It's been a few weeks since Lwengo LC V caused quite a lot of commotion when he descended on his constituents with a drive to clean up their community. What was interesting is the range of reactions and responses that emerged from his people and...naturally his opponents.
I suppose he was a little enthusiastic about getting his people to clean up their community. What was strange to me was the memories that came up from our neighbor-Rwanda.
In this country, there is a day that is set up exclusively to cater for community work. The country still struggling from memories in its past has taken great care to ensure that it builds strong cohesive communities using at least in this case activities like construction and cleanups to unite the people. Visitors are not barred from taking part in these activities either.
So maybe our LC V chairperson was working with this in mind, maybe his enthusiasm was called for. Perhaps we needed a push or boost in activity to get us excited about a weekend or weekday of targeted work.
The challenge with this kind of experiment in these parts at least is that 'community work or service' is what we assign prisoners or up-scale citizens when they break traffic rules or young students when they behave badly in our rural school.
Agriculture therefore although it is the mainstay of this vast continent is still largely viewed as a punishment. Even if we have the capacity in countries like South Sudan and the Congo to feed the world, we are still a little shy about a sector that is very promising.
So the larger discussion should really not be about the punishments that we're visited upon constituents but rather should be about the bigger picture-the support of farmers by improving transport, modernization without marginalization, creation of markets, better planning and improved research to combat disease and the mainstreaming of mobile applications to improve the lives of farmers and agricultural support services.
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