations and their ever changing policies is absolutely justified.

"I have always believed it is our actions, not our thoughts that matter. Tears have never fed a child, pity has never healed a wound. Unless words become deeds, unless dreams are lived, they are mere deceptions".
(Dr. Michael Meegan) (source)

Interesting to note, btw, that people in Germany will be spending around 100 million EUROs on fireworks on the last day of this year (on a single day!). According to ICROSS’ donation information, that’s a lot of food, vaccinations or mosquito nets. Hmmm….

p.s.: ati, isn’t that mzee Thesiger? :-)

soil maps

Please correct me if I am wrong on this one but as far as I am informed, detailed maps of Kenya were always hard to come by since that infamous AirForce coup in 1982 in Nairobi, Kenya, upon which the Government of Kenya reduced the number of detailed maps openly available to the public.

A friend of mine had told me about some plots for sale in Thika (Kenya), so I did a short Google image search on the keyword "Thika" and came across a HUGE collection of amazingly detailed maps for scientific use – scanned & published online by the DG Joint Research Centre of the European Commission: the "European Digital Archive on Soil Maps of the World (EuDASM) ".
Kenya? Africa? – you name it, they have it. Free of charge! With coordinates for geo-referencing and other useful metadata!

Now I take it that most of you won’t have a proper use for such scientific maps and that Isohyets of median annual rainfall for places like Wajir won’t be of any interest, BUT! I know you’ll love to have a look at maps like this one showing the City of Nairobi:

nbomap.jpg

  Or this 1:100.000 map of "Nairobi & Environs":

nbomap2.jpg

  As for the soil question in the area around Thika, Kenya:

thikasoilmap.jpg

Those maps for Kenya make up for about 1 GB of downloadable JPEG images with an average size of 4 MB each…ENJOY! :-))

jamboOO

Eben lese ich in der Online-Ausgabe der kenianischen Tageszeitung "Daily Nation", dass die Firma Microsoft® in Kenia heute die Kiswahili-Version ihres Office Software Pakets veröffentlichen wird (Word, Excel, Outlook). Die entsprechende Kiswahiliversion von Windows soll wohl dann im Januar 2006 folgen.

jambosmall.gif

Dabei gibt es die kostenlose Alternative – OpenOffice – zumindest in der 1.1.3 Version schon seit über einem Jahr in Kiswahili. Die vollständige Übersetzung der 2.0 Version soll auch im Januar 2006 erscheinen.

ODM’s inheritance

"Kenyans are mostly unaware that ministers have little control over the workings of their ministries and are small cogs in the general running of the government which is dominated by State House officials, including of course Cabinet Secretary Francis Muthaura, who direct senior ministry officials to carry out functions and policies without reference to their ministers. There are exceptions — some favoured ministers are free to run their outfits as they deem fit."

…says Raila Odinga, MP for Langata, in his call for snap polls in today’s Standard. // As a direct analogy to this – since Raila also made a comparison to Germany in his open comment – this also reminds me of Germany’s Oskar Lafontaine and Gregor Gysi: German socialistic politicians that glow with brilliant rhetoric but have a completely different appearance once they are given certain positions in the government. That is, these guys excel in their opposition role and are much more useful for a democratic process by adding their constructive criticism from that position. Sijui about Raila, though…

Update: reactions on Raila’s commentary here, here and here.

Mchagua jembe si mkulima

Hmmmmmmmmmmm………

You see, I was just going through some news online when I came across another "he/she said this and that" story in the DailyNation & TheStandard about our German Ambassador to Kenya, Mr B.Braun.
The articles (1,2) say that Mr Braun made some statements on President Kibaki’s new cabinet and that "it was obvious the Cabinet was not all inclusive". Making his hard-hitting statement, Mr Braun described the new Cabinet as "very disappointing", adding that the President had "lost a very good opportunity to constitute a working government.” (Daily Nation)
Braun said donors were disappointed with the President for scrapping the office of the Permanent Secretary for Ethics and Governance.
"We don’t want to interfere with internal politics of the country, but the President has to correct the situation," said the envoy. (The Standard)

etc.

Obviously, such remarks generate some mixed feelings.
On one hand, I understand his quest to speak up his mind on the current political situation in Kenya – also since Mr Baun is leaving the country soon. On the other hand,  he’s the ambassador and not a blogger like me.  His words are taken for granted and viewed as the official position Germany has on this matter. And since a direct letter to the Office of the President would be considered somewhat rude, political statements are normally made on private events, in church or during conferences. Statements that are published and carried as the leading story in newspapers the following day. Is this the best way to communicate with a (chaotic) government?

As for democracy, I could even agree with Kibaki’s undemocratic "dream team" if only it will get Kenyans where they really want to go (same with the German Government btw – I never voted for them but think they’ll get us somewhere). So, instead of directly pointing out who’s good and who’s failed to provide good leadership, I would rather measure good governance by the positive change it has brought to a country and put any direct criticsm in this direction. And besides, a proverb sometimes has more elegance of saying something others are not yet prepared to hear. Ama?