Sukuma Kenya: Blog Action Day

Friday, October 16, 2009

So UNEP, did you Kick The Habit (Just for today)?

Ok, so I am one day late for Blog Action Day which was all about taking action against Climate Change. There was a lot of noise in the blogosphere and even that chap Gordon Brown had something to blog about

Global Voices reports that there were more than 9000 bloggers who devoted a post to Climate Change. I am wondering what our friends at the UNEP Headquarters were up to yesterday. Do you think they Kicked the Habit for just one day? Wonder what sort of car they drove to work in. Did it look like this?

Or was it one of these ones?

Dear friends at UNEP, Just For Today, did you manage to get the log out of your ass?

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Politics is about exploiting the poor

It's Blog Action day and this year bloggers around the world are you uniting in one common cause: making noise against poverty. Does it help throwing more cluster into cyberspace? I doubt it. The poor will still be poor at the end of today and the rich will be richer. Do we splash logos, banners and pictures of emaciated children across the screens because we sincerely believe it will help or because it makes going to sleep easier? What's special about today is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are concerned for whatever reason giving a few minutes or hours in their day to something that does not have any direct impact on their lives. But the best thing about this is that there are people out there who are united in this and not being paid to be concerned. No cushy job in an air-conditioned office with an SUV parked outside while they sit in a workshop and come up with some solution to world poverty (with no conscience about the fact that they are part of the problem - yes that includes me minus the SUV).

So let us have a minute of silence for these people - not the poor ones - the rich ones...

And let us have two minutes of silence for that other lot of people that call themselves Ministers, Members of Parliament, Prime Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Diplomats and of course Presidents. Now this lot ( at least in Kenya) are a really special breed. They have mastered the art of not just making a living from poverty but getting the very poor people they represent to pay them to get even richer. Geniuses. I salute you.

So now that we have had a few minutes of silence for Patriots Paid to Protect the Planet, I would like to make a noise about the other kinds of heroes. The silent kind who don't do any of this for a living or for the feel good factor. They have been around for too long to get a kick out of any of this.

And I needn't look very far. Today I want to make a noise about two people: