Innovation is a pre-requisite for sustainable growth

Editor, Reference is made to Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s article, “Innovate or stagnate” (The New Times, February 5). Any living entity is intrinsically committed to never stop innovating. So, innovation is not a caprice; it rather is a matter of life sustainment. And any degree of lack of it is an assured road not only to ‘irrelevancy’ as you say, but simply to relatively slow disappearance from earth, meaning ‘death’. Our country, Rwanda, and the entire African continent, are being distracted from innovating since the last 4-5 centuries. That means we, Rwandans and Africans, both individuals and collectivities, are slowly drifting towards death, a gradual imminence of disappearance from earth. Can this entropic trend above be ever reversed? Yes, it can, through constant creativity, which is continuous innovation both by each individual Rwandan and each African, and by our institutions, political and all others. To an individual human entity, the actual trend reversal is a matter of one’s character reset: lucidly refocusing one’s entire living mode on the essential that sustains life, instead of letting oneself occupied on what one considers as futilities. The yardstick on anything or any event, it is always asking whether or not being somehow involved, that in a way or in another enhances one’s whole life as a unit of a physical, psychological, and social phenomenon. To a collectivity, as so well developed in your article, reversing the trend is a matter of and a duty entrusted to local political government: “an existential question’ not only for the institution itself, but also and more dramatically for the entire community that being organized through it. Indeed, we have witnessed many cases when a government that doesn’t innovate in its structure and ways; it simply is replaced sooner than later. It dies. But worse, the group being un-creatively governed, it either stagnates or becomes sclerosed, and all kinds of social perturbations occur...towards social disintegration and death. Or, the group lurks, or as by necessity, it systematically leads to lurk towards more dynamic, more creative/innovative, more alive neighbors. The un-creative government thus either overtly or subtly entice the governed individuals to enter the mode of systematic borrowing whatever is innovated and created elsewhere (more imports allowed in), thus systematically killing the indigenous innovative spirit and drive. Result, on the long run individuals and their communities literally die... physically, psychologically, and culturally. Francois-Xavier Nziyonsenga

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Innovation is a pre-requisite for sustainable growth