Mehkurydiaries

The Science Summit opens in Nairobi today with a serious ambition: to place African scientific leadership at the heart of the global agenda. Africa has never lacked questions. It has lacked sustained control over which questions receive money. UNESCO’s latest data puts research and development spending in Sub-Saharan Africa at 0.38 percent of GDP. The global figure is 1.92 percent. That gap is not merely a budget problem. It is a power arrangement. The person funding a question often influences which problem becomes scientifically visible. When the topic, method, timetable and expected result arrive inside the grant call, the local researcher can become a field assistant in his own continent. We export samples and import conclusions. A microscope does not become African because it cleared customs. This is not an argument against international collaboration. Science grows by crossing borders. Isolation would be expensive foolishness wearing a sovereignty badge. But collabora...

The United Nations has 193 member states. The room is crowded. The key ring is not. At this year’s General Assembly, more than 150 leaders spoke beneath a theme about restoring trust. Africa again asked for permanent representation on the Security Council. The answer, as usual, arrived dressed as sympathy and walking at the speed of procedure. The Security Council has fifteen members. Ten rotate. Five—the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France—never leave. Each holds veto power. The world calls this multilateralism. The furniture remembers 1945. Africa has 54 UN member states and roughly 1.6 billion people. Yet no African country holds a permanent seat where binding decisions on sanctions, peace operations and international security are made. This is not merely a seating arrangement. Calling African states after decisions have been shaped is consultation. Allowing them to help shape those decisions is power. The difference is the entire argument. The African Union’s model d...

Morocco has held an election. That sentence is true. It is not yet the whole truth. On September 23, Moroccans voted for 395 members of parliament. Twenty-seven parties competed. They argued about jobs, wages, housing, education and healthcare—the ordinary matters through which politics either serves people or rehearses speeches at them. Yet Morocco is a constitutional monarchy in which the king still holds significant political, military and religious authority. The winning party can form a government. It does not inherit the entire house. The ballot can rearrange the furniture while someone else keeps several important keys. This does not make voting useless. Parliament legislates. Governments administer public services. Elections can widen representation, punish incompetence and force neglected problems into public view. But democracy should not be measured only by whether citizens were given paper, ink and a queue. It should also be measured by how much power enters the polling ...

Africa does not have a shortage of clever education apps. It has a graveyard of platforms students were expected to discover, download, understand and keep feeding with data. The technology may be brilliant. The entrance is often the problem. Adesua, an AI teaching assistant developed for science learning in West Africa, chose a less glamorous door: WhatsApp. It answers questions and gives students timed or untimed multiple-choice practice using curated textbooks and 33 years of national examination questions. Innovation usually arrives wearing a new interface. Sometimes it should simply enter through the interface people opened before breakfast. A six-month feasibility study in Ghana recorded 56 active users, including students and parents. The reported helpfulness score was 93.75 percent—but that came from only 16 ratings. Promising? Yes. Proven across a continent? Calm down. The important lesson is architectural. Adoption is not a marketing problem added after the product is built...

We have become very skilled at giving destruction professional names. A forest becomes timber inventory. A river becomes a drainage channel. Poison becomes an externality. Once a wound enters a spreadsheet, it begins to look productive. The 2026 Planetary Health Check has interrupted the euphemism. More than 60 scientists report that seven of Earth’s nine planetary boundaries have been breached. All seven are now at their highest recorded levels of transgression. Ocean acidification became the latest boundary to cross the safe limit in 2025. These boundaries are not imaginary lines painted around the planet. They describe interconnected systems—climate, freshwater, land, biodiversity, nutrient cycles, pollution and ocean chemistry—that help keep Earth stable enough for civilisation. We are dismantling the machinery while congratulating ourselves on factory output. The report speaks the language of science: resilience, thresholds, carbon sinks and tipping points. Beneath that l...

After Mugabe, who is next? - List of African longest serving leaders www.naija.ng Nov 22, 2017 11:44 AM The resignation of Robert Mugabe as the president of Zimbabwe after 37 years in office has once again brought to fore the leadership problems in Africa, especially as it relates to the desire by some of these leaders to hold on to power in perpetuity. In this piece,  NAIJ.com  takes a look at Africa's current longest serving leaders. 1. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea.Cridit: Google Mbasogo took power in a coup in August 1979, and has ruled for 38 years. He won the last election to extend his mandate for a further seven years till the next elections in 2022. He has also been elected life president of the ruling party in July 2017. He is 74 years old. 2. Paul Biya of Cameroon Paul Biya of Cameroon. Credit: Google Paul Biya took over after resignation of Ahidjo in November 1982 after serving as...