Censorship is the sincerest form of flattery.
- From Ethan Zuckerman’s blog

The December 2010/January 2011 issue of the Africa Report, included an article on 11 Ideas for 2011 to make real change. I read through the ideas and thought that the idea that suggests, “Nobody can become President over the age of 69″ was the best for me. I found it to be a low cost solution enabling freedom of choice among Africans benefiting the majority. I truly agree with the sentiment that says we appreciate the goodness that comes with ‘old wine’ – that is wisdom, experience and perspective. Surely our much older leaders in Africa deserve a round of applause for exhibiting these characteristics. However, having them in leadership positions for too long brings major discomfort to citizens as promises made go undelivered. Also when a leader stays in power for too long citizens begin to see their imperfections more clearly.

The pursuit of African leaders to stay in power even when the populace is no longer comfortable with them has proven not to be a general thing of late. This is evident with the protests in Tunisia and Egypt.  The anger brewing in the hearts of these citizens in these countries has been put in the limelight for the whole world to see. And the possibility of having other protests rising in other African countries cannot be ruled out. As Cameroon, Egypt, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe go to vote in 2011 we hope to see a new age bracket of leaders govern our countries. Simply put, we want new faces in leadership positions.

We have to continue to pray and be patriotic towards our desired change in Africa. We truly desire to have selfless and visionary leaders at all levels of the government. There is a need also to have youths in leadership, as they are the future of tomorrow.

I conclude with a quote by Nelson Mandela, which says, “It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.”

Leaders will be more appreciated and recognized if they take steps towards these wise words.

I enjoyed reading The Standard editor’s latest instalment about Mudenge. I also took notice of the paper’s “Quote of the week” where Saviour Kasukuwere spoke about the black man’s right not to remain poop when the spoils of war resemble Aladdin’s cave. Kasukuwere speaks the language of Supa Mandiwanzira – or vice versa who a few weeks ago told us the indigenisation crusade will not be around forever and exhorted exiled patriots not to wait until “things are okay.” Yet Mudenge takes the cake as he reminds us about his love for game meat, meat which war veterans enjoyed in unforgettable barbecues during the height of farm invasions that claimed Martin Olds and other nameless black farm workers. Then we heard the same government complaining about the falling numbers of the national herd. Now when Mudenge speaks about wantonly killing and eating game meat, what does it say about Francis Nhema on the other hand crusading about the conservation of wild life? And  it goes further, Patrick Zhuwawo leading the takeover of tourist resorts and Walter Muzembi selling the country as a safe tourist destination. These are people supposedly working together! And we are expected to take them seriously?

“The best time to listen to a politician is when he is on a street corner, in the rain, late at night, when he is exhausted. Then he doesn’t lie.” Theodore H. White, US journalist (1969)

But I figure Mudenge, Zvuwawo and all still well-heeled as they are and protected from the elements are not lying. As the Carlifornia guv would say back in the day as a celluloid thespian, Zwuwawo said, they will back at Kuimbashiri. Are cops listening? You bet!

Charles Arthur writing for The Guardian:

Google and Twitter launch service enabling Egyptians to tweet by phone: Voice-to-tweet software allows citizens to send news from Egypt despite internet blackout

Google and Twitter have launched a service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by leaving a voicemail on a specific number after the last internet service provider in the country saw its access cut off late on Monday.

The new service, which has been created by co-ordination between the two internet companies, uses Google’s speech-to-text recognition service to automatically translate a message left on the number, which will be sent out on Twitter with the “#egypt” hashtag.

Ujwal Singh, co-founder of SayNow and Abdel Karim Mardini, Google’s product manager for the Middle East and north Africa, said in a blog post that “over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection … We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time.”

Google listed three phone numbers for people to call to use the service. They are: +16504194196; +390662207294; and +97316199855.

No internet connection is required. That will be important for users in Egypt after Noor Group, which had been the last internet service provider connecting to the outside world, went dark late on Monday. It had remained online after the country’s four main internet providers – Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr – abruptly stopped shuttling internet traffic into and out of the country last Friday.

At about 11pm local time Monday, the Noor Group became unreachable, said James Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, a security firm based in Manchester, New Hampshire, which monitors huge directories of “routes”, or set paths that define how web traffic moves from one place to another.

The Noor Group’s routes have disappeared, he said.

Cowie said engineers at the Noor Group and other service providers could quickly shut down the internet by logging on to certain computers and changing a configuration file. The original blackout on Friday took just 20 minutes to fully go into effect, he said. However it is not clear whether the Noor Group’s disconnection was planned or accidental.

Mobile phone service was restored in Egypt on Saturday, but text messaging services have been disrupted during the continuing protests.

In an op-ed for the New York Times Egyptian author Mansoura Ez-Eldin gives a personal account of the Egyptian protests:

ON Friday, the “day of rage,” I was in the streets with the protesters. Friends and I participated in a peaceful demonstration that started at the Amr Ibn al-As Mosque in Old Cairo near the Church of St. George. We set off chanting, “The people want the regime to fall!” and we were greeted with a torrent of tear gas fired by the police. We began to shout, “Peaceful, Peaceful,” trying to show the police that we were not hostile, we were demanding nothing but our liberty. That only increased their brutality. Fighting began to spread to the side streets in the ancient, largely Coptic neighborhood.

…Clearly, the scent of Tunisia’s “jasmine revolution” has quickly reached Egypt. Following the successful expulsion in Tunis of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the call arose on Facebook for an Egyptian revolution, to begin on Jan. 25. Yet the public here mocked those young people who had taken to Twitter and Facebook to post calls for protest: Since when was the spark of revolution ignited on a pre-planned date? Had revolution become like a romantic rendezvous?

…In Suez, where the demonstrations have been tremendously violent, live ammunition was used against civilians from the first day. A friend of mine who lives there sent me a message saying that, Thursday morning, the city looked as if it had emerged from a particularly brutal war: its streets were burned and destroyed, dead bodies were strewn everywhere; we would never know how many victims had fallen to the police bullets in Suez, my friend solemnly concluded.

After having escaped from Old Cairo on Friday, my friends and I headed for Tahrir Square, the focal point of the modern city and site of the largest protests. We joined another demonstration making its way through downtown, consisting mostly of young people. From a distance, we could hear the rumble of the protest in Tahrir Square, punctuated by the sounds of bullets and screams. Minute by painstaking minute, we protesters were gaining ground, and our numbers were growing. People shared Coca-Cola bottles, moistening their faces with soda to avoid the effects of tear gas. Some people wore masks, while others had sprinkled vinegar into their kaffiyehs.

Shopkeepers handed out bottles of mineral water to the protesters, and civilians distributed food periodically. Women and children leaned from windows and balconies, chanting with the dissidents. I will never forget the sight of an aristocratic woman driving through the narrow side streets in her luxurious car, urging the protesters to keep up their spirits, telling them that they would soon be joined by tens of thousands of other citizens arriving from different parts of the city.

…Hour by hour on Friday evening, the chaos increased. Police stations and offices of the ruling National Democratic Party were on fire across the country. I wept when news came that 3,000 volunteers had formed a human chain around the national museum to protect it from looting and vandalism. Those who do such things are certainly highly educated, cultivated people, neither vandals nor looters, as they are accused of being by those who have vandalized and looted Egypt for generations.

…Late Saturday, as I headed toward Corniche Street on the Nile River, I walked through a side street in the affluent Garden City neighbourhood, where I found a woman crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that her son, a worker at a luxury hotel, had been shot in the throat by a police bullet, despite not being a part of the demonstrations. He was now lying paralysed in a hospital bed, and she was on her way to the hotel to request medical leave for him. I embraced her, trying to console her, and she said through her tears, “We cannot be silent about what has happened. Silence is a crime. The blood of those who fell cannot be wasted.”

I agree. Silence is a crime. Even if the regime continues to bombard us with bullets and tear gas, continues to block Internet access and cut off our mobile phones, we will find ways to get our voices across to the world, to demand freedom and justice.

The IFLA/UNESCO Public Library Manifesto of 1994 defines a public library as, “The local centre of information, making all kinds of knowledge and information readily available to its users.’ The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users and was founded in 1927.

The main Harare City library is at the Civic Centre and there are branch libraries in Greendale, Highlands, Hatfield, Mount Pleasant and Mabelreign. I stay in Chisipite so I decided to visit the Highlands Branch Library.

The location of the library is a good one opposite to a primary school, just off the main road making it accessible to users from other suburbs such as Eastlea, Newlands and Chisipite.

My visit made me to give my blog this title because the infrastructure is all there. All that needs to be done are upgrades. Library updates should be done in a similar fashion as upgrades of computer operating systems. Operating systems change now and then due to transformation in consumer needs, preferences and expectations and advancements in technology. We have witnessed operating systems running on MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows XP, Vista, Windows Live and Windows 7 just to name a few. My visit to the library was more of an experience of using a computer with an operating system of MS-DOS in this day and age.

The out-datedness, the unattractiveness, the slowness … you name it I experienced all that by merely entering the library.

The library’s opening hours are on the negative. Two thirds of the time the library is closed. I can justify the full day closure of the library on a Thursday because its important to do so that administrative work can be done without the librarian being disturbed by patrons.

Let’s hope the relevant authorities start taking our libraries seriously and upgrade them for the benefit of all Zimbabweans.