Continuity and change.

Ezekiel Lengaram
2 min readAug 20, 2021

I had an interesting talk with ambassador Peter Kallaghe about matters of progress and politics. The intriguing part of our chat was what he thought about the future, or specifically what should a country, a city or even an individual focus on to progress in life. He quipped “continuity and change”. I spend few days pondering about the response, first because of its frugality, and second because of what it concealed. You must understand that the pattern is observed by my friend Busara when he asked the ambassador the other questions. Busara question was how does one assess whether to use military intervention in conflict resolution and being specific of the end game. The ambassador response was again short and clear-not for lack of deep thought, but rather for precision and his ability to internalize the question asked and respond within small window of time with such clarity. His response was “Is it a military or a political one?”, notice the simplicity and yet the rigor of the analysis!.

Now back to his response with regard to the future. If you are from a mathematical background –you will appreciate the response of his answer by looking up what does continuity of a function means mathematically and that continuity is a necessary condition for change. Actually in absences of continuity of a function mathematically- one won’t be able to solve for a change of just about anything. But even better continuity calls for ongoing improvement and that itself bring about change. Besides continuity equation also means conservation of mass, which means if you are to think of Balozi statement in this frame-you will need to appreciate how difficult it is to try conserve a mass of something while changing it at the same time. But I should not bore you with mathematics technicalities, in short; progress in any place- be leadership, economics or political call for continuity and change. Interestingly continuity and change forces one to think long term and long term thinking helps one to transcend some of the common traps of life. In short be a pioneer of good things in life by remembering all that have survived till today is the result of continuity and change.

As usual I will leave you with a quote from the Book: What you do, is who you are-by Ben Horowitz.

“In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.”

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Ezekiel Lengaram

Ezekiel Lengaram is a Researcher in Economics at Wits University. My teaching and research focus are on the theory of Macroeconomics, Computational Economics.