Have You Ever

Have you ever felt so strongly about someone, that you simply want them to be happy. When you’re happy in seeing them happy. Imagine feeling so strongly about someone that their smile brightens your day. A simple picture means the world to you. When everything goes wrong and simply hearing their voices makes it all better.

Have you ever longed to spend the day with someone, when simply being around them gives you peace. An hour spent with them is worth more than millions in the bank, a phone call makes the rest of the day inconsequential.

Have you ever enjoyed someone’s company to the point of wanting to be the only deserving of their time, and knowing they’re spending time with someone else makes you green with envy.

Have you ever wondered why someone loves you, when you see no value in yourself, when you’re at your lowest point and everything you do simply serves to push them away, when your love for them is misdirected and becomes almost everything love isn’t, yet they still love you?.

Have you ever seen the pain you’ve caused someone in the name of love and wondered how they stuck around for so long.

Have you ever taken the conscious decision to work on yourself, to build yourself up into a better person not for anyone but for yourself.

Have you ever missed someone that you type a message to them daily but never send? When you want to see if they miss you as well and wait to see if they’ll start you.

Have you ever had so much to say to someone but not been able to say it because you doubted they wanted to hear it.

Have you ever truly loved someone that you don’t know just how to show it, when you want to make all their dreams come true.

Have you ever had what you wanted and watched it slip away from you, further and further each day.

Have you ever been unable to really say what you wanted to say!!

Pan Africanism and What it means to me

1^st featured on http://www.tsueysays.com

Pan-Africanism is defined as an ideology and movement that encourages the solidarity of Africans worldwide,
it is based on the belief that unity is vital to economic, social and political progress and aims to uplift people of African descent
(credits : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pan Africanism )

The reason I thought to write on this is because I’ve realised how we all have a different view of what pan Africanism is, I for one do not agree with the Wikipedia definition, I believe pan Africanism does not exist in our world today simply because we have all but lost the core values that where at the beginning of pan Africanism, when Africans where still fighting their wars for independence and majority rule. We seem to have become side-tracked by fighting, a seemingly never ending war against “western imperialism” we have not realised that we have won the right to rule ourselves and so should rule ourselves according to our own philosophies and values, we are stuck forever defending the stuff we do. So much so that pan Africanism is no longer growing but simply dying a slow and painful death.

the father of pan Africanism Henry Sylvester Williams, came up with a philosophy and organized the 1^st pan African congress in 1897, his view was a simple one, bring African leaders together to discuss ways of empowering the African to be the master of his own destiny. What he soon realised was that in order for them to discuss empowerment and how to achieve it, they would 1^st have to free the Africans from their colonial masters.

Yet African independence only started becoming a reality about 50 years later, simply because they allowed themselves to get side tracked by useless issues about the problems with this ideology, fast forward to 25^th of May 1963 and the birth of the OAU currently the AU, the largest “pan African” body in the world, now I put pan African in brackets simply because I do not believe the AU follows a pan African path, that however is a tale for another day, now all that history aside.

I believe pan Africanism is simply Africans finding African solutions to African problems and the betterment of life for all Africans through African initiatives, most people don’t know about Gaddafi and how he proposed an African currency made of gold that would be used to trade for all goods and resources found on African soil, would have been called the African dinar if I’m not mistaken. In his presentation Gaddafi also proposed an American style state, named obviously the UNITED STATES OF AFRICA with a rotating presidency, now the reason most African leaders did not go for this idea was simply because it would have diluted their power and left them with titles and no power, they lacked the understanding or did not believe in pan Africanism, simply because a united Africa would have made Africa the largest economy in the world and allowed Africans to negotiate deals on their own terms and led to more benefits for Africa and Africans as a whole, but again they were side tracked and started fighting issues that had not and probably would not have come Into reckoning. Had they embraced they spirit of pan Africanism and thought about Africa and Africans surely Gaddafi would still be alive (African leaders would have been more proactive dealing with the Libyan crisis) and African would have been on its way to finally bettering the lives of all Africans and would surely have been better placed to find its own solutions to its own problems,

Next post on pan Africanism, why I don’t believe the AU follows the pan African path.

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter @gushmaisva #GushOut

Zimbabwe Independence

 

Delayed post

On occasion of Zimbabwe’s 34th birthday I like to take this opportunity to take a swipe at all those “Zimbabweans” who are proudly Zimbabwean once a year on the 18 of April,

You people disgust me, you spend 364 days in a year be-littling your country, government and President H.E Robert Gabriel Mugabe, then to day you want to talk nonsense about how you are thankful for your independence and all that bullshit, nxaa you should be ashamed of yourselves, I’m not saying Zimbabwe is in perfect condition or that H.E R:G Mugabe has not made mistakes and does not deserve any criticism, no I’m saying don’t focus on the negatives when there are so many positives about our great country, we will never be perfect but we sure as hell can try.

People need to realise how unfair it is to blame a person or an entity on the mistakes of individuals, people talk of how people that got farms are not utilising them properly, it is not governments fault that people are not utilising the opportunities availed to them, yes government could do more to make them accountable but if you have been given an opportunity then it is up to you to make the most of it.

So on this day when we come together as Zimbabweans to celebrate our independence, ask yourself what can I do to make my country a better place for me, my family and all those who live and love our beautiful Zimbabwe, because when all is said and done no one will build Zimbabwe into what we want it to be, besides Zimbabweans, you don’t have to be pro ZANU PF to build Zimbabwe you just have to be pro Zimbabwe, because whether you like it or not you are and you will always be Zimbabwean the sooner we all accept this the sooner we can build our Zimbabwe.

In Shona we say “haurase mbereko nekufirwa”

Roughly translated to “you don’t throw away your birth right because of a death in the family”

#Proudly Zimbabwean

Of Productive Hours #4

 

Part 4 of the productive hour’s blog, Quality over Quantity

Working smart over working long hours yeah was going to try getting a catchy phrase but didn’t work out, anyway working smart entails getting the job done with as little effort as possible put into it. The biggest misconception in the world is that one has to break their back working in order to succeed, wrong, one merely has to work smart to succeed, there’s a saying that says something along the lines of less you work the more you get paid. And the usual reason being, you’ve already worked hard and so it’s now time to enjoy your labour, in a way it’s true, but think of it this way, you do less work because you are working smarter.

By simply cutting out scores of meaningless chores we do we can learn to work smart, you will realise that most of the work we do is repetition of a task we have already done, yet we always start from scratch, each and every time, why you wonder? Because we have been taught to work hard and not smart, simply put by learning to focus our energies better we can do more work with less effort and in less time thereby making us more productive, I don’t have the answer as to how you can work smart as opposed to working hard, it’s something we each have to achieve individually. Because we are different and different things work for different people, for example I found that most of the task I do are repetition so I cut out a lot of them by simply remembering what I had already done and polishing up what needed to be without necessarily redoing the task at hand.

Now I’m not saying don’t work hard, that would be a foolish thing to say, I’m simply saying work smart not hard, sometimes working smart requires you to work harder than you usually do, but you will realise that in the end it was all worth it as you would have covered for other tasks that might not have come up yet but will undoubtedly come up at another point in time

Ps: working smart also entails doing something right the 1st time insuring that won’t have to do it again, because there’s nothing worse than being told to redo a task you have already done, Bill Gates is quoted as saying “whenever I have a new project that needs doing I give it to the laziest people on my team’ simply because I know it will be done fast, and properly, simply because they don’t want to do the job again at a later time because of mistakes or anything else”

Yes I just threw in an unverifiable quote #Sue Me

Follow me on twitter @gushmaisva or Skype me tatenda.maisva

Owning Your Destiny

 

So owning your destiny. It seems that Zimbos are used to blaming other people for our hardships we’ve forgotten how to take responsibility for our own actions, every single day I see posts either blaming our government, sanctions and the a whole lot of other bs for the problems we currently face, it always leads me to ask, what are you doing to help rectify the problem, seems most Zimbos are content with simply stating the problem and then blaming someone else for it.

1stly someone walks into a shop and buys a South African manufactured product, then blames the government for killing our economy, surely you realise that you are helping kill the economy, because the money you are spending is going to creating jobs in south Africa leading to job losses and the like in zim, now I’m not saying this is the only reason we are where we are but surely if we all bought zim made goods (the basic necessities) our economy would be a little better off. We cannot own our economic destiny/future until we make a valid contribution to it, ask yourself this, off all the goods you buy the soaps, cooking oil and the like, are the imported products really better than our own? For most people I think it’s merely a sign of prestige, people see you buying these foreign goods and immediately think you’re better off, there’s nothing to it buy zim.

2ndly I’m tired of hearing the age old adage that Zimbos are the most resilient/adaptable people in the world, because truth be told we are simply adapting to survive and not to succeed, when things got hard in zim the people that left didn’t do so to succeed but rather to survive, in everything we do we simply aim to survive and not to succeed, this is clear from almost any facet of being a Zimbabwean, I mean look at our sports teams, Our warriors are a better talented group than South Africa’s “Bafana Bafana” yet they seem to always qualify for major tournaments and we don’t! Why you wonder? Money has a lot to do with it, but if you look deeper into they have an entirely different mind-set to our own, where as we simply aim to do our best they aim to win, they walk around with a certain swagger that we can only wish to see in our own boys, the Zambians seem to be developing this belief in themselves, just look at the way they went about winning the afcon 2 years ago, they believed in themselves from the start while our boys where being paid to lose, loot at our cricket team for all the promise they show they never achieve anything, and don’t give me that bs about them representing zim at a world cup, the moment they had to qualify what happened? Exactly. Look at Brendon Taylor in my eyes his a better Cricketer that Ten Doeschate (sp) yet Ten is playing ipl while BT is benching, why? Simply because as a people our mind-set is wrong, we always aim to survive and never to succeed, until we can get this hardwired into ourselves then all can hope for is to celebrate mediocrity.

3rdly we need we accept that we are and we’ll always be Zimbabwean, you could become a citizen of any random Country on this earth but at heart you are and you will always be zimbo, it annoys me when people leave zim for a couple of years come back and act as if they are not from here, own your identity Nigerians are some of the proudest people I know, meet a naija in zim and you will know they are naija, meet some Zimbos outside zim and you will be hard pressed to figure out where they are from because we lack an identity, we seem to not want people to know we are from zim for one reason or another, well sadly for us until we own our identity we will always be a lost people, most of the problem in zim are because we have forgotten who we are as a people but that’s a story for another day.

#GushOut #BringBulawayoToTwitter #BringBulawayoWomenToTwitter
follow me on twitter twitter.com/gushmaisva

 

Succeeding in a difficult environment

Thanks to my friend Afro-can for the post

Time to address the
elephant in the room
that many have not
given a flying monkey
about.Success,a nd the general perception
which the masses have
concerning it.In a world
that is mainly co-operate
its easy to struggle to
reach the epitimy of society’s expectations
of what it is.So this
places many who aspire
occupations outside of
this field at a
disadvantage,it causes parents to disregard
sport due to a popular
misconception but if
society would realise
that all men were
endowed with different gifts and unless they
function within these
cirlces they will spend
their lives in
gloom.However
excellence and time moulding their craft is
essential for those who
decide to go against the
grain in the field of
mainstream jobs,placing
yourself at a demand by irresistable perfection
and cherishing your
moral valuesHaving
moral stamina and
backbone which can not
be flattered especially for the woman.True
indomitableness that is driven by zeal and
constantly remembering
that you chose a
different route.

The Mandela Issue

So a couple of months ago, Nelson Mandela died and i posted to Facebook how i found his death to be “funny” now alot of people took my post at face value and thought i actually meant the occasion of his death was funny, I feel I should clarify what I meant when i said i found his death to be funny.
What found funny was not the fact that he was dead but the different reason people decided to post about why he was a great humanitarian and what what. Basically you had Zimbabweans and a whole host of Africans saying Mandela was the greatest african leader ever, because well look at the level of development in South Africa as compared to the rest of Africa, while some said his greatest accomplishment was peace and reconciliation between white and black South Africans, and i was asking was that really South Africa’s greatest need at the time, some even went to the extent of saying if Mandela hadnt said let there be “Peace and Reconciliation” then black South Africans would have gone around slaughtering white South Africans, now if these words had come from a white south african who knew of the attrocities that they had commited under the apartheid regime then yes i would have accepted that this was a possibility, but these words were coming from the mouthes of black Zimbabweans, it saddened me to think that we as Africans thought so little of ourselves, I am not a black South African but I am pretty sure slaughtering whites was not high on the least of things they hoped to achieve after toppling the apartheid regime, surely these people where more concerned about fair access to schools, hospitals, jobs and the like. Personally i feel Mandela should have been more pro African in the things he hoped to achieve, sadly i feel peace and reconciliation only benefited the white minority because even today black South Africans are murdering each other at astonishing rates, they do not know this peace that mandela spoke so passionately about, it is but a white ideal in most of thier eyes. Most people will say i’m wrong on this point but truth be told im not, go into any one of South Africas townships and ask these people if peace and reconciliation benefited them in any way.
Probable answer is no, i mean ask that single mother of 3 living on Government benefits who fears for her life and that of her children whenever they leave the house, who’s children find it difficult to access education in Africas biggest economy, and when they do manage to attend school attend fearing for their safety due to all the gang violence, tell those 10 women raped each hour about peace and recreation or the 40 people per day that are victims of violentg crimes, walk up to any South African living the townships and tell them about peace and reconciliation and be ready to fight for your life, yes those that came after Mandela could have done more for the people but it all had to start with him, their’s a story told of how mandela once spoke to Richard Branson about how the people in his country where unfit and a few months later hundreds of Virgin branded gyms sprouted allover the country, my question here is if Mandela had this much influence on people in positions of power why did he not have them do stuff which would have been more beneficial to his people like building more schools, improving living conditions and the like, this though is not Mandela’s fault alone, perhaps these people where not willing to invest the things that where not directly beneficial to them, because really most of the investments in the new South Africa have benefited the white minority more than the majority blacks,, sadly though this is a sad reality throughout africa, the moment a government decides to do something that directly benefits its people it is labeled and loses support from the international community (but i wont go into this)
I wish the South African people well, i hope they learn from mistakes Zimbabwe made in trying to uplift its people, by this i dont mean don’t try to uplift your people i mean be ready for the inevitable backlash because no matter how you go about it someone will not be happy about it and will attempt to punish you for it. (Next post why africans don’t believe in African ideas)
#GushOut
ps: people need to stop comparing Mugabe and Mandela they are two different people two different types of leaders who stood for completely different ideals post independence, to compare them is unfair, and in most cases people have already come to conclusions before they start comparing.
Dont forget to follow me on twitter @gushmaisva

Of Productive Hours #2

1st post up some positive feedback some negative all constructive,
I’ve read so many selfhelp books its sad really, but in all fairness they have helped. Maybe not in the way they were intended but rather they helped me see my own way. I realised a bit belatedly that self help books try to help you get started/motivated to do whatever it is that you want to do, yet none ever tell you to get up and do it, how does this link to productive time you might ask, well if for every hour you spent reading a book learning a new skill planning your day/life, you spent 2 putting all this new found knowledge into use you would have more productive hours per day.
We spend so much time reading and learning new skills, maybe developing skills we already mastered yet we never spend time putting these skills into use, this then renders time spent learning this skills as unproductive time. I read the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, anyone who has ever read this book will tell you how useful it is/was and how you learn so much from it, but ask them if they ever put what they learnt into practice and they’ll say well i tried it once and it didnt really work, havent tried it since (hopefully they are honest enough to tell you this). Now imagine you spent 3 hours a day 5 days a week for 4 weeks reading this book, thats 60 hours of unproductive time(same amount of time someone with an 8 to 5 job works in a week), people usually say well its productive time because I learnt a new skill, but the fact that you don’t put what you learn into practice, means that this is unproductive time. Might as well have taken a super long bath, your time would have been better used.
Ps: i’m not saying dont read books or don’t take time out to learn new skills, i’m simply saying unless you put what you learn into practice the hours spent acquiring these skills is unproductive time.

Of Productive Hours

Hie and thank you for giving my blog a read
special thanks to a good friend of mine tsu,
Who’s blog inspired me to finally get mine of the
ground. Give it a read here
( http://www.tsueysays.weebly.com)
So productive hours. I find people, myself included like to think number of hours spent awake ,is directly propotinate to productive hours. Hence people say if you sleep for 8 hours a day for your whole life you’ve spent a 3rd of your life sleeping hence you’ve lost or wasted a sizable amount of time, that could have
been used to do something productive. My question is always, say you sleep for only 6 hours a day that leaves you with 18 hours to mess around with. If at the end of every day your where asked to write a detailed description of how you spent your day could you come up with 9 productive hours out of 18?
Be honest with yourself, most of us would struggle to come up with 4 hours (less then 25%) the main reason i find is we all include the time we spend contemplating a task as being productive time. Dont get me wrong im not talking about time spent planning but rather time spent thinking about the task at hand, say you are a university student and you have an assignment that needs doing, before you research it you spend anything from 5 minutes to an hour thinking about researching then you do your research lets say for an hour, then you think about writing it out thats another hour, you check the time and its already 3 hours passed since you started on the assignment. But productive time is just above an hour, because you spent so much time thinking about what you wanted to do while not actually doing anything. I hope that makes sense, you spent an hour thinking about how you wanted to research, but you where not productive because you didnt actually do anything.
In short time spent thinking about a task is not productive time its idle time because you havent actually done anything, so if anyone tells you how they sleep less then you so they are more productive then you ask them how many hours they work because in the end thats all that matters, its not about how many hours you’re awake but rather how many hours you’re at work
ps : i nevr said sleep more, i said judge your productivity through working hours not hours spent awake
feel free to follow me on twitter @gushmaisva and direct your friends to my blog #GushOutu