He was also excoriating us Kenyans, asking "what kind of nation are you raising if you shut down kids when they are 13," referring to our free education being cut off after primary school. But he was clear about one thing: "I will never run against a Kenyan!"Â

I was not the only one wanting to hear more from him. Well-known personalities from the Nation, Kiss FM, BBC, and Capital also wanted time.Â

South Africa, the land of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Steve Biko, has produced another wonder. Zola is an instinctive and inveterate advocate for kids, being hardly much older than them. He has just joined up as a Unicef goodwill ambassador so that the two of them can support each others' campaigns for mobilizing political will and resources to protect the hundreds of millions of Africa's most tender citizens.

"I had no idea how many deadly children's illnesses there were, and how many easy remedies, until I met Unicef," he said.Â

They will learn from each other, of course. Zola talks about the need to groom the "boy child," an expression I had never heard since Unicef focuses primarily on the concept of the girl child. "Unless you change boys and men, our girls and women are going to continue to suffer," he says.Â

Zola is horrified that the tiny souls all societies repeatedly proclaim to be their first priority have such trouble meeting even the simplest of their compelling needs, thanks of course to the workings of our economic systems.Â

These allow obscene amounts of wealth to be amassed, corruptly or otherwise, by rapacious elites. Unlike most of the dozens of goodwill ambassadors that Unicef has roped in, Zola wants to take them all on, including our "development partners" whose own economic systems we mimic, except that they have generally managed to make provision for most children.Â

We don't even try. Zola saw this first hand again when he visited Kibera, "the informal settlement" - South Africans find the word ‘slum' demeaning - hardly a mile or so from State House and the sumptuous Lang'ata suburb. "It's beyond description," he moaned quietly after a trip through it with Nameless.

He saw child-headed households, one with nine children in one room.

"Even reality is not supposed to be that harsh. This was not a set for some awful film." He is going to raise money for some Kibera kids' school fees with a local radio station.Â

With his resonant language for both kids and adults, Zola gets everyone interested the minute he opens his mouth. Even as he talks about his own figurative AK 47, Zola says that at home he takes away toy guns from kids. "Tell your mum and dad Zola took it," he tells them.Â

He is furious with the Sudanese Government about the mass killings in Darfur, and wants every democratic African president to send a few thousand soldiers to protect that tortured territory's people.

Zola would not be complete without his professional business partner, Delphine. She runs the record label Ghetto Ruff, but when Zola first approached her, she was not interested. "He looked like a rogue," she says.

But day after day, Zola sat outside her gate, refusing to go away. Eventually, she relented, and heard him, and took him on - and in. Her young artists, mainly penniless, stay at her home, usually six at a time, until they can stand on their own.Â

Seeing Zola and Delphine in action reminds you once again that development does not come in one size and needs all sorts of animators to keep jump-starting it. Every one of us can influence development, with energy, creativity, words or with a shilling or a fortune. In fact, unless all of us own it, it won't happen - at least not the way we want it to.