As the city turns hostile and Kenyans fearful of suffering hunger flee to the rural areas, COVID-19 has presented us with an opportunity to eliminate the colonial mentality that views the rural countryside as the segregated homeland of a silenced underclass and to renew the rural-urban relationship as a mutually beneficial support system.
Small-scale farming accounts for roughly 75 per cent of the total agricultural output in Kenya. The future of food security in the country, therefore, lies in safeguarding small-scale farmers. However, Kenya’s agricultural policies are focused on cash crops and industrial agriculture. This has led to the food crisis we face today.
If we divorce training for the workplace from university education, universities can return to being sites of knowledge that are open to the public and that benefit society.
COVID-19 has compelled us to think about the home as an enclosed political economy. The pandemic has placed an additional strain on the caregiving role and labour of women, who have been disproportionally affected by domestic and other forms of violence. What might a just home in a post-COVID future look like?
By seeking to transform postcolonial Africans into entrepreneurs, neoliberal economic interventions misread Africa’s past. One outcome of this has been a profound transformation in the very vocabulary we use to designate some Africans as entrepreneurs. In the end, the innovative ingenuity of Africans in many entrepreneurial fields is either denied or sensationalised by those who purport to speak for and about African entrepreneurs.
The Kenyan government’s sledgehammer response to the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a kind of schizophrenia in the country’s governance that our precarious economy cannot sustain. We might not have to wait until the next election to discover the elastic limit of the people’s tolerance of impunity.
PAUL GOLDSMITH reviews a selection of vantage points from pandemic literature and attempts to make sense of the partially understood coronavirus and its world-warping spread.
The COVID-19 crisis has presented the Church with an immense challenge and the ACK now finds herself in a liminal space concerning her visibility, a place of transition from where she must open herself up to a paradigm shift.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the world’s wounds, scars, fissures and pressures. The fear of an impending catastrophe when the virus finally reaches zones of abandonment remind us of the violence and partialities that partition a world that should ideally be shared and held in common.
The coronavirus pandemic, like other disasters, will no doubt provide opportunities to some people to make money. When many get killed, there are always a few that make a killing. This is the essence of disaster capitalism.
