Can we keep up??

There is an interesting story which happened in the early 90’s (sounds like a really long time ago) when one of the senior members of our clan was studying in the US. There was a family issue which he wanted to discuss with folks back home and he wrote a letter that on a particular day and time he was going to make a phone call to have the discussion…amazing huh.

I am sure if I were to start narrating this story to the multiparty generation, the first question they will ask me will be; why couldn’t he just send an SMS or an e-mail…you know?
Yeah right I wish it were that easy; most of us were fully preoccupied with the world ending in the year 2000 to even imagine anything of the sort.

If the world was not ending in 2000 at least there was this very glorious line about “prosperity for all by the year 2000” …very funny. I am just hoping that whoever was responsible for coining such ridiculous phrases (they don’t qualify to be called goals) is currently serving time (in jail of course) or he is a fugitive hiding somewhere in some remote mountain living like a peasant. I mean look at the world today and tell me how many people can claim to be prosperous, 9 years down the line.

The prosperity line was so popular that we even had our own Malawianized version which went a little something like this “poverty alleviation”. If you look up the word alleviation in your thesaurus it will give you words like; mitigation, lessening, easing and of course another one which I feel is out line if you try to replace the word alleviation in the phrase…improvement. Obviously “poverty improvement” gives you a totally different meaning.

The beauty of the Malawian version of the prosperity promise is that it is so vague that nobody could really be held to account for anything, but when it said on podiums…my friend, it sounded soooo noble. Obviously when people realized the folly of such a ridiculous proposition, they had field day satirizing it. The one which I loved so much and which seemed to make sense considering the situation on the ground went along the lines of improvement. The word alleviation was conveniently replaced with the word ELEVATION.

Enough of that but suffice to say that within the last 20 years the developments that have taken place in the communications sector are nothing but mind boggling. I am sure I don’t posses within my bank of knowledge the full repertoire of tools and resources out there. I mean, while we are all excited about social networks like FACEBOOK, Twitter and the like; let’s not forget that Malawi did not have its own TV station until the late 90’s. I am sure most of us remember not so long ago how people would proudly display ‘bricks’ on their waists.

Did you know that in the year 2000, Malawi only had 15,000 people with access to the internet? The figures of 2008 at least paint a respectable picture with numbers just going above 300,000. In a country of 13,000,000 people, I think we can do better.
The nest time you are tempted to take that cell phone, access to the internet, TV for granted just remember that 15 year ago most people never even imagined this would be possible. So ask yourself in the next 15 years are we going to keep up with the pace of innovations...