Last week was my birthday and with that came the usual reflection; how much wisdom had I gained in the last year? Memory is a curious thing the more you remember the more you forget; I remember looking at old school essays I wrote and can’t remember writing them, let alone the complexities of what I wrote about. I made a deal with God; if I made it to 85, then he can take me, but thinking about it 85 would be a short life for my generation, soon I’ll be able to download my brain onto a hard-drive and live forever. I watched a mundane news story of how a man had broken a swimming record for the over-70; the man was 101 and could swim faster than most people a quarter of his age. Sadly he had to give up football aged 85 because of the lack of fellow players his age. This made me think it isn’t too late to take up football or any sport and I am only as young as I feel; then I tried to run for a bet and almost died. Societies that are aging like the West idealise youth but younger societies admire age like we do in Africa. When you look at an old man in Africa, you know he has been through a hell of a lot to get to his age; it has been a daily hustle to feed himself and his family, via disease, war, famine and every pestilence. We denote respect with age so a quick way to gain respect is by aging yourself prematurely; young men call each other “Mzee” when they are barely out of puberty, they seek to gain big pot-bellies to look like their heroes. I knew I had to go on a diet when people were calling me “Boss” while looking at my belly. Then there is the scenario where you go to visit your friend and ask for say John and nobody knows who you are talking about “Oh you mean Papa Eric”. Soon you become named after your children and lose your own identity. When you look at the major corporations in Rwanda they are run by the young; walk into MTN and the only person over 40 is a director, same with Rwandatel, BCR, BK and all modern institutions but when you think of the people making the decisions they are the older generation. I cannot wait till this younger dynamic generation is making decisions and not following old methods. This modern world is curious; the old rules don’t apply; before the elders had all the answers, but now we are caught between reverence and reality. The young have all the answers but no power to implement them. When you look around Kigali, there are so many young professionals looking for work; KIST, KIE, UNR, ULK, ISAR, and all the other institutions are producing more graduates than there are jobs. We are trying to build capacity when we already aren’t using what capacity we have. We need to focus on job-creation as a means of poverty reduction particularly among the young who routinely suffer high unemployment in most economies. We need to incentivise job creation to encourage more people to employ more personnel; we must give tax breaks for every person you employ, we should tax a company that employs 5 people at a lesser rate than one that employs 4 and so forth. A generation could be lost unless we find gainful employment for them but that will not come through poverty reduction; parallel to that must run a programme for employment, we need an employment minister, with a national agency dedicated to creating jobs, collating job data, matching jobs to people. Take Zimbabwe; they are in their current situation because of 90% unemployment, before bad economic policies were offset by the fact that most people were working, now they are not and have to deal with all the other factors. I will leave you with an anecdote I heard about Einstein; for years his E=MC2 was taught in university, it was a very long calculation but the great Einstein had forgotten to carry a number during a crucial part of the calculation. Nobody ever noticed until a 19 year old student pointed it out; it turned out the equation was wrong in its original context but right in another context. ramaisibo@hotmail.com
