TIGblogs - Bernard Muhia's TIGBlog http://Muhia.tigblog.org/ What's on the minds of young leaders from around the globe? en-us http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/978523 share with the people around you? Here is mine...

--
Profound Regards,

Bernard Muhia
]]> Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:44:00 EDT http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/978523 -1.2833333 36.8166667-1.283333336.8166667 Poor soul http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/720055
I’m just like you, you are poor materially, and I’m poor in spirit. You wear torn clothes and I wear a bare soul. You often go to bed hungry, I often go to bed angry. I walk around depressed, you walk around stressed. You live in an empty mud house, I live in an empty sad house. You salute me despite being my father’s age, I salute you for playing your part on the father’s stage. You complain about malnutrition, I complain about obesity. You can’t come to my exclusive country clubs without a pass, funny enough, I can’t come to the slums because you wouldn’t let me pass. I respect every soul as sacred, you respect every soul as sacred. I’m just like you, it’s just that we lead different lives. Poor soul.]]> Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:56:00 EDT http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/720055 -1.2833333 36.8166667-1.283333336.8166667 Fern (Students') Magazine http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/610937
Most secondary schools and other institutions of higher learning have a journalism club as part of their extracurricular activities. These clubs are very active as they have the mandate to accompany any troupe going for activities outside of the school. They then bring back a report of what transpired which is read out at the school assembly or pinned on the notice board for all students to read.

The magazine will collect such news stories among other creative literary material from talented student writers and publish them online so that students from another part of the country can know of what is the latest update. They will also be able to exchange ideas and most importantly exercise their freedom of expression in a manner that is peaceful. The magazine is hosted at www.fernmagazine.com

Young people are by nature very creative. This has been expressed on the internet through the success of user-generated content websites. This is where more and more young people are exercising their power to create their own media rather than consume what has been created for them by someone else. The success of the video-on-demand website www.youtube.com and social networking website www.facebook.com are good examples of the power of the liberalized young person. The online magazine works with the same principle whereby, rather than writing stories and presenting them to the students, we empower the students by asking them to write articles which we then publish in the magazine. This way, the students identify with the product.

In addition to publishing news stories, poetry, essays, plays from journalism clubs/ associations, the magazine’s website will also offer online courses on ethics, civic education, peace and conflict resolution, spiritual learning and human potential growth and development. Various organizations that currently offer such courses have been identified.

The magazine website will also be a platform to conduct campaigns aimed at creating social change. Such campaigns include the anti-drug abuse campaign, the Youth violence prevention campaign, the anti-AIDS campaign among tons others.

We invite your involvement as students, teachers, parents, guardians, civil society and government to offer Journalism as a career choice, to air grievances and celebrate talented creative student writers and reporters, to offer programs that are beneficial to students and increase their exposure to the career/ business world and to inculcate values in students that will be their guiding principles as they become leaders in whatever fields they choose.

In an effort to ensure that the content produced by students adheres to basic journalism principles, the journalism clubs in secondary schools have a patron who is often an English teacher. The English teacher acts as an executive editor and checks whether the quality of the stories is appealing to all audiences. This works in our favor as it lessens our workload. In the case of higher learning institutions such as universities, colleges and polytechnics, the students are expected to be more executive in their editing and rightly so. Students from these institutions can be relied on to edit their articles inline with guidelines from the profession which will be made available to them on the website. The Fern Magazine Editor gives the final go ahead on the publishing of the literary material received from student writers and reporters.

It is our belief that the media can be and should be used as a tool of world benefit. The ‘sensationalization’ of bad news and the use of media as a tool of incitement has depleted the value of journalism as a profession. It is our desire to see the day when bad news is not censored but that good and uplifting stories also make the headlines more regularly than the sad repetitive stories.

Fern Magazine
Keep your pen alive.
]]> Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:52:00 EDT http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/610937 -1.2833333 36.8166667-1.283333336.8166667 The impending class war http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/380641
By Bernard Muhia

The French riots of 2007, which were a horrific representation of a class war or the recent spate of violence in South Africa, are probably where Kenya is headed. According to Dr. Sobbie Mulindi , who studied and lived in France for 15 years and is now a human behaviour specialist at the University of Nairobi, this country is on the brink of a class conflict that will surpass the post-election violence. Dr. Mulindi says “the next conflict is going to be between those who have and those who have not”.

The possible outbreak of spontaneous violence countrywide has also got the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports very worried. According to Mr. Isaac Kamande, the chief economist at the Ministry, a failure by the Coalition Government to fully and comprehensively address the problem of youth unemployment is going to be “disastrous”. His worry is that the youth will join or form new militia groups that will forcefully claim what they perceive to being taken away from them in terms of denial of opportunities. He expressly says that the youth feel denied and robbed of economic opportunities.

Kenya is ranked among the top 10 most unequal societies in the world and the most unequal in East Africa. For every One Shilling a poor Kenyan makes, a rich Kenyan makes 56 Shillings! This is according to research done by Society for International Development on economic inequality (2004). On top of that, Kenyans are among the highest taxed populations on the continent. As a result of the post-election violence, Kenya now has the second highest cost of living on the continent after Zimbabwe. It has become expensive to be proud to become Kenyan.

A class war is a friction between various groups or clusters in the class structure. There are three main classes; the upper (rich) class, the middle class (non-manual labourers) and the working class (manual labourers). A fourth class of the unemployed has developed over the decades, the underclass. Most of the youths in Kenya fall in this class which apparently has the majority compared to the first three classes. This is the class of the ‘have nots’!

With the youth between ages 15 and 30 years constituting 32% of the country’s population, it is a cause for alarm that majority of them are in the underclass in the backdrop of the high cost of living. At some point, something’s got to give and when it does, it’s going to be ugly. This group feels left out and is a disgruntled lot. The creation of the Ministry of Youth Affairs was a great leap in the right direction and substantive ground has been covered since, but that barely scratches the surface. Dr. Mulindi acknowledges that “ we have come up with so many sound policies regarding the youth and their welfare, but the problem has always been funding, implementing monitoring and evaluating them”. In fact, we have such excellent policy documents that they are edited and used by other countries while Kenyans continue to wallow in poverty and disease.

There are currently four documents that strive to address the youth unemployment problem. These are; The Poverty Reduction Strategy paper (PRSP), Sessional Paper Number 4 of 2005, Sessional Paper Number 2 of 1992 on small scale and jua kali enterprises and the Development Plan 1997-2001. The latest addition to this pile is the Youth Employment Marshal Plan (November 2007). Kenyans are also partly to blame because they do not listen to professionals nor do they use their research. We should move away from relying on politicians, who have vested interests, for direction.

As a consultant on the UN-HABITAT backed National Youth Violence Prevention Campaign, Dr. Mulindi says that the lack of employment and the feeling of despair is what push the youth to join Militias which tend to provide a sense of direction and belonging. The late American rapper, Tupac Shakur in his song ‘mama’ expresses his choice to join street gangs as not the best but says that “even though they sold drugs, they showed a young brother love”. Mr. Kamande agrees with this theory when he asserts that the feeling of being abandoned by society, betrayed by the political class, looked down upon by the financial sector and criminalized by the police force is not a good combination for a young person trying to make a living.

There is a general lack of faith in the ability and potential of the youth and this is a societal problem. Parents cannot offer their title deeds or logbooks as collateral for their youth nor are financial institutions willingly ready to lend to the youth. To add insult to injury, the police have criminalized being a youth/ being young. When the police report that majority of the criminals are youth, they also include in their statistics ‘crimes’ like walking without identity cards, loitering in the streets, being in groups of four or five and hanging on matatus! (Public Service Vehicles)
I am not a human behaviour specialist nor do I condone violence but I think all these factors contribute to why militia groups are coming up to fight ‘the system’(oppressive structures in public, private and social sectors). It’s a youth revolution that most often than not, leaves a bad taste in the society’s mouth.

One sign of the looming class war that most stakeholders did not pickup on was that most of last year’s (2007) political campaign rallies were held on working days, but were massively attended. This shows that there are so many youths who are idle and unemployed, and they pose a serious threat to the internal security of any country. Dr. Mulindi says that “we will never have peace unless we address the problems of the underclass”.

Then came the disputed elections and the result of that post-polls violence was the internally displaced people. The violence is the most serious thing that happened to Kenya’s population as a whole, since independence. The worry from different quarters is that the IDPs will not forgive the perpetrators and that their frustrations at being flung into the underclass so suddenly might push them to the battlefront of the class war. There were reports that militia groups were having a field day recruiting youths in the camps of the displaced. According to Dr. Elijah Agevi who is coordinating the National Youth Violence Prevention Campaign, analysis of the intensity of the post-election violence reveals a worrying coleration between violence, the youth and the lack of their opportunities therein. He is also concerned that a simple trigger can bring spontaneous violence that might take on a class conflict dimension.

We have a serious problem of unemployment and the ramifications of this, among the youth. As the security forces try to deal with the symptoms by shooting to kill and brutally arresting youths who just fill up our prisons, what they are essentially doing is creating hardcore criminals. Rather, addressing the root causes of the problem is a far more viable approach. The Ministry of youth has come up with a Youth Employment Marshal Plan (November 2007) which seeks to promote the successful transition of youths from school to work and thereby contribute to economic development. Most importantly, the Marshal Plan is expected to “greatly reduce the incidence of social problems as youth unemployment is essentially a time bomb”.

Dr. Mulindi who has extensively been involved in issues concerning the youth and is also the Chairperson of AFC Leopards, says that sports when used as an entry point can help fight drug abuse, HIV/AIDS, and teenage pregnancy. Football for example is a labour intensive sport and has the potential of employing over 2 Million youths directly, countrywide.

There then couldn’t have been a better gift for the youth than the merging of the Ministry of Youth and Sports. The task of the new Ministry is to now make sports an economically viable option for the youth. Kenya is in the world headlines every week thanks to athletics, so the new Ministry should view developing athletics vigorously countrywide as a priority. We can have town marathons in almost every town in the country and invite local and international sponsors. There is already a vote of confidence in Kenyan sports following the airing of the Kenya Premier League on a paid TV network.

I may not have all the answers to this quandary nor have I comprehensively expressed the views and frustrations of the youth despite being one of them. And so I propose further research into the looming class war, so that we can better understand it and hopefully help our youth break out of the cycle. The research will involve a countrywide survey to collect views, opinions and recommendations from youth respondents and other relevant stakeholders on how we can address this problem. The research will yield a report that will be presented to the Government of Kenya for it to take action immediately and expeditiously to avert the worst case scenario of a class war.

Story by Bernard Muhia. The writer is a member of the Kenya Association of Photographers, Illustrators and Designers (KAPIDE). He can be reached on bernardmuhia2000@gmail.com

]]> Sat, 31 May 2008 10:30:00 EDT http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/380641 -1.2833333 36.8166667-1.283333336.8166667 Banner http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/367425
Get my banner code or create a flash banner
]]> Wed, 07 May 2008 08:32:00 EDT http://Muhia.tigblog.org/post/367425 -1.2833333 36.8166667-1.283333336.8166667