My Beauty Best Teacher

Mobolaji Sanusi indicts Nigerian society:

The rot in the nation is unimaginable. It is not impossible for a right thinking Nigerian to develop insomnia as a result of the depth of graft in the country. Graft has foreclosed many windows of opportunities for citizens of this country. From the topmost leadership to the least person on the street, corruption has come to be seen as a way of life – nothing in our national life is free anymore.

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh writes:

Mediocrity constructs the failure of societies. It brews allergy to progress. To this end, a society that applauds mediocrity has booked an appointment with poverty. That society has a rendezvous with collapse. It has a date with failure. Mediocrity kills development. It smothers aspirations to excellence. It eviscerates every passion to innovate. It percolates and corrodes the fibres of the society. Core values erode at its toxic acidity. This leads to a breakdown of social support system which ensures social cohesion. In the light of this, a society which places premium on corruption, and fraud is heading to hell. Because dalliance with the mean has never launched any society into the orbit of development

Continuing our focus on private foundations we take a look at the the AE Healthlinks foundation founded by Tosan Akporiaye-Oruwariye . Their goals are to:

1. Facilitate direct patient care of a wide variety of illnesses that includes both medical and surgical interventions
2. Provide technical assistance in terms of specialized equipment for different services
3. Facilitate the appropriate medical training of various cadre of health professionals

Gebreselassie Y. Tesfamichael writes:

For decades, we had watched governments throughout the continent compromise their sovereignty as they adopted economic models imposed on them by both the West and the East in order to get aid. We could not help noticing how aid distorted the development process. For instance, donor organizations emphasize the social sectors -- health and education -- while almost entirely ignoring the commercial and business sector. Africa's cities are full of educated, enterprising people who are peddling goods made in Asia. Why should that be? Agriculture and manufacturing are starved for funding. We need health care and education, yes, but we also need a productive sector for the healthy and the educated to work in...The fundamental problem in Africa is not lack of resources, but the failure of political leadership. The modern African state is a colonial creation, extractive in its design. Its mission was not to serve the people, but to dominate and exploit them. Despite independence, and despite improvements brought by numerous recent democratic elections, the nature of that state remains intact. The primary solution is to change it.

Jean Rogers writes(PDF):

Transition to a rule-of-law system requires a shift in values that must permeate the implementing institutions and the public. As mentioned before, the values include respect for the law, supremacy of the law, recognition of rights, equality under the law, government restraint, and fair and impartial enforcement. Assessing functioning norms in the informal sector and adapting them for formal laws is one key way to gain acceptance of change from the grassroots. Such change may still encounter resistance within various levels of government, however. Thus, political will from the top and push for change from the grassroots are both key to making the shift effectively.

The Anti Corruption Internet Database (ACID) is a project of WANGONET founded by Tunji Lardner, it is "...an on-line facility set up to help Nigerian citizens monitor the performance, accountability and transparency of their government and government officials.This website is part of a multi-media outreach campaign which aims to Educate Nigerians on the systems and processes that exist for the budgeting and accounting of public funds, Inform the public on government’s efforts and shortfalls in managing these vast funds and Empower all citizens to demand their basic rights to see these funds spent on their needs..."

Karekezi, S "...surveys (PDF) the dissemination of renewable technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa...and attempts to evaluate the potential for these technologies to meet the energy needs of Africa’s poor..."

In contrast to the industrialized world which is worried by the long-term global environmental impact of current patterns of energy production and use,African countries are largely pre-occupied with the immediate problems of reversing the persistent decline of their centralized power systems as well a meeting the longstanding and pressing demands for a minimum level of modern energy services for the majority of their poor - many of whom have no electricity and continue to rely on inefficient and environmentally hazardous unprocessed biomass fuels...At the institutional level, African countries needs to realize that the centralized energy model is becoming increasingly obsolete in developed countries where independent power producers riding on the back of the privatisation wave are increasingly the norm rather than the exception. Rather than continue to expand its centralized power systems, African countries should begin to develop a decentralized energy structure which would better match its current capital resources and management capability as well as position it well to adapt to future energy technologies and systems.