but i did go to marches, i worked with sts and i assumed my law degree at the university of pretoria. i saw black students and i was one of the few lawyers would go into the township and represent defendants as a legal aid so i would go in and do that and that's what one of the essays talked about and how i could do that as unfortunately amy beale got murder and people were like it's not fair, you're not allowed to go do that a lot of those cases were actually also drug war related which i think is an interesting parallel to life in america. one of the essays in the book does talk about how i think black people in america actually are worse off than they were under apartheid. and i don't say that lightly but in america we have the largest incorporated population in the world. and the war on drugs has been an abject failure and that is really disproportionately affected our black communities. so in some ways it's ironic to see the extension of the work i did in south africa to actually coming to america being like no, now we've got to do it all over again but that's the reality . it wa

if you're a monte, who is a professor of political economy, the university of pretoria and the founding director at the center for the study of governance, innovation in london, vicky price chief economic adviser at the c e. b r, the center for economics and business research and a former u. k. government advisor. and in she's walker. we have suggest takesha, who is the dean of the school of management at the university of she's rocha and i thank all 3 of you for joining us. today as a say, i don't think we're going to solve everything, but we can maybe figure out which sort of direction we're going in the run. so i'd like to start with you, primarily because of your title. you look at political economy and i've always thought of this pandemic. certainly the reactions to this pandemic as being almost politics versus economics. political decisions versus. busy economic ones has that been the problem, but it's a problem with everything. it's all been politicized. well, i think the politicization of depend on my kids is becoming more and more evidence . and i think mostly in the 2nd phase,

of stock markets and airlines and people's travel plans. you don't plan to have that ripple effect. >> a spike in cases first happened in pretoria with a cluster infection at this technical universityvariant were first detected by scientists and pat pathologists at lancet laboratories. they noticed a strange anomaly. it happened over and over again. it reminded them of tests for the alpha variant first detected a year ago in the uk. what was it like to see this anomaly cropping up again? >> it was disturbing. because we were dealing with something new. there&was there an increase in positivity rate. we could be dealing with a new variant. >> reporter: they urgently notified the team. they described and made public disturbing details of the highly mutated virus. scientists are trying to understand omicron. >> why was it so important to alert everybody about this. why not just keep quiet about what you find? we know a new variant is likely to have an increase in case, whether severe or not. >> reporter: the big question, is this more severe or not and even less severe. at least at this stage pathologists and doctors say they are noticing that it's not as serious as possibly earlier w