In January 2020 Kenya experienced the worst locust invasion in 70 years. So intense were the infestations that they posed a serious risk of food insecurity to the country and the region.
Countries that adopt ethnic recognition go on to experience less violence, more economic vitality, and more democratic politics.
What matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of productivity, not a question of production rates. And no, it is not a question of back to nature. We must invent a new future.
In recent months it has felt like election rigging has run riot. Citizens killed, beaten and intimidated and election results falsified in Uganda. Ballot boxes illegally thrown out of windows so their votes for the opposition can be dumped in the bin in Belarus. Widespread censorship and intimidation of opposition candidates and supporters in Tanzania. […]
Our various peoples had clear democratic practices in their pre-colonial political formations without the inconvenience of political parties. It is high time we learned from our indigenous heritages.
The poverty of ideas in America’s political arena reflects the barbarism of our historical moment. While Trump’s minions promote authoritarianism and jingoism, their ideological opponents within the Democratic Party offer equally bankrupt solutions, from a return to “civility” to the rebuilding of national “unity” all the while forgetting the critical lesson: White supremacy does not love White folks.
At another historical inflection point, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized white Americans’ delusions as the property of the West more broadly.
Reginald Cline-Cole provides an analytically rigorous understanding of the differentiated spread and impact of Covid-19 around the world. In so doing he returns us to what ought to be our core concern: the political economy of uneven incorporation of African economies, societies and natures into the world economy.
All through history prophets have oscillated between one extreme end, the highest level of political leadership — what Plato called “the Philosopher King”, the ruler of his utopian city Kallipolis who possesses wisdom and simplicity — and the other extreme end, the highest level of political activism — what the 19th century termed as Radical Activism, individuals who called for total societal change, engineering complete upheaval of the status quo. Both the Philosopher King and the Radical are enabled by one thing—Knowledge.
The Kenyan government’s misguided and costly investments in big infrastructure projects are compromising the nation’s socio-economic transformation. Meanwhile, elite-driven opportunism has suffocated intellectual debate that once characterised the flow of ideas in this part of the world. The time is ripe for a Big Conversation.
