THE PROFILE OF JAKAYA MRISHO KIKWETE

Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete (born October 7, 1950) is a Tanzanian politician, the fourth and current President of the United Republic of Tanzania. Kikwete was born in Msoga, Bagamoyo District, Tanganyika in present day Tanzania. Kikwete was also the Chairperson of the African Union from 31 January 2008 to 2 February 2009.

Kikwete grew up witnessing the exercise of leadership by his grandfather Mrisho Kikwete as a local chief and father as a District Commissioner in colonial Tanganyika and Regional Administrative Secretary and an Ombudsman in post-colonial Tanganyika and the United Republic of Tanzania. He spent part of his childhood moving from one area of country to another as his father was transferred to different outposts. He also spent a better part of his childhood in the village under the guidance of his grandfather. Kikwete became a natural choice for leadership in school and later in the party (TANU and CCM) youth movements.

His leadership talents emerged at early stages in life. He was a student leader both in middle and secondary schools and at the University of Dar es Salaam. He was elected Chairman of the Students Council at Kibaha Secondary School and Deputy Head Prefect at Tanga Secondary School. He became very active in student politics at University. He was eventually elected Vice President of the Dar es Salaam University Students Organisation and de-facto President of the student government at the Main Campus in 1973/74. As a student leader, he spearheaded efforts to fight for student's rights and welfare. He was in the forefront in bringing about awareness and activism in liberation and anti-apartheid politics in the campus and the University community at large. He represented the Dar es Salaam University students and the students and youths of the African continent in several international conferences. Among such meetings were the International Youth Population Conference in 1974 in Bucharest, Romania.

Education, He received his primary education at Karatu Primary School between 1959 and 1963 and his middle school education at Tengeru School from 1962 to 1965. He then moved from Tengeru School to Kibaha Secondary School for O-level education between 1966 to 1969. The following year he joined Tanga Secondary School for advanced level education. Kikwete attended the University of Dar es Salaam from 1972 to 1975, where he earned a degree in Economics.

Personal, President Kikwete is a keen sportsman having played basketball competitively in school. He has been a patron of the Tanzania Basketball Federation for the past 10 years. He is married to Mama Salma Kikwete, and together they have eight children.

Leadership and political career

Graduating with a degree in economics in 1975, he opted for a low-paying job as an executive functionary/officer of the ruling Party (TANU later CCM). This gave him the opportunity to work at the grassroots in rural regions and districts of Tanzania.Kikwete sharpened his leadership acumen in the military. He first had basic military training at Ruvu National Service Camp (1972) and later underwent a basic officers course at the famous Tanzania Military Academy at Monduli, Arusha. This is Tanzania’s top military training institution. On successful completion of the course, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in 1976. He also undertook Company Commander's Course in 1983 at the same academy. In his military career, he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. From 1984 to 1986, Kikwete was Chief Political Instructor and Political Commissar at the Military Academy. He retired from the military as a lieutenant-colonel when political pluralism was reintroduced to Tanzania in 1992 when he chose to become a full time politician. Prior to that, he was permitted to be both in the military and political leadership.

In elective Party politics, Kikwete started shining in 1982 when he was overwhelmingly elected by the party (CCM) national congress to be a Member of the National Executive Committee. This is the highest policy and decision-making body of the party. He has won re-elections to the body every five years since then. Also, in 1997, he was elected a member of the party’s powerful 31-member Central Committee (CC). He is still a member of the Central Committee since he was reelected in 2002 for another term of 5 years.

As a party cadre, Kikwete moved from one position to another in the party ranks and from one location to another in the service of the party. When TANU and the Zanzibar’s Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) merged to form CCM in 1977, Kikwete was moved to Zanzibar and assigned the task of setting-up the new party’s organisation and administration in the Islands. In 1980, he was moved to the Party’s Headquarters as Administrator of the Dar es Salaam Head Office and Head of the Defence and Security Department before moving again up-country – to regional and district party offices in Tabora Region (1981-84) and Nachingwea (1986-88) and Masasi District (1988) in the country’s southern regions of Lindi and Mtwara respectively. President Kikwete throve in the military and grassroots party political organisation, mobilisation and administration until 1988 when he was appointed to join the Central Government.

The then President Ally Hassan Mwinyi appointed him Member of Parliament and, simultaneously, Deputy Minister for Energy and Minerals on November 7, 1988. In 1990 he was promoted to full Minister responsible for the Ministry of Water, Energy and Minerals. Later the same year he successfully contested for a parliamentary seat in his home constituency of Bagamoyo. He was reappointed Minister for Water, Energy and Minerals in the government formed after the elections.In 1994, at 44, he became one of the youngest Finance Ministers in the history of Tanzania. At the Treasury, he established discipline in public finance management and accountability and, until today, he is still remembered for establishing cash budget system and revamping of revenue collection structures, methods and institutions, including preparations for the formation and eventual establishment of the Tanzania Revenue Authority.

In December 1995, he became Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, being appointed by President Benjamin William Mkapaa of the third phase government. He held this post for ten years, until he was elected President of the United Republic of Tanzania in December 2005, hence becoming the country's longest serving foreign minister. During his tenure in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tanzania played a significant role in bringing about peace in the Great Lakes region, particularly in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Kikwete was also deeply involved in the process of rebuilding regional integration in East Africa. Specifically, several times, he was involved in a delicate process of establishing a Customs Union between the three countries of the East African Community (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania), where, for quite some time, he was a Chairman of East Africa Community’s Council of Ministers. Introducing candidate Kikwete at a campaign rally in Dar es Salaam on 21 August 2005, former President Mkapa described him as a super-diplomat, in recognition of his role in the search for peace in neighboring Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kikwete also participated in the initiation, and became a Co-Chair, of the Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy.

THE TECHNOLOGY OF MIND AND NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT

The progress of biology, neuroscience and computer science makes it clear that some time during the twenty-first century we will master the technologies of mind and life. We will build machines more intelligent than ourselves, and modify our own brains and bodies to increase our intelligence, live indefinitely and make other changes. We live together according to a social contract, consisting of laws, morals and conventions governing our interactions. This social contract is based on assumptions we rarely question: that all humans have roughly the same intelligence, that we have limited life spans and that we share a set of motives as part of our human nature. The technologies of mind and life will invalidate these assumptions and inevitably change our social contract in fundamental ways. We need to prepare for these new technologies so that they change the world in ways we want rather than just stumbling into a world that we don't.

The Technology of Mind

Neuroscience is discovering many correlations between the behaviors of physical brains and minds. If brains do not explain minds then these correlations would be coincidences, which is absurd. Furthermore, relentless improvements in computer technology make it clear that we will build machines that match the ability of brains to generate minds like ours, sometime during the twenty-first century. This technology of mind will enable us to build machines much more intelligent than ourselves, and to increase the intelligence of our human brains.

We do not yet understand how brains generate our intelligent minds, but we know some things about how brains work. Minds are fundamentally about learning. Baum makes a convincing case that brains do what is called reinforcement learning (Baum 2004). This means that brains have a set of values (sometimes called rewards), such as food is good, pain is bad, and successful offspring are good, and learn behaviors that increase the good values and decrease the bad values. That is how genetic evolution works, with the value that creating many copies of genes is good. A mutation to a gene creates a new gene that is expressed in organisms that carry the mutation. If those organisms survive and reproduce more successfully than others of their species, many copies of the mutated gene are created. But genetic evolution learns by pure trial and error. Human and animal brains are more efficient. If you have a new idea, you try it out to see if it works. If it doesn't, you have a model of the world (that is, you can reason) that you use to trace cause and effect to estimate the cause of the failure.

Brains understood as reinforcement learners consist of:

1.         Reinforcement values to be increased or decreased - these are the basic motives of behavior.

2.         Algorithms for learning behaviors based on reinforcement values.

3.         A simulation model of the world, itself learned from interactions with the world (the reinforcement value for learning the simulation model is accuracy of prediction).

4.         A discount rate for balancing future versus current rewards (people who focus on current rewards and ignore the future are generally judged as not very intelligent).

This decomposition of mental functions gives us a way to understand the options available to us in the design of intelligent machines. While we do not yet know how to design learning algorithms and simulation models adequate for creating intelligence, we can reasonably discuss the choices for the values that motivate their behaviors and the discount rate for future rewards.

In spite of our overall ignorance of how intelligence works, well-known reinforcement learning algorithms have been identified in the neural behaviors of mammal brains (Brown, Bullock and Grossberg 1999; Seymour et al. 2004). And reinforcement learning has been used as the basis for defining and measuring intelligence in an abstract mathematical setting (Legg and Hutter 2006).

The most familiar measure of intelligence is IQ, but it is difficult to understand what a machine IQ of a million or a billion would mean. As is often pointed out, intelligence cannot be measured by a single number. But one measure of a mind’s intelligence, relevant to power in the human world, is the number of humans the mind is capable of knowing well. This will become a practical measure of intelligence, as we develop machines much more intelligent than humans. Humans evolved an ability to know about 200 other people well, driven by the selective advantage of working in groups (Bownds 1999). Now Google is working hard to develop intelligence in its enormous servers, which already keep records of the search histories of hundreds of millions of users. As these servers develop the ability to converse in human languages, the search histories will evolve into detailed simulation models of our minds. Ultimately, large servers will know billions of people well. This will give them enormous power to predict and influence economics and politics; rather than relying on population statistics, such a mind will know the political and economic behavior of almost everyone in detail.

There are already experiments with direct electronic interfaces to brain nerve cells. This will ultimately evolve into prosthetic enhancements of human brains and uploading human minds (Kurzweil 1999; Moravec 1999), in which humans minds will migrate out of human brains and into artificial brains. The technologies of mind and life will blur the distinction between humans and machines.

The Social Contract

Teamwork helps individuals succeed at survival and reproduction, and this has created evolutionary pressure for teamwork in humans and other animals. Thus we have social abilities such as language, and social values such as liking, anger, gratitude, sympathy, guilt and shame, that enable us to work in teams.

A fascinating experiment called the Wason selection test demonstrates that the ability of human subjects to solve a type of logic puzzle depends on whether or not it is worded in terms of social obligation: most subjects can solve it when it relates to social obligation and cannot solve it otherwise (Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby 1992). This indicates that humans have mental processes dedicated to satisfying the values necessary for cooperation, including especially evaluating whether the subject is being cheated.

Social values and the special processes dedicated to the logic of social obligation, which evolved in human brains because cooperation benefits individuals, are at the roots of ethics. Specifically, ethics are based in human nature rather than being absolute (but note that human nature evolved in a universe governed by the laws of mathematics and physics, and hence may ultimately reflect an absolute). Thomas Hobbes defined a theoretical basis for this view in his description of the social contract that humans enter into in order to bring cooperation to their competition (Hobbes 1651).

The social contract as described by Hobbes gave different rights and obligations to rulers and subjects. That has evolved in modern societies into a contract in which everyone have the same rights and obligations, but certain offices that individuals may (temporarily) occupy have "special" rights and obligations. The legal systems in most countries are based on the equality of individuals, although there is a spectrum between equality of opportunity and equality of results. Of course, there is also inequality based on country and family of birth, and plenty of corruption that undermines equality. But, over the long haul of human history, despite reversals in some societies and during some periods, there is gradual progress toward the ideal of equality. In many countries, progress includes elimination of slavery and real monarchies, popular election of leaders, and collective support for educating the young and caring for the elderly.

THE HISTORY OF HIV AND AIDS IN TANZANIA

The first cases of AIDS were reported in the Kagera region in 1983 and by 1987 every region in the country had reported AIDS cases. In 1985, the government set up the NACP (National AIDS Control Programme) to coordinate the response and established AIDS coordinators in each district in the country.In order to confront the growing epidemic, the NACP developed a medium term plan for the period 1987-1991 which was then followed by two more medium term plans covering 1992-1996 and 1998-2002. These plans had three main aims: the decentralisation of the health sector response, reducing HIV transmission and relieving the social consequences of HIV/AIDS through care and assistance.

However, according to Tanzania’s first National Multisectoral Framework (2003-2007) the three medium term plans did not halt the spread of HIV. By the time the third medium term plan came into being HIV prevalence had reached 8 percent.⁶ It is important to bear in mind however that, at this time, Tanzania had no coordinated monitoring and evaluation system, and systems for collecting data on HIV prevalence varied widely from region to region. Therefore, frequent delays in reporting as well as general underreporting suggest that the HIV prevalence could have been much higher.A national policy, which had been under development since 1991, was finalised in 2001, following the declaration of 'war' on HIV/AIDS by former president Mkapa.

The Tanzania Commission for AIDS (TACAIDS) was then established in 2002 to coordinate the multisectoral response, bringing together all stakeholders including government, business and civil society to provide strategic guidance to HIV/AIDS programmes, projects and interventions.⁸ In 2003, TACAIDS launched the first National Multisectoral Framework (NMSF) 2003-2007, which outlined all areas of focus for stakeholders including cross cutting themes like stigma and discrimination, as well as prevention, care and support and dealing with the socio-economic consequences of HIV and AIDS. Under each broad theme, certain strategic areas were identified (such as school based prevention or blood safety) and goals, challenges, targets and indicators of success were specified.Tanzania’s second National Strategic Framework (2008-2012) analyses the achievements and challenges faced in the implementation of the first NMSF, as well as identifying new targets and indicators of success.¹⁰

The current situation in Tanzania

A study published in 2005, using evidence drawn from Kenya and Tanzania exposed some findings which challenged some widely held assumptions about the effects of HIV and AIDS. The study found that generally the highest prevalence of HIV was found amongst the wealthiest households, particularly affecting wealthy women, as opposed to poorer and rural households.Since the study, academics have suggested various reasons for this phenomenon: wealthier people tend to have the resources which lead to greater and more frequent mobility and expose them to wider sexual networks, encouraging multiple and concurrent relationships. They also tend to have greater access to HIV medications that prolong their lives and are more likely to live in urban areas, which have the highest prevalence.

However, the HIV prevalence gap between wealthier urban groups and poorer rural communities is slowly closing.¹³ A 2008 study found that knowledge of sexually transmitted infections was ‘alarmingly low’ in rural Tanzania and associated with low condom use and HIV infection.¹⁴ Reduced prevalence has mainly been noted among the most educated (those who attended secondary school) while among those with no formal education, prevalence has not decreased and the number of new infections has risen.¹⁵ Because access to health care and knowledge of HIV and AIDS is typically lower in rural areas, prevention efforts must be increased if new infections are going to be reduced.

THE MOMENTS OF MIKE IRON TYSON.

Michael Gerard "Mike" Tyson (born June 30, 1966) is an American boxer. Tyson was the undisputed heavyweight champion and holds the record as the youngest boxer to win the WBC, WBA and IBF world heavyweight titles. He won the WBC title when he was 20 years, 4 months and 22 days old, after defeating Trevor Berwick by a TKO in the second round. Throughout his career, Tyson became well-known for his ferocious and intimidating boxing style as well as his controversial behavior both inside and outside the ring.

He was the first heavyweight boxer to hold the WBA, WBC and IBF titles simultaneously. Tyson is considered to have been one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all timeNicknamed "Kid Dynamite" and "Iron Mike", Tyson won his first 19 professional bouts by knockout, with twelve of them occurring in the first round. He unified the belts in the splintered heavyweight division in the late 1980s to become undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. Tyson became the lineal champion when he knocked out Michael Spinks in the first 91 seconds of the fight. Tyson lost his titles to 42-to-1 underdog Buster Douglas on February 11, 1990, in Tokyo, Japan, by a knockout in round 10.

In 1992, Tyson was convicted of sexually assaulting Desiree Washington, for which he served three years in prison. After being released from prison in 1995, he engaged in a series of comeback fights. He regained a portion of the heavyweight title, before losing it to Evander Holyfield in a 1996 fight by an 11th round TKO. Their 1997 rematch ended when Tyson was disqualified for biting off part of Holyfield's ear. He fought for a championship again at 35, losing by knockout to Lennox Lewis in 2002. Tyson retired from professional boxing in 2006 after he was knocked out in consecutive matches against Danny Williams and Kevin McBride.

Tyson declared bankruptcy in 2003, despite receiving over US$30 million for several of his fights and $300 million during his career. Tyson was born in Brooklyn, New York. He has a brother, Rodney, who is five years older than him. His sister, Denise, died of a heart attack at age 25 in 1991. Tyson's father, Jimmy Kirkpatrick, abandoned his family when Tyson was 2, leaving his mother, Lorna Smith Tyson to care for them on her own. The family lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant until their financial burdens necessitated a move to Brownsville when Tyson was 10 years old. Tyson's mother died six years later, leaving 16-year-old Tyson in the care of boxing manager and trainer Cus D'Amato, who would become his legal guardian. Tyson has been quoted saying, "I never saw my mother happy with me and proud of me for doing something: She only knew me as being a wild kid running the streets, coming home with new clothes that she knew I didn't pay for. I never got a chance to talk to her or know about her. Professionally, it has no effect, but it's crushing emotionally and personally."

Throughout his childhood, Tyson lived in and around high-crime neighborhoods. According to an interview in Details (magazine) his first fight was with a bigger kid over his mistreatment of one of Tyson's birds. He was repeatedly caught committing petty crimes and fighting those who ridiculed his high-pitched voice and lisp. By the age of 13, he had been arrested 38 times. He ended up at the Tryon School for Boys in Johnstown, New York. It was at the school that Tyson's emerging boxing ability was discovered by Bobby Stewart, a juvenile detention center counselor and former boxer. Stewart considered Tyson to be an outstanding fighter and trained him for a few months before introducing him to Cus D'Amato.

Mike tyson on the right side throwing his punch

Tyson was later removed from the reform school by Cus D'Amato. Kevin Rooney also trained Tyson, and he was occasionally assisted by Teddy Atlas, although he was dismissed by D'Amato when Tyson was 15. Rooney eventually took over all training duties for the young fighter.Tyson's brother is a physician assistant in the trauma center of the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center. He has always been very supportive of his brother's career and was often seen at Tyson's boxing matches in Las Vegas, Nevada. When asked about their relationship, Mike has been quoted saying, "My brother and I see each other occasionally and we love each other," and "My brother was always something and I was nothing."

SOCIAL REVOLUTION

Revolution is not something that is created by political elites, but rather by ordinary people when they change the way they think and live. "When enough people lose faith in an institution and begin to act as if it did not exist, that institution disappears."

When the old institutions crumble, there is no guarantee that more human-centered structures will replace them. In fact, conservatives have their own ideas about how the new world should be organized, and it's not pretty.

That is why we all must participate in the transformation of society—to ensure that human values replace the values of the old elite. Because destruction is also creation, the methods we use to pull down the ruins will determine what kind of world arises from the rubble. Our struggle should not be completely political because political revolutions simply deliver concentrated power into new hands, rather than dispersing it. Furthermore, political thought is rarely innovative: political change usually originates from social conditions, rather than the other way around.Instead of political revolution, our goal should be social revolution. Social revolution is nothing more than a change in the way we live our lives. It springs from changes in the way we think.

In today's context, revolution occurs when people stop believing one thing, and start believing something else; when people discard their old ways of living, and begin to live in new ways. When enough people lose faith in an institution and begin to act as if it did not exist, that institution disappears.Values and institutions are social constructions. They were not handed down by God or created by nature. We invented them. And if they don't serve our needs, we have the power to eliminate them.

Everything we do can have revolutionary implications: how we make money, how we spend our leisure time, how we relate to our family, friends, co-workers, strangers. Every activity that asserts individuality and autonomy from corporate/government/religious control is in itself a profoundly revolutionary act, regardless of content.

When we make our own music (garage bands, self-produced records), produce our own food (home-brewed beer, collective gardens), or create our own forms of communication (graffiti, zines), we strike at the heart of mega-corporation hegemony. When we engage in "do-it-yourself" projects that express our unique personalities and deepest desires, we participate in the transformation of the world.

TANZANIA SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

The government's Rural Development Division concentrates on community development (including health, labor, and literacy programs) rather than on welfare programs. All public and private employees except domestic workers receive lump-sum pension payments through a provident fund system, to which the employer contributes 10% of payroll and employees contribute 10% of their wages. Old age pensions are paid as a lump sum equal to contributions plus interest. Employers are required to provide workers' compensation through a private carrier and also pay severance indemnity to workers with 3 or more months of continuous employment. Free medical care is provided by public hospitals and clinics. The elderly, widows, and the physically and mentally handicapped normally are provided for by the traditional tribal system. Orphaned and abandoned children usually are cared for similarly, but missions and voluntary agencies also are active in this field.

The government advocates equal rights and employment opportunities for women. However, discrimination and violence against women are widespread. In the public sector, the largest employer in the country, women are restricted from certain positions. Women in the largely Muslim island of Zanzibar face considerable discrimination. Islamic custom dictates limited inheritance and property rights for women. Courts rulings have upheld discriminatory traditions in the area of inheritance. In Zanzibar, unmarried women under the age of 21 are subject to two years imprisonment if they become pregnant. In response to growing concern about violence toward women, the government passed a law in 1998 mandating life imprisonment for rape and child molestation.

Although Tanzania became a multi-party state in 1995, its human rights record remained poor. Police abuse of prisoners and detainees is widespread. Prison conditions are poor, and dysentery, malaria, and cholera are common. There are reports that the government has blocked the registration of local human rights organizations.

THE APROACH OF MAX WEBER

Max Weber's (1864-1920) sociology is the foundation of scientific sociology of religion in a sense of typological and objective understanding. Rejecting Karl Marx's evolutionary law of class society, or Emile Durkheim's sustained law of moral society, Weber established the understanding sociology of the subjective meaning of religious action or inaction. To make such knowledge of the understanding objective, he founded the methodology of the ideal type and the elective affinity of causal relationships. Weber "elaborated a set of categories, such as types of prophecy, the idea of charisma (spiritual power), routinization, and other categories, which became tools to deal with the comparative material; he was thus the real founder of comparative sociology." Weber holds that there is no universal law of society as supposed in natural science, or the law of history which determines the course of the dynamic mechanically.

The goal of Weber's sociology of religion is to understand religious action from the subjective meaning of the actor rationally and also emphatically; it is not to establish the laws of religion and society, or to extract the essence of religious action. Or the goal is not even to formulate and evaluate the social function of religion as Marx did that religion was the opium of the mass or as Durkheim did that religion was what made moral society hold together. Typological and comparative understanding of religious action depends on the theoretical construction of the ideal type through thinking or empathic experiments. Objective understanding of religious action, on the other hand, depends on the value-judgement free analysis of the subjective meaning of social action from the viewpoint of ideas as well as material and mental interests. To avoid the injunction of value-judgments, one has to distinguish the empirical recognition of "what is" from the normative judgment of "what should be."

The validity of an ethical claim is not the matter of social analysis, but the matter of conscience and belief. The criteria of value-judgment is imperative, and does not depend on empirical reality. The understanding of "what is," on the other hand, involves not just empirical facts of social action, but also the subjective meaning of the social action. Social action is not mechanical reaction of the law of material interests, but the dynamic of ideas and interests which give the actor the conscious or unconscious meaning of life and the world. In order to understand sociological reality of religion, Weber holds the importance of religious idea which cannot be reduced to the component of material interests (Marx) or to the social nexus and function (Durkheim). Weber says

Not ideas, but material and ideal [ideological] interests, directly govern men's conduct. Yet very frequently the world images that have been created by ideas, like a switchman, have determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.