After everything has been said and done...

I'm not much attracted to celebs as a rule. In fact, I tend to find it slightly ridiculous to almost worship a mere human being for their looks, art or even their brains. That is to say how much I suffered through the demise of Michael Jackson, then Barack Obama's visit to Ghana, trying to avoid an overdose of tributes, laudatory comments and what I see as downright craze.

Despite my disinclination to follow the crowds, and although I am probably one of the very few people in Ghana who didn't buy the newspapers this week and didn't watch a single minute of Obamania on the tube, I read with interest Mr Obama's speech to the Ghanaian Parliament.

One sentence stands out:

Africa’s future is up to Africans.

After everything has been said about the need for international aid, the right to compensation for the harm done by slave traders centuries ago, the unfairness of the terms of contemporary global trade, etc., time has come for a change: let's DO something about our future. Mr Obama promised that the US of A will help those of us who work at their own, their country's or the continent's development, but the first step has to come from us:

"these things can only be done if you take responsibility for your future."

These are the two sentences I want to remember of Mr Obama's visit to Ghana. I hope that beyond the craze around the event, our rulers, lawmakers, as well as the ordinary people of Ghana will ponder over this speech and find in it the necessary inspiration to take things in our hands and build our own prosperous future.

Everything has been said. Let's do something about it now.

Running madly... in circles?

It's been a long time... Not that I had nothing to say, rather that I found it difficult to arrange my ideas in a coherent way. So many things happen every day, in the world at large and in my own life. How can I make sense of it and decide what would be most sensible as the next step forward?

We Western privileged people with a telly or a radio and the tiniest ability to understand what the newsreaders are saying know that the whole world economy is in turmoil. Everywhere, there is fear and apprehension: will I lose my savings? will my employer let me go? what about my retirement? my lifestyle?

Most of this is due to the fact that collectively, we've built a lot on sand or even in the air: speculation was rife... and still is, which magnifies the repercussions of every single event.

Since the West got rid of the immediate concern of feeding people on a daily basis, it has been forgetting gleefully about the basics of life: work, earn (not win!) money, have a roof over one's head, feed one's family, provide for their health and education. The workforce has become a commodity, it's now considered much more clever to make money through investment/speculation than through hard work, a house is just another gamble, health and education funds are being played around with to make the quickest, biggest buck possible.

To me, what we Westerners have been doing... and today's result is perfectly summed up here:

Do you think I'm jesting? Think again.