What's up with Whatsapp?

Greetings, good people.

At some point I wrote a post titled “Social Networking Know-how Deficiency Syndrome”. In that post, I talked about how a lot of people are on pretty much every social network and messaging app that there is with the smart revolution; but lack the basic knowledge on how to use them. I actually thought that my post would be exhaustive but it turned out that I only talked about the cyber sins that people committed on Facebook. Of late I have noted that there has been an increase in the same on the popular messaging app, Whatsapp (note, it is not Whatsup or anything of that sort).

To be frank, most of what I write here will be based on my opinion of how this Whatsapp thing is supposed to work, but I do think that it is objective enough.
In the first place, I believe that the application was meant to facilitate easy, affordable and instant communication between people. Innovation and upgrade saw it include voice notes, media sharing and voice calls. There is also that important feature of groups and soon enough we might see video calls get incorporated, making Whatsapp a one stop communication application. You wouldn’t know what these fellas have in the pipeline, would you?

The thing with Whatsapp is that with its increasing popularity has come misuse. The same sort of thing that happened on Facebook.

To the point.

The fact that Whatsapp is instant and cheaper has led to a lot of unnecessary communication. People can always start an irritating conversation aimlessly so long as they have nothing to do and K5 in their phone. This in turn tends to affect those who tune in to their Whatsapp awaiting important communications as they have to screen through the trash before they can get the important messages. Generally disturbing, these things.

Apart from the aimless message throwing, there is another bad habit of forwarding every single thing that has the word “forward” to it. This, especially gets done by Christians (not sure about people of other religions). We have people creating messages, some nice and some not so nice, strictly for cyber circulation purposes and for some reason they haven’t let us decide for ourselves whether to forward or not. SO what do they do? They attach good conditions to it. “Abraham Lincoln forwarded it a day before he was announced a victor in a presidential election”. And we have fully grown people forwarding these messages, probably after being convinced by the Abraham Lincoln blessing. Is forwarding messages wrong? Nope. People just need to realize that they do have the autonomy to forward or not and the ability to edit.

Then comes the issue of media sharing. For some reason some people have not yet grasped the idea that the fact that you can do something doesn’t mean that you should overdo it, and they have taken that to Whatsapp. Every good morning message is a 2 minute (5 MB) video, nice lunch is a picture and goodnight is another video. They never seem to run out of them by the way, wherever they are forwarded from. I personally do not think that a good morning message does not need to take my 2 minutes and 5 megabytes. Something that comes from the heart sounds more appropriate.

And then there are audios. “Every hood song and funny audio (some of them are not even funny) to everyone” seems to be the policy for some people and I am sure you have that one friend in your circle (assuming that it is not you) who does that. Is sending audios wrong? Not at all. Just make sure you are sending the right audio to the right people.

Big issue is the issue of groups. Now the whole concept of Whatsapp groups has gone wrong at different levels. Ideally the whole purpose of s group is to keep people of the same interests together so that they can discuss their issues. For some reason others have decided to create groups with vague subjects and others decide to go beyond the borders of the group and add people who have no interest whatsoever in the issues discussed in the group. Vice. You know how to correct that.

The big problem we have with groups is however that of ectopic posts; the sort of things that are completely unrelated to the agenda of the group. Create an educational group and someone will soon be posting football stuff; religious group and it will soon be full of memes, corporate group and someone will soon be sharing the Word of God in there (that is wrong too, if you didn’t know). We are finding it so hard to focus on the aim of groups on Whatsapp. Actually it is as simple as sticking to the topic, but for some reason not all of us grasped the concept. Are you one of those who bring up Messi’s picture in your local church’s youth group? I am calling upon you to up your Whatsapp game.

Well. This article shouldn’t be any longer. Point is that Whatsapp has given us some opportunity to communicate and it is not a good thing to abuse that. This thing of aimlessly sending messages and forwarding everything that we have received doesn’t do anyone good. Funny jokes in religious and corporate groups? Obviously not the way to go.

Then there is the issue of going into the office only to sit there reading and responding to messages on some Whatsapp group. That is a non-standard. No one should move to the point where "networking" becomes synonymous to "not working". Those of you who already have should repent and renounce your old words.

Tizitolere.

Success, again

Friday.

This is the sort of thing we call “success Friday”; reason being that I would like to write about success.

Some have defined success as the progressive realization of a person’s goals. The probably elongated the textbook definition of it, but this one is enough for me; and it should be for you.

To expound on it I will start from the end phrase; the realization of one’s goals. This means that there have to be goals in the first place. No goals, no success. In short, there has to be a benchmark for comparison; something independent of the objective, if you get what I mean.
Next is the fact that the realization of goals has to be progressive. If you achieve your goals today and fail to do so the next day to the extent that you go back to where you were initially, that does not count as success. This is the sort of thing that screens true success from kugwera (coincidence).

Before some misquote me, progressive does not mean that all will be smooth. Somewhere, things may go wrong, but successful people bounce back and rise above challenges. The point is, however that there has to be something about the success that can deliberately be replicated and result and result in the achievement of yet another bigger goal.

Then comes the other thing I omitted from the textbook definition of success. Success is multifactorial. It doesn’t help to be too successful academically but to be a failure morally. Obviously not a good idea to be successful in spirituality and still be poor (not saying you should ask God for “miracle money”). The point is just that success should be balanced in all disciplines of life.

What bundles the few paragraphs here together? Well. Success is deliberate. It is about setting goals and pursuing them.
Does it mean that those who are not successful did it deliberately? Well. Not sure. All I know is that those who succeed do it deliberately, while those who do not… well, those ones do not plan anything at all. They might stumble upon something that lifts them for a while but it might not always be sustained.

Wanna have a sustained realization of goals? Plan it.

Woza Friday.

Independence

Yesterday we were commemorating Martyr's Day. Indeed, the people who spearheaded the fight for our independence. A couple of months ago we singled out one of them by the name of Reverend John Chilembwe and celebrated his day too. I have used all these holidays for studying and resting (that combination is possible when you are me) and there was nothing whatsoever about.

Later in the year we will have another holiday called Independence Day. Somehow the freedom fighters will also be mentioned. I will probably not be interested in that at the time so I will write about independence now.

For long we have talked about Malawi being independent for 50+ years, but I somehow think that the word "independence" is grossly abused when it comes to this.

I do not need to go into the dictionary to show you how we abuse the word "independence". Dividing the word into its two main roots, you will find that it is a prefix "in-" connected to the word "dependence". In simple terms it means "no dependence"; thinking of it from those lines, that is.

I find it hard to think that we are not dependent. You and I have heard our esteemed leaders grant an interview saying that the country's economic woes are coming about because of lack of donor support. Whether that is true or not is a subject of debate and I will not get into that. All I take from such statements is that we are not truly independent. In my view, freedom is the word that best describes our situation. We have the freedom of self-governance but are not really independent.

Next time you want to talk about Malawi's 50 years or so of independence, think of what Prof. Kamwezi wrote on his blog.

Some of you might be wondering as to why I am busy talking about this instead of being busy preparing for the scary exams I have on Tuesday and Wednesday this coming week. Well. It is simple.

Just like every problem we have in this country begins from the state machinery through various societies to the individual, this whole issue of mistaking freedom from independence has affected us at individual level.

Those who have been in college can bear witness (from observation and experience) that some of us consider this a period of independence from parents. I am not talking about this in it's semantic sense. What I mean is that we do want our parents and guardians to stay out of our way when we are doing our "not-so-clever" (stupid, in other words) thing, while we look to the same people to support us. Tulo. Better I not talk about that. It is probably a lame example, but I am sure dear readers have their own examples which they will share in the comment box.

The whole point of this was just to shed the light and to emphasize on the thin line between independence and freedom. The idea is not that freedom is bad. Neither is it that independence is always good.

To talk of freedom, there is a need for some degree of freedom in every person and society's being. That sort of gives you the autonomy to do some things without having to check in with someone else and having a second opinion from someone.

On the other hand, freedom should come with responsibility and independence comes in a bit handy with freedom. If you want to exercise freedom, you need to have what it takes to exercise it. ("If you don't legalize homosexuality we will not give you aid". Remember?)

While we acknowledge the fact that independence is important, we also do not have to forget that no man is an island and that we need one or two people or things at some point to come to our aid. At some point, we need to work our own way around issues, though. For those of us who have people who mentor or advise us, it is important to balance this independence-freedom complex. While we might look for opinions, it is good to fractionate them, extract the sense and use it to make a decision. The fact that we have people helping us should not make us lose our ability to make decisions.

To summarize this, there is a line between freedom and independence. All of these are good but the most important thing to realize is that if we focus on freedom alone, we will end up being enslaved by the freedom and we will not be able to experience the true joy of independence.

The wise one has spoken. (This is a joke. Laugh!)

The Mentorship Factor

One for the Friday.

Being a Christian, I have always been reading the Bible for as long as I have been able to. In my young years, however, reading the Bible was an issue of entertainment. I was always fascinated by the nice stories of the Old Testament. Sticks turning into snakes, Israelites crossing the Red Sea on dry land and the many other stories. The fact that I was reading for entertainment meant that I did not pay much attention to something until recently; nominology.

Throughout the Old Testament and in parts of the New Testament, names are always given with the name of the person and then that of the father. Joshua son of Nun, David son of Jesse, Simon son of Jonah and many other countless examples. In the sort of David's defeat of Goliath, we also see the emphasis of the importance of the father's name, as the first question Saul asked people about David was "whose son is this?".

We might wonder as to what this meant, but to the Jews, the father played a big role in the child. Traditionally the occupation of the father was transferred to the children for generations and the honor of the father was also reflected in the offspring.

Taking a look at how diverse and modernized the world has become, it is easy to recognize that these principles cannot work in the same way as they worked among the old day Israelite communities. Children are being sent to school to pursue careers and professions of their dreams (sometimes of their parent' dreams; komabe nzabhobho) and some turn out to be perfect opposites to their parents when it comes to honor.

The application of the principle of parent to child transfer, should therefore not be focused on issues like career, but rather on other things like character and ideologies.

I have every reason to believe that we used to have this transfer even in our own community, where parent would be able to sit down with their children and talk sense into them. Over time, children became less and less obedient and parents sort of gave up on advising them (Kamwezi's Theory of Parent-Child Dissociation; might not be the case, so don't take it too seriously) and so far we don't have much of that happening. The moment people get to tertiary education they are almost untouchable by parents and they gain independence of their parents, having no one to listen to whenever it comes to practical life issues.

The whole thing of having no one to listen to comes with a dangerous thing I prefer to call enslavement by freedom. Some would resort to doing things that parents or guardians in general prohibit for every good reason.

Others, on the other hand will fall into good hands of mentors, mostly from church. Others will get exposed to coaches on success and begin to pick recommendations on various lifestyle traits and reads. The results are sort of mixed because despite the source of the mentor, there are a lot of dynamics when it comes to the mentor, the content and the perception of the mentee.

I have observed a couple of adversities of mentorship. A couple of people have suffered unintentional breakups or have missed out on finding loving spouses because their mentors said no to their desires. Others have ended up mixing up priorities because their mentors recommended things that diverted from their personal dreams.

That being said, I  have to say that I am advocating for a carefree life for those who are free. I, by saying that, was just being me; was just exposing the other side of mentorship because it may go wrong at some point. When well understood and applied, on the other hand, mentorship is an awesome thing for both the donor and recipient end (if you know what I mean).

In the first place, we need to understand that there are people who know better than us by virtue of having much more experience or knowledge. That understanding should always give us the humility and let us be human enough to sit under someone's teaching to listen to their opinion and draw some wisdom from it.

On the other hand, it is important to realize that what we may hear from those we think are better than us in terms of knowledge and experience may not apply to everyone. In other words, everyone is unique and some of the directions they may give are more of opinions than they are facts. It is important to, therefore synthesize what we hear from those guiding us and see what may apply to us. Of course that may depend on how the mentor presents issues, so the choice of of someone to listen to is critical.

Now kwa anthu amene muli ma coach ndi ma mentor; those of you who have taken it upon yourselves to see to it that those below you have it better, I salute you for the noble course you have taken. I would, however like to remind you to understand the diversity of humanity. In as much as there are some general principles of lifw that do not change, not everything that applies to you applies to everyone else no matter how similar people and situations may be. It is important to be flexible and to focus on giving facts for people to make decisions; as opposed to making people live our dream lives and forcing others to live the way we want.

All in all, those of us who are young need to find people we look up to and that goes to everyone. No matter how big we may grow or who may (or may not) be seeing us, there is need for sitting under some teaching in order to forge ahead. Those who have learnt need to also share with others for continuity of goodness. Those who like to read should read good reads but let us not roam around like sheep without shepherds; and in the same way we shouldn't let others roam like goats without ujeni.

PS
Shout out to all the Richie Online Readers who celebrated with the author on his birthday. Management hopes you will do the same on his wedding.