Who sets your agenda?

Scenario one: the first white missionary comes to our village with ‘good news’ of our salvation by a God we have no idea about. He carries a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other.Bemused at first, we listen to him and welcome him to stay in our midst. “Let’s hear what this strange looking man has to say,” we tell ourselves. We see him harmless. He surprises us with his ‘wonder drugs’ like penicillin that can easily cure our children of ailments that have killed many and bothered us for some time. These are diseases that we thought were as a result of evil spirits, thus incurable.But alas! The gun takes over and we are enslaved in colonialism and our brothers shipped westwards into slavery. We soon pray to the colonialists’ God for salvation even though the colonialist himself does not seem to follow God’s teachings. We are not Kalisa, Uwimana, Kazungu or Muhire anymore, but rather Jean, Paul, Angelique and Clarisse. We dress, speak, walk, dance, and act like the white man in an effort to be powerful like him. Some of us even use creams to lighten our skins and ‘straighten our hair’ to make them as close as possible to that of the white people. A testimony of the fact that we are part of another person’s agenda.Scenario two: The Republic of Uganda is currently in trouble. The Ugandan parliament approved a bill against homosexuality complete with stiff penalties for the offenders.It was, and still is, a Ugandan national issue, or so they thought. How wrong they were! The bill waits the President’s signature to become law but it has already caused furor from unlikely quarters. US President Obama, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Richard Branson, among others are, to varying degrees, leading the chorus against this law. There are covert and overt threats being issued to the government and the good citizens of Uganda The merits and demerits of the bill aside, is it not for the good people of Uganda to decide? In Muslim countries, women wear veils and alcohol is a no. That’s their way of life, why should Ugandans, or anybody for that matter, be compelled to conform to other people’s standards and values if they do not conform to theirs? As Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni would put it, “we Africans are not in the habit of talking about our sleeping arrangements in public”. It is a Ugandan agenda.Scenario three: There is some political disagreement in an African country. Tensions rise and before we know it bullets are flying all over the place and thousands are killed with hundreds of thousands others displaced. International mediation and peacekeepers are called in and we have a super crisis at our hands! Sounds familiar?Central African Republic, Mozambique, and South Sudan are only new entrants to this macabre pattern. Before that it was Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya and others. Egypt is yet to recover and it seems we are adept at starting skirmishes and graduating them into various stages of war... or do we?An agenda – an outline, plan or schedule of activities – is an important part of personal business and national growth. Basically, it should be able to tell you where you are, where you should be and how you will get there.An agenda, national or personal, is the single most effective tool we have to succeed. Look at what Vision 2020 has done for Rwanda. It is not perfect; it does not have to be. But it has to be an organic roadmap that is reviewed and improved every step of the way.From the three scenarios above it is clear that it is important to have an agenda in life. It is also clear that someone will always try to make you part of their agenda and if you have none of your own you will fall right in their plans.The most dangerous thing is to be without an agenda, to be purposeless. It is intrinsic for us to want to succeed. Without an agenda, a plan, people are bound to do ridiculous and dangerous things to cheat their way to success. This is especially so because that success is not clearly defined either.You can see why we emphasise on business plans for enterprises. So, who sets your agenda?Happy New Year.Sam Kebongo is an entrepreneurship Development Consultant based in Kigali.

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Who sets your agenda?