Editor, RE: “Africans agree in Kigali: urgency is of the essence” (The New Times, May 17). Is the Pope catholic, or what! The industry thrives on chaos and disaster, whether natural or man-made. Conversely, it itself faces pessimistic prospects when nary a dark cloud can be seen overhead and on the horizon. You could say their fortunes are perfectly inversely correlated with those of the rest of humanity. Paradoxically, they thus wouldnt be human not to pray for conditions that maximize their own prospects, though these are exactly the very opposite of what the rest of humanity would wish for. Apart from this digression into the ironies of humanitarianism, Rwanda can pat itself on the shoulder for a very successful WEF. But let us not rest on our laurels, success simply means you are now going to have to challenge yourselves to jump even higher than the last time. The last success becomes the minimum level of expectation. That is how people, organizations, and even countries grow, progress and prosper: always seeking to push the envelope of performance as far as you can. I am of the view that one the reasons Africa tends to stagnate is that we are often too satisfied with small achievements rather than seeing them as baselines from which we must build more qualitatively and quantitatively far greater and more challenging successes. We have to change our attitudes to understand, in the words of Albert Einstein, that Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. MweneKalinda
