Draft Contract for Comprehensive NHIF Cover for UNASHIG Members ~ 2018-2019

As reported to UNASHIG Members and prospective Members
via WhatsApp earlier this evening, I'm happy to report that I received the Draft Contract at NHIF HQ this afternoon at around 4:30 PM. And I'm pleased to avail a copy for close scrutiny by all of you, fellow Dons, who have expressed an interest in this 'self-funded' Group Medical Cover idea; and who have waited so patiently, and with so much frustration (to boot), for almost a year. Seeing, I guess, is in the end the best kind of believing, after all.

I've had a cursory look at the draft since I received it. I see nothing in it that cannot be corrected or clarified prior to circulation to members of the final copy -- ahead of the signing ceremony. But there are matters that will have to be corrected and clarified. Let's hear what you think -- about any aspect of this draft.

There are four items in the draft that I'd like to comment on myself, right away:

1. It suggests an age limit of  60-65 years, though we had agreed that there would be no such limit. I believe that this must and WILL be corrected.

2. It implies a 'lump sum' payment of the annual premium, even though we were told that the CEO had already approved our three 

premium payment options. This, too, will be corrected -- I do believe.

3. The benefits and limits previously reported remain intact, as you will see. So does the average monthly premium per Member + (up to) 3 dependents.

4. It is envisaged that we will start off with 570 UNASHIG Members (NOT Employees, as wrongly indicated in the draft). This is of course lower than the initial, and challenging, target of 700 Members we've been working toward. The dampened enthusiasm caused by the long delay will need time to recover.


Click here to read the whole Draft Contract

And let's hear from you via WhatsApp or this email address: 

unashig.kenya@gmail.com

CONCEPT: Disaster

Disaster: A disaster is a catastrophic/traumatic, critical and consequential result of an extreme form of emergency,  which we didn't do anything about (to prevent or mitigate), or couldn't. The terms emergency and disaster are often used interchangeably, and confusingly, in "disaster management" conversations. An emergency is, in fact, solely the event in any distinction between an emergency and a disaster. 

An emergency is an emergent event, for sure, and by the same token a process. What we call a disaster is the negative-cum-extreme consequence(s) or stage(s), for its array of victims, of a morphing emergency. An emergency is an event or process; a disaster, a consequence. A disaster is a consequence in the sense that it embodies (‘personifies’) – represents – an emergent event “gone bad”. 

And yet, it is important to acknowledge that all disasters are (extreme forms of ) emergencies, but not all emergencies are disasters. That is, not all emergencies have disastrous consequences. Many emergencies, particularly those responded to effectively and in a timely fashion, never end up being recorded and disasters, even where they have directly or indirectly involved countless lives.

Updated: March 6 and May 22, 2018

CONCEPT: Conflict

Conflict: Ancient Chinese philosophers, the Taoists specifically,  saw conflict as the ever-recurring but forward-leaning dialectical spiral of Night and Day -- that is, of Yin and Yang. It was a 'fatal embrace' of sorts destined to always produce Tomorrow, and never yesterday. Plato, the Greek philosopher, likewise saw conflict as a dialectical engagement. In his case, it was a clash between good and evil; and, indeed, he held that "each thing has its evil and good". This dichotomy between 'good' and 'evil' (or Self and Other) characterized (and still does) certain conceptions of the phenomenology of conflict situations. 

Karl Marx, the most consequential proponent of conflict, argued that class struggle was the real driver of epochal change in all human society. This struggle was powered the underlying modes and relations of production/reproduction and distribution in society at large. Those modes and relations were at once unequal, exploitative and unjust -- and contrary to human nature. The contradiction(s) thus build into the relations led to inevitable conflict (in a Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis format) and the pressure to resolve it -- typically and logically in the direction of a new economic and social order. Contradiction, it has been argued even by more recent scholars such as Marcuse, always has (built into it) the drive toward its resolution.

In his paper titled "Social Conflict and the Theory of Social  Change", Lewis Coser explored the functions of conflict (he clearly preferred the term conflict to violence) in the broader context of social change. His exploration focused on: (a) the impact of social conflict on change within enduring social systems, with particular reference to consequences for such concerns as "institutional rigidities, technical progress and productivity", and, (b) the "relation between social conflict and changes [or overhauls/overthrows] of social systems" (Coser, 1957: 197). 

One clear outcome of this exploration was Coser's proposition, inspired by George Sorel, that "conflict prevents the ossification of the social system by exerting pressure for innovation and creativity." He wrapped up his optimistic conception of the operation, and consequence, of social conflict in the following terms:

"The clash of values and interests, the tension between what is and what some groups feel ought to be, the [contest] between vested interests and new strata and groups demanding their share of power, wealth and status...[all of which] have been productive of vitality." 

Georg Simmel has presented perhaps the most intriguing and refreshing post-Marxian characterization of the idea and process of conflict. His version offers, as in a wedding, the opportunity to bring into the conversation "something new and something old, something borrowed and something blue" (that is, something that's not red -- figuratively). 

He argues that conflict is inseparable from social interaction, and thus “sociation”; and is even itself a form of sociation. He sees conflict, indeed, as “one of the most vivid interactions” and, as an example of social interaction, by definition beyond the scope of social acts by the lone individual. Furthermore, conflict is not the cause of some sort of pathology of human interaction, but the resolution or ‘cure’ of such pathology READ MORE

CONCEPT: Chaos

Chaos: Philosophers, poets and painters have, at least since the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (6th century BCE), held a categorical view of  the universe -- or indeed all creation -- as a unity, or Cosmos. They attached to Cosmos such attributes as good order, calmness and peace -- indeed, symphony -- despite the complexity of its many and diverse parts. Their imagined opposite for this clock-work verity or metaphor was Chaos -- meaning, disorder, disharmony, disconnect and even jarring noise (or cacophony). 

In the 19th century, Alexander von Humbolt re-imagined Kosmos (Cosmos) for the modern world as a vast, complex but interconnected and harmonious unity. And in the 20th century, George Santayana suggested that Cosmos had no empirical opposite. There was only Order, often too hidden (or too obvious) to casually see. He saw Chaos as a figment of the imagination, arguing that it was "a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds". That is, the order or complexity imprinted in discrete phenomena or processes observable "out there" in the natural and social worlds may appear chaotic, but only so appear, to the observer who does not have the wherewithal (tools, time, training, frame-of-mind or the like) to grasp their essential or 'below-the-surface' nature. 

Dutto (2000), on the other hand, has argued that chaos is "...the complex and unpredictable motion or dynamics of systems that are sensitive to their initial conditions". These initial conditions may include a system's initial size/magnitude, position, weight, direction or velocity. But he adds that "Chaotic systems are mathematically deterministic -- that is, they follow precise laws, but their irregular behavior can appear to be random to the casual observer." In a word, they are 'ordered', and their orderliness is out there for the well-prepared to discover. 

His examples of chaotic behavior commonly observable within systems include: measles outbreaks, heart rhythms, electrical brain activity, fluids, animal populations and chemical reactions. Even the highs and lows of the stock market may appear chaotic to the more casual observer (see William Dutto, 2000, "Chaos Theory", Encarta). 

The organismic view of society, such as is dominant in structural-functionalism, strongly suggests that social life -- indeed human society -- is founded on a certain 'order of things'. In other words, society cannot properly function and thrive without a preponderance of it. Public policy implicitly or explicitly labels it "Law and Order", a breakdown of which must be prevented from degenerating into civil disorder or anarchy -- or, yes, Chaos.

Conflict (or Social Change) theorists of various persuasions, on the other hand, generally argue that an uncompromising emphasis on Order weakens society by stifling needed short-term and long-term change. Further, they argue that labeling agitators for change or reform as agents of anarchy or Chaos is, deep down, a reflection of the rulers' self-interest and determination to preserve the status quo -- which is beneficial to them. From this perspective, then/too, Chaos is in the eye of the beholder; and Conflict (or Change, or Reform) is, potentially at least, transformative.   

READ "Chaos" Plato, Stanford University.



UPDATED: March 2nd and 8th, 2018

CONCEPT: Community

Community: In sociology, a community is typically a face-to-face group or 'aggregation' of families and individuals living in relatively close proximity with each other and bound together by certain genealogical and/or 'social ties' as well as ecological/geographical factors, or givens, to which their livelihoods are more or less physically tied. All of this generates reasons and opportunities for joint action at the local level, and hence such ideas as "self-help groups" [more accurately harambee (= let's pull together) groups], "the therapeutic community", "mutual-aid groups" and "community policing".

Ferdinand Toennies made a widely acknowledged distinction between Community (Gemeinschaft) and Society (Gesellschaft). By his reckoning, a community displayed the characteristics outlined above, which were typical of all pre-modern (or traditional) and usually rural and isolated collectivities. According to Emile Durkheim, a community thus organized was held together by the centrifugal pull of sameness or similarity; that is , by what one may call the logic of "birds of a feather". 

In contrast, the heterogeneity manifest in a modern society, due principally to widespread division of labour beyond household and community boundaries, was welded together by a crucial byproduct of that very division of labour -- namely, the "mutual dependence" of those who could no longer directly produce the resources required for their own full subsistence, but were now bound together, if more impersonally, by the operations of "market exchange".

In an influential empirical study of respondents' conceptualizations of "community", K. MacQueen et al (2001) identified five core elements of a community. These were: Locus (a sense of place, which can be both located and described by those concerned), Sharing (common interests -- values, norms, mindset, ideology, vision, activities, skin color), Joint action (which serves as a source of cohesion and identity, and includes opportunities/contexts, structures or 'arenas' for socializing, conversation, gossip and get-together), Social ties (interpersonal relations - encompassing sub-elements such as family units, lovers, friends, neighbors and support groups) and Diversity (that is, "social complexity" or heterogeneity due to the presence of sub-communities within or migrants into the community -- sub-communities or migrants characterized by distinct identities such as clan, ethnic group, race, religion, caste, occupational status and unequal family standing) 

[To be updated]

CONCEPT: Concepts

We live in a concept-mediated and concept-loaded world. We cannot escape concepts. Indeed, mixed into our physical Earth and its airy atmosphere is another sphere -- a component of a much larger sphere that I have elsewhere called the memetic sphere. Things of planet Earth, and of the universe at large, are of course out there in the material sphere (and ipso facto outside of the mind), but don't mean a thing to us until we process them in the mind and give them a name of sorts -- that is, until we thus attach to them a set or sets of concepts (that is, memes), which is the only available path to actualizing our sense impressions. 

Likewise, alleged 'figments' of the imagination cease to be figments and become real 'things' just as soon as we're able to observe the facts that underpin the claims they embody, and can affirm our 'encounter' with them -- and, more importantly, tag them with a name. Incidentally, figments of the imagination and other un-grounded products of thought may pass as concepts too, but only as meta versions and as 'material' for artistic production and reproduction or for philosophical engagement.

Concepts are in their own universe, as well -- and thus a universe of sorts. Without concepts, there would be no learning, and nothing akin to what we call intelligence, and even what we call community. There would be no capacity to tell what there would be to tell, and what there (ever) was to pass on.

Concepts are key to all understanding -- and all missed understandings. Without them, language and speech would be preemptively gibberish, and could not arise from, after all, a non-existent language -- even for potentially the most eloquent and the most erudite individuals. Without concepts, all bodies of knowledge would be formless and one big mess of nothing without anchor. In a word, their efficacy presupposes some kind of anchoring on arrays of conceptualization. 

Our concepts have raced well ahead of us. They have reached the farthest known and imaginable realms of Being (of existence and reality) -- and even Nothingness, as Marcuse and others sought to see them. They've gone to places we ourselves (we humans) will never, may never, physically be. They've even ventured into the sun's core and into Black Holes, and on to dying stars and stars just fixing to be born -- and to galaxies which answer back in tongues, after a fashion. They have gone back in Time to Big Bang's singular and very own moment -- or so they say. 

As several scholars such as Dawkins and others (discussed in Yambo, 2012) have noted already, concepts are, for bodies of knowledge, gene-equivalents in the cultural universe. That is, they are memes which make everything make any sense at all in the physical and the social and the spiritual worlds. Concepts empower us to achieve the transition from the raw to the cooked -- that is, to the nets and webs of insight and understanding essential to apprehending our diverse realities and mastering our ever-present challenges. 

It is for these reasons that we start (indeed, must start) our journey, in any field of learning or problem-solving, armed with a set of concepts that we will need (and need to build on and add to in ever more specialized ways) along the way -- that is, Key Concepts. Key concepts may sound like a tiresome cliche, but they are, singularly or in bunches, truly key to understanding both seemingly simple and manifestly complex ideas, and to solving the associated theoretical, methodological and practical problems.




UPDATED: March 5, 2018.

Ma Lo by Tiwa Savage ft. Wizkid x Spellz

Ma Lo (My Love) is a definitive club banger sung by two iconic African artistes from Nigeria: Tiwa Savage, self-described as Number 1 "African Bad Girl", and WizKid. Spellz joins them in this memorable do.

Click to watch the video

The song has a mellow beat, with a laid-back tone which the singers sustain from the beginning to the end. It's a haute gig, this, wrapped in a fine definition of cool. Indeed, Tiwa isn't boasting when she proclaims herself the baddest. Her rivals know it, but will not cease challenging her with each new song that they release. And that's how it is. No one gets to sit on their laurels as years come and go. Each year demands a re-constitution, as I see it. 

WizKid? Well, he's Starboy! He is in full command of his consistent voice, and his tempo, and there's not a hint of affectation. He is not averse to being the Clyde of this love duet played out in so 'public' an outing -- in which he, Starboy, and Tiwa are the orbital point of reference for all the goings-on. 

But, contrary to Tiwa's insinuation, there's no similitude here with the Bonnie and Clyde matter. There's no re-run here of that saga across vast and violent spaces -- on Earth. Starboy's displaying maximum restraint. All there is is fine swaying and posturing. And a super pleasant slice of Time served to all of us.