Playing by the Numbers

• I think chance is more a fundamental conception than causality; for whether in a concrete case, a cause-effect relation holds or not can only be judged by applying the laws of chance to the observation.
                      Max Born
• Manche menschen andern sich nie. (Some people will never change)
  Die felten Jahre sind vorbei! (Your days of plenty are numbered)
                    Film, The Edukators

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Probabilities are everywhere and, yet for some evolutionary primordial reasons, aided by medieval theology or juju imperatives, we rarely take heed of them in our survival enterprises. Why is that? Modern education doesn’t seem to help either. Most of us can’t see sense beyond the classical Newtonian physics and Euclidian geometry of our education, literally and figuratively.

In the 19th century Pascal and gambling informed of us some explanation in natural phenomena by probability. Since then some elegant laws have been expounded and, if we choose to use them, our lives’ ventures could be less unpredictable. And we could dispense with human sacrifices to bend fate, or be less caught up in sweaty tribal jingoistic emotions for a particular homeboy presidential candidate.

When we set out on a venture, most of us often do not ask the question: What are the chances?

When I was a kid, a neighbor retired and decided to invest all his retirement moneys in a car. Those were the days when having a car in my village meant you had arrived. Soon the car broke down and there were no spare parts. The poor guy began hoofing the village paths like the rest of us. I often met him walking, head down, thinking, seemingly oblivious to the customary greetings as one passed by a person. We kids soon gave up and watched somberly—testimony to our psychological mirroring. Other naughty tykes would have thrown stones at him, and he wouldn’t have cared.

The question is: What would have been the result had he worked out some kind of subjective decision tree with some equally subjective probabilities? His decision would have been wiser and, assuming a constant of objective, he could have got himself a new bride, a few heads of cattle, or a small dry-goods dukan (store) in the ‘hood.

In launching his candidacy, homeboy Barack Hussein Obama, smart as he is, probably asked: What are my chances? He saw a chance if he played by certain game rules. Thus we could see candidate Obama emphasizing his white maternal side exclusively. His middle name “Hussein” was, prior to election, nowhere to be seen except in the pens or mouths of his detractors. He threaded the race—which is effectively tribal—question gingerly. The rest now is history, and the salient tacit fact remains that he played by the numbers.

In Uganda we can holler and bend out of shape but let us be clear about the objective: Is it about getting rid of the quarter century ignominious Museveni rule? Or is it about indulging in our fancy of one form or another? Either way, Moses will have to go to the Mountain by the numbers—the Mountain will not come to Moses—prayer or no prayer; juju incantations or no juju incantations. Once the objective is clear, we can then work on improving the chances of our candidate in the probability distribution scale, and not act crazy after the fact.