Page 44 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 30

Community
care is mostly not care but the exchange of
money for the products of pharmaceutical
companies which really don’t care for our
health. This is not an idle statement but what
you can clearly measure if you look at the
number of people who are hooked on or made
addicted to these pharmaceutical products.
And this is not necessarily because these
products are doing a great job of restoring
health, but because they make you depend
on more drugs to alleviate the side effects of
the original drugs that you started with. So,
instead of being healed from whatever the
ailment may have been (if you were even
diagnosed accurately and genuinely), you
instead become a walking machine that is
fueled and maintained by medicines which
are byproducts of the petrochemical industry.
And the basic meaning of that is, that
pharmaceutical companies care about making
sure you are always sick so that your life
makes them money. Human life to them has
become a database of money-making entries.
But we can stop this. We must move from
the commercialized treatment of symptoms
to a more humanized curing of diseases. And
this means that we must give real focus to
preventive medicine, and curative medicine,
rather than the medical system we have
now that deals with just symptoms. This
preventive type of health care starts with
paying attention to the health of the food
we eat, the health of the soil in which our
foods are grown, the health of the water we
drink, the health of the environment we live
in and the various aspects of healthy organic
lifestyles.
We do not need any government policies to
start to make this a reality in our homes or
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with our families. We just have to decide to
start.
Food production
The war against Africa’s indigenous seeds
is very real and the devastation it is causing
already is staring us all in the face even as
we speak. Take for example, according to the
UN, Zimbabwe recently became the country
with the largest number of cancer cases
globally. Interestingly, Zimbabwe is also one
of the countries in Africa that has been eating
GMOs and the derivatives of GMO products.
It’s pretty easy to make the connection that
GMOs, no matter what their creators tell
you, can never be a healthy alternative to
real organic food. The one way out of this
evil of GMOs is to aggressively plant and eat
indigenous organic food crops. If we boycott
the buying of GMO products, their production
and sale will naturally die off. We are that
powerful and can make such change happen
in Africa.
Information Technology
An Africa that should be better must factor
in how the data of Africans are collected by
foreign platforms online, and even offline, and
what they are used for. And this should begin
with Africa owning its versions of everything
that works on the internet. Accurate systems
for internet usage and data collection must be
put in place.
Holistic Family life
It takes a family of individuals to create
communities for a better Africa. In a real
sense, holistic living must be spiritual,
mental and physical. We must work towards