Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Anyone would have seen the tear-jerking photo: a malnourished African child, dressed in torn rags that can barely be defined as "clothing" and sitting on barren red dirt, tears and nasal mucus freely following down her earth-crested face.  It is a poster child for the likes of UNICEF, so well-utilized to help part the sympathetic rich folks of the First World with their cash.  Itis a strategy used prevalently even among the less fortunate in more well-off places : give a visual representation of misfortune, and the many people who feel sorry will mindlessly donate to "end the misfortune."

In a world where political labelling is rife, it is not easy to precisely define a set of values that constitute a political ideology.  "Liberalism" is a particularly tough one at that.   People speak of certain values being universal, especially when it comes to the field of human rights .  For such people, those who dare to oppose such values are not only barbaric and uncivilized, but also on the right side of history, sure to be perceived in the negative light in the history books of the future.  To them, it is simply unfortunate that these barbarians do not see their own barbarism and make self-motivated efforts to correct themselves.

Farmers in rural Tanzania do not pay taxes today. The reason is rather obvious. On one hand, it is just too logistically difficult to collect taxes on millions of farmers who live far apart from one another. If attempted, the cost of collecting taxes (walking around villages asking for cash) probably would exceed the collected amount many times. Only systematic usage of mobile money can resolve this problem. Without a scalable way to have farmers themselves hand over money for fear of credible threats of punishment, everyone will just evade tax.

The rural Tanzanian town that I resided in is a classic truck-stop kind of town. Sitting on a top of a hill, it nonetheless serves as a transport hub where two of the country's major cross-country highways intersect. An east-west highway connects the country's main port at Dar es Salaam with Zambia, providing ocean access for trucks coming from the landlocked interior of the continent. And spurring off that east-west highway is a north-south highway leading north to the country's new showcase capital of Dodoma , where MPs and other political types from across the country congregate when the legislature is in session.