Ashley Mwanza

The remarkable story of Egypt's anti-government protests continues. Night has fallen there, and the protests are continuing.

(Amr Nabil/AP) An Egyptian mother hugged her child as she watched thousands of

Egyptian protesters gather at Tahrir square in Cairo earlier today (Jan. 30, 2011).

It’s not clear at all whether they believe them or not, but the Egyptian elite have been telling themselves lies and half truths for years. Today may have seen the day when those lies and half truths caught up with them. Clearly, the many thousands of people in Tahrir Square don’t take the regime’s claims about reform seriously.

The press has focused on economic grievances—perhaps taking their cues from government spokesmen—but the only demands we hear are political. The young people in Tahrir want freedom and liberation from Hosni Mubarak, his family, and the National Democratic Party.

Mohamed ElBaradei, a leading opposition figure, has joined thousands of protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square, in continued demonstrations demanding an end to President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule. He told the crowd on Sunday night that "what we have begun cannot go back" referring to days of anti-government protests.

‎"As Muslim Protestors prayed, Christian Egyptians formed human chains to protect them. Solidarity, strength and co-existence."

Victory for the people is certain...it's only a matter of time...

Compiled by Ashley Mwanza

While our world places much emphasis on factors such as knowledge, innovation, technology and skills, it makes no real reference to values, ethical decision making, regulatory frame- works, corporate responsibility...

Our recent economic collapse was more than a technical event -- it was a human event that arose from unwise and in some cases unethical decisions. When there were opportunities for fairness, caution and duty of care, there was carelessness, irresponsibility, and on occasion downright dishonesty.

We have allowed higher education’s almost exclusive focus on such things as knowledge, innovation, technology and skill to remain unchallenged.

At a time when many of the sharp suits in our failed banking and property sectors and in our inadequate regulatory, political and administrative regimes held high-quality degrees we wonder did we do enough for them. In teaching them to become innovative, technologically proficient and competent in the latest knowledge or method, did we short-change them?

UNESCO's director-general said that some of the pilots who perpetrated the 9/11 atrocity were university graduates and argued that "knowledge by itself . . . is not enough -- many terrorists, after all, are educated".

We are missing a core weakness in higher education -- the lack of a coherent role in preparing graduates for responsible and ethical behaviour in the workplace.

Nor does it encourage higher education to consider the importance of adequate regulatory and corporate frameworks to keep organisations safe and effective.

Our graduates need an understanding of, and a facility for, effective regulations, appropriate rules and ethical frameworks to guide organisational behaviour so as to ensure the safety and vibrancy of our economy and society.

From producing graduates who absorbed the mantra of deregulation and light-touch rules, we must now imbue them with the importance of ethical and regulatory frameworks and the ability to distinguish between rules that keep us safe, solvent and effective and those that just take up time.

While the economic and regulatory wings of Government are now desperately trying to get us out of the hole we are in, it is mainly to education that we look to ensure this crisis never happens again. Although the Government and its agencies are feverishly working to bed down a powerful and effective regulatory regime to keep us afloat, it is to education that we look to encourage the long-term development and sustenance of this framework.

We must now come up with a short, sharp and focused project to prepare higher education for the new reality.

This will ensure that our graduates have not just the knowledge, skills and technical capacity to do their job, but that they also have the knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, regulatory frameworks, corporate responsibility and ethical behaviour to help ensure we never again have to face into the nightmare of sovereign insolvency.

Excerpts from Anto Kerins’s memo: Higher education must teach ethics. Anto Kerins is a Senior lecturer in the Dublin Institute of Technology and author of An Adventure in Service-Learning: Developing Knowledge, Values and Responsibility (Gower, 2010)

IT would be easy to despair of conditions in Haiti, one year after the devastating earthquake, and to turn one's back on the suffering of its people. More than 800,000 are still living in camps, in squalid conditions, in the open spaces of the capital Port-au-Prince. Conditions are worse outside the capital, where the television cameras rarely go.

Indeed, one of the fears of international agencies is that the disaster will widen the gap between Port-au-Prince and the rest of the impoverished country, as the aid effort takes the line of least resistance, or maximum political advantage.

With most governments around the world strapped for cash, more appeals from Haiti could well fall on deaf ears. There would probably be little public objection, especially since it seems such a hopeless case.

One of the difficulties is that Haiti is almost the definition of a "failed state"; one crippled, not by war, but by its inability to create a functioning administrative system. In a cruel twist in such a situation, around a fifth of the country's civil servants were killed in the earthquake, which destroyed their modern but inadequately constructed offices.

The fact that conditions in the camps are often better than those in Haiti's slums or poor rural areas does not come across to those in rich countries. But it is clear, for instance, that the cholera outbreak, which killed almost 4,000 people, might have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths without foreign aid and the efforts of those administering it.

Haiti does have a political system, but it may not be helpful in this process. The presidential run-off in a few weeks time will get more than normal publicity, of a kind which may weaken the case for continuing the aid programme.

Yet taking that view would be a mistake. Dealing with natural disaster is always slow and difficult, even in more favourable conditions than Haiti. Naples still has scars from the earthquake of 1980. A lot of human suffering has been avoided by the Haitian aid programme, but one cannot film suffering which has not happened.

The cry will inevitably go up that we cannot afford it. That is a spurious excuse. For all our problems, we are immensely more fortunate than the inhabitants of Haiti, or billions more around the planet.

Not only should that spur us to generosity, it should remind us to curb our complaints and count our blessings.

Published on Wednesday January 12 2011 in the Irish Independent

Compiled Ashley Mwanza

Image courtesy of the BBC

There's a distressingly widening gap in the world -between the haves and have-nots, between the folks at the top of the economic ladder and those further down. It's an unhealthy situation. There is definitely a common understanding about the problem that we face as a world. Millions of people are living in poverty, most of them in abject poverty.

There is a ‘mystery’ we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? What do we make of this? In the richer countries, greed had not helped matters either. As a world our chief enemies are greed, corruption and exploitation. Without these we can eradicate poverty.

We are the architects of the suffering we see today. We all cannot have plenty, but we all can have enough. When others have more than enough others inevitably have less. As the rich get richer the poor get poorer. For a while things can seem to be going well but as time goes on the gap opens up or when the system implodes, the poor are ‘born’. The ‘wealth of nations’ in Europe has imploded and thus a new class has been born, poverty may not be the right word to describe it, but as others got too rich, for a while it went unnoticed until the ‘game’ failed.

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.” This quote sounds like it comes directly from the pulpit of a Spirit-filled minister or an intellectual Christian scholar. However, these assumptions would prove fictitious. The real author of this quote though scorned by many Christians still possessed the eyes to see the immense suffering and immeasurable need throughout the world. Charles Darwin could see more clearly than many postmodern believers.

“Before moving on, we should note a sad connection to our own society: it's that final class (the destitute class) which is growing so quickly, the expendable people who are unemployed and unemployable.” (Rohr, 61) The poorest of the poor become more numerous with each passing day as a result of others’ drive to become wealthier.

Marshall McLuhan said, "Affluence creates poverty," and that continues to prove itself true today. For some time, this made no sense to me. It seemed to be such a contradictory statement. However, when I decided to delve deeper into the mind of McLuhan and observe the world in which we live, the quote made perfect sense. I believe that in this world which is often labelled by its greed, while many become richer, others are “left behind”. It is not because there is less money available to the poor (it’s available, many of the poor simply do not have access to it); it’s that the rich often times do not share their wealth. I must acknowledge the fact there are endless numbers of individuals who have dedicated their lives to charitable foundations and bringing an end to poverty. However, there are also those who either ignore the fact that poverty exists or are naive and not able to recognize its impact on many.

However, changes can be made to right this horrible wrong. Prosperity, we are told, is a result of productivity. Let those people who have worked hard to be where they are be appreciated. However, I believe that it is wrong for anybody to be receiving most of the fruit of the productivity alone. It is my most ardent belief that the fruit should be equitably shared. I am not calling for equal salaries for all people. Rather I am saying, it is wrong to have one person receiving an obnoxiously high salary while those working with him or her receive ‘peanuts’. It is wrong.

Trade and exchange of goods and services have always existed in human societies, but these were subjected to nature’s and people’s economies. The elevation of the domain of the market and money to the position of the highest organising principle and the only measure of our wellbeing has in fact led to the undermining of the processes that maintain and sustain life. The richer we get, the poorer we become ecologically and culturally. Our poverty is on many levels we need to act fast to reverse this.

Let’s not let greed take over the world. Let’s not depend on the governments to solve our problems (most of them actually help in creating the problems). Let’s prove Marshall McLuhan wrong. We have to change, and we must start now.

"Wars against nations are fought to change maps; wars against poverty are fought to map change." - Muhammad Ali