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by certain principles. Under normal circumstances, a person

without self-discipline will look left and right before doing

something. If what that person is about to do is bad or illegal,

they will not do it when they notice that someone is watch-

ing. But if no one is watching, then the person will do the

bad/illegal thing. However, a person of self-discipline, even

when locked up in a room with all sorts of evils, would come

out of the room after three days without having committed

any infringement whatsoever, simply because he or she is

governed by certain principles. When we manage to create

world citizens who are self-disciplined, then we shall avoid

many misbehaviours that we currently witness.

Self-drive:

This pillar requires every world citizen to have an

engine in him or herself. A new generation of world citizens

must be developed so that we have people who are self-

driven, not those who behave like pushcarts. A pushcart is

normally wheeled around, and when you place it somewhere

it stays there until you push it again to move it elsewhere.

Many people today are generally like pushcarts – they wait

to do what they are told, because they have been trained to

do only what they are told. Thus, they cannot decide to do

what is right simply because they wait for orders from above.

For example, at the household level, a child would wait to be

told to remove a cup that is wrongly placed on the pathway,

or a plate that has fallen off the table. You will see a child

walk over such a cup or plate, not deciding to remove the

item from the wrong place. The child expects someone else

to do it, or otherwise someone should tell him or her to do it.

Such behaviour is witnessed everywhere. Take, for example,

a water tap erroneously left turned on and the water pouring

wastefully away. A student at a university or any other person

would not take the initiative to turn off the tap and prevent

the water from wasting; he or she would say, ‘it is not my job!’

Similar behaviour may be witnessed in offices where a worker

may not do anything until the boss says so, even though the

work might be extremely important and urgent for the office.

A child who has completed schooling would just sit there,

waiting for the parent to tell him or her what to do. This

happens irrespective of the many employment opportunities

available. Such are the types of people we generally have today

– people without initiative, people waiting to be told what to

do. For that reason, systems of education in the world need to

change to incorporate some of these African values.

To train a child to be self-driven, parents and teachers will

have to adopt this attitude:

let the child be reasonably chal-

lenged in life.

Do not create an unnecessarily easy life for the

child by doing everything for him or her. For example, if a

one-year-old child is struggling on a bed, lying on its belly to

reach a bunch of keys about six inches away, its parent should

not just abort the child’s struggle by handing over the keys

Image: ACRI (2012)

Sengekwo Cultural Group of Pokot, Kenya, calls for peace in the world

gree

iffer