EDITOR’S NOTE

First, I want to apologize to our esteemed readers for not bringing forth the July and August editions of our journal. The mind was willing to produce the editions as usual, but the body was unwilling to do so. I was faced with some health challenges which did not allow me to produce the journal. I appreciate your patience and I am happy to be back online this month.

While we were offline, the world continued to be plagued with all sorts of crises. Climatic change is wreaking havoc in every corner of the world. Though melting ice in the extreme ends of the world may not mean anything to people who live in the tropical and temperate zones, catastrophic fires in Europe, and North America burning down homes, flood in North America, Pakistan, and Uganda are serious problems. For those who lost lives, saw their homes burnt down with all their contents, saw homes flooded completely or infrastructures washed away, climatic change is for real. It is not fake as climatic change deniers would like you to believe. While we may not yet understand it completely, we certainly know enough about it to do something about it. Otherwise, the world as we know it today will dramatically change or worse, cease to exist.

Meanwhile, the Russian-Ukraine war continues to rage on. Apart from the displacement of people, loss of property and destruction of infrastructure, the most concerning problem is the mind-boggling threat of nuclear plants in Ukraine being hit by Russian missiles or indirectly by lack of power to cool the nuclear reactors. To reasonable people, this would be the last place anybody would want to have turned into a battlefield.

Not to be outdone by the major war in Ukraine, there are insidious wars that have been festering in other parts of the world. One of these is the war in Ethiopia between the Tigrinya People’s Liberation Front and the government of Ethiopia in which hundreds if not thousands of innocent people have become the unwilling collateral casualties. In nearby Somalia, al Shabab is busy with its war of attrition against the unity government aided by AMISOM troops. In the west of the African continent, Nigeria is in a constant hit and run war with Boko Haram.

Despite all these traumas, there was a hopeful sign in Kenya. The much-anticipated election in Kenya took place relatively peacefully. Though the outcome was challenged in court, the Supreme Court dismissed the petition reportedly for lack of convincing evidence that the election was rigged, thus confirming the election of William Ruto as the fifth president of Kenya. Contrary to the post-election violence that happened in 2007, there was no significant violence this time suggesting that there is some improvement in the electoral process as well as the acceptance of the outcome.

Whether it is climatic change, war or election, humans are responsible. We either act reasonably and stop doing things like polluting the atmosphere or allowing our egos to have the better part of us, we will all perish under the weight of climatic change and or war.