Good people,

Africa, Kenya included is lagging behind in scientific industrial development. Africa or Kenya is known to copy the rest of the developed world now for a long time. Africa has not been on the frontline on any new scientific adventure. I will stick only to a small field and try to convince you that we are not yet smart enough despite the education knowledge we have harboured since independence or before that independence time. Kenya for example have a lot of highly educated lots, but the country have failed completely up to today to exploit most of the best brains in the country. Most of the best brains in the country are busy trying to make the ends meet by constant routine manual work to get food for their family and pay school fees for their off springs. The ones who have left the country are working for foreign countries and therefore contributes to the development of those host nations, not Kenya.

Take for example the medical field: with the present knowledge we do know that even identical twins are not truly identical. Although to strangers they look much a like,relatives and friends usually have no problem telling them a part, even from a distance, but these twins have their own personalities and completely their own genomes. Malaria disease have been a pain in the ass for an African man or woman now for a long time; devices have been suggested, business men have made billions of dollars out of just mosquito nets alone, but an African man or child is still being buried everyday because of this malarian problem. Drugs have been given to an African man by whites, now even Chinese but does the African get help from these drugs?. Some get some do not get and end up dying.

Africans still lack the study on their genetic structure, we need to do a complete genome sequences of our population. Through this we will understand our people`s diversity. We should study mitochondrial and sets of nuclear in our cells. Just being a bantu, let say a kikuyu does not necessarily mean that you have the same genome sequences with a bantu who is a kisii, or a kamba when it comes to diseases or treating some particular diseases. Or being a nilotic luo and the other a nilotic kalenjin, or masai or acholi does not mean you have the same genomes.

Why is genome knowledge important?. Well today we do know that there is lack of malaria-resistance alleles in the Bushmen population and also some other Africans which might have significant consequences on treating this malarian disease and also in the development of a drug for malaria. We know today that the Bushmen seem to be, on average, more different from each other than, for example, a European and an Asian. So folks drugs we sometimes get blindly from foreign farms for any disease to be used in Africa might not be well for our African genome or drug metabolism and disease resistance. But how do we go about this if we use almost all our tax-payers money to pay Mps, ministers, presidents salary or buy them the best motorcars in the planet etc and some of our resources are also being stolen and banked a broad?.

This is not all we know now from medical point of view this is just a tip of the iceberg in other diseases and environmental changes or mutation. I do look to the day we Africans will come up with a non copy laboratories and good scientific facilities to do good research to enrich our population and academic egos.

Paul Nyandoto