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 between Madina Wa Chege and Darius Okolla.

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.