The African Trumpet

The higher-ed and the wider economy feed off each 0other through a knowledge economy loop that has been severely disrupted. It's now up to the scholars in institutions of higher learning to reorient the models of disseminating knowledge even as they help the wider economy reconfigure itself for a new emerging world under the pandemic. As narrated by Dr Joy Mueni Kiiru.

The church has impressive infrastructural inroads into the social aspect of the society. This embeds them into society in ways that also make them easier to be co-opted by the state systems, and as Father Dolan elucidates, the church has to address the question on the injustices of history and the implicit imbalance in our societal structures.

The Kenyan society has sustained critical limitations around the economy mostly occasioned by policy and leadership failures. Corona has simply amplified this challenge and as researchers, Aly-Khan Satchu and Julian Rowan elaborate on how the state's reaction isn't making the situation any easier for Kenyans.

This Corona pandemic has shifted the nature of terror in the horn of Africa through stretching state resources, redeployment of security infrastructure, policy focus and movement of both people and cash. The impact of these shifts will in the coming months reorient the capability of both the state and the terror networks to operate optimally and precipitate creation of new networks and the death o...

Knowledge and education are never neutral. What we understand, how we understand it and the process leading to the validation of that knowledge is filtered through prisms and biases some of which we never give much thought to. Given that the state will keep children stuck at home till 2021, we'll need to advocate for a better philosophy of knowledge, even as we advocate for more schooling opportun...

The Kenyan state is trying to recreate the 1990s and send us back into the days of the dreaded special branch as it loses grip of the Kenyan society through its incompetence, dysfunction and unimaginable corruption. Public spirited citizens, as we witnessed during the Saba saba rallies, find themselves accosted by a well-oiled infrastructure of violence which is the last resort for a regime that h...

The 2020 COVID scare has accelerated certain forces within the local and global societies and put into question age-old beliefs including the idea of the infallibility of the market. The state, we were told, is corrupt, inefficient and stuck. But as Prof. Tiyambe Zeleza explains, the magnitude of the pandemic is demanding from us massive logistical, infrastructural, and systemic responses which on...

The COVID-19 has upset the basic economic relationship that existed between different sectors in the wider economy. As Dr Mariam Omollo and Dr Charles Warria explain, this heightens the need for new data on the evolving relationships between known variables and market indicators, as moderated by Wanjiru Gikonyo.

The modern Africa city and state with their colonial origins are finding it harder to evolve in way that allow them to meet the needs of their urban populace. Gathara says this is the best time to question their structural limitations and to reform them in ways that ensure continuity of human organization.

Lockdowns may have made sense in the initial civilizational panic but their efficacy, and sustainability are now being put into question. Now that the pandemic evolves its time for regimes to take into account the unique aspects of their respective nations and regions.

The year 2020 is evolving at a pace that overwhelms the creative synergies of the artists, and the creatives. But what opportunities, growth areas and anxieties define this age artistically.

Dr. Chambi Chachage: Pandemics evolve from being a clinical health issue, to public health issue before becoming a public order issue. At that point urban anthropology, city dynamics, and historical accidents become amplified as different players in the urban space try to adjust to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Alex Awiti: We’re living in the new dispensation in which COVID-19 will become part and parcel of our clinical and public health realities. How then do we embrace the plus COVID world and what adjustments will it require of us?

Dr. Adia Benton: Pandemics are not new to human civilization. In light of that certain lessons picked up from dealing with previous calamities and pandemics become part of the institutional memory and social fabric and can be successfully deployed to help tackle upcoming viruses.

For years public health suffered as clinical health flourished because clinical medicine is much easier to marketize, privatize and monetize. Now COVID is demanding a public health response through auditing the social construction of health, disease, economics, rural-urban life, and human relations; basically the kind of stuff that can't privatize, commoditize or privatize easily. A conversation b...

This pandemic is an economically unique trouble in that it has affected both demand and supply while notoriously failing to respond to the usual fiscal and monetary options. The international policy cooperation is the shorter route out of this. However, as Dr Ndii and Dr Stiglitz discuss, an immediate downturn is all but inevitable before the global world picks up again.

The African governments are notoriously averse to expert advice often preferring the simplistic solutions and perspectives of the court jesters. This time though the complexity of the issues facing regional, local and global societies are forcing the experts and scholars back into the frontline. How will the insecure regimes coexist with these rising intellectuals?

The nation-states across Africa are so caught up in self-preservation through securitization of the COVID-19 responses. As policy expert, Zein Abubakar explains this was entirely predictable and obviously short-sighted and ineffective.

The economic impact of the global pandemic will last longer and affect much more than the medical virus has so far. This will definitely call for a reorientation of the world of finance and ethno-capital as elaborated by Rahma Hersi.

The world has shifted irreparably in ways that will fundamentally human organization. Prof. Larry Diamond urges the world to move forward with boldness embracing new paradigms and seeking opportunities for growth in this brave new world.

After years of sidelining and marginalizing its scholars, African societies and the wider public are increasingly turning their ears towards their learned sons and daughters. This according to Prof. Kanyinga is an opportune time and place to recalibrate the place of the African scholar in the problem-solving and power matrix of the society.

Africa’s pandemic prospects is a mixed bag of learned and missed lessons as well as countervailing factors which in the end produce a less than stellar response from a pretty knowledgeable African intelligentsia. This pandemic gives African research scholars, and policymakers an effective chance to prove their mettle at the continental and world stage.

COVID-19 it is said has only highlighted and in some instances exasperated long-standing regime habits in Africa. Despite their unique sociopolitical architectures and situations, the regimes have been predictably tenuous in their approach a decision-making model that has produced interesting outcomes in terms of the economic and political impact of the pandemic.

Conservation is a principle; tourism is a business, so says leading conservation scholar Dr. Mordecai Ogada. The conservation politics are laden with racial hierarchies, lies, violence and misinformation used to subjugate locals in a bid to wrestle precious; and space from them in ways that upset human-wildlife coexistence.

The post-pandemic world will be every bit different from the world we've known all our lives. The human society therefore has to reimagine a new way of economic, social and cultural existence unlike anything he's ever previously conceived.