We have to face up to a number of challenges here. It’s a question of power too… those who are powerful would like to tell those who are less-powerful (women, the poor, the Third World, the ‘developing’ countries, the elderly) that they have nothing worthy to express. That’s why so few women’s voices get heard in the mainstream media (hey, while on an unrelated point, I’ve heard a lot about Nigeria’s film industry, and am keen to learn more).

Technology can be another tough challenge even when it comes to expressing ourselves. If we don’t know what options are available (and most people don’t!) how do we decide what would work best? If only more people knew that it took just two minutes to create a blog on Wordpress or Blogger! (Of course, keeping a blog active and working is more difficult than setting it up!) Apart from that, as has been noted already, ours are oral societies — not written (let alone digitised!) ones. So it becomes easy to express our thoughts orally… but not in writing.

Anyway, we need to make the effort. We need to build our confidence to express ourselves. We need to convince ourselves that we have crucial points to make, and that each and every voice is worth listening to. Once we do that, we will quickly realise the power of communication, and how it can be a useful tool in reaching our goals.

Permit me to share a brief video I recently put together, with an octogenarian friend of mine … am amazing guy who believes in mentoring others, even though he’s 82+ years old! Some interesting tips on writing. My apologies for those on low-speed access bandwidth to the internet, I’m not unfamiliar with that and know that access is an issue in large parts of our planet still.