Welcome to AfricArXiv
This initiative showcases UbuntuNet's commitment to fostering knowledge sharing, collaboration, and accessibility within the African research community. With AfricArxiv, researchers across the continent have a dedicated platform to disseminate their findings, making them accessible to a global audience. By facilitating open access to scholarly work, UbuntuNet Alliance plays a pivotal role in advancing the principles of open science, enhancing research visibility, and driving innovation across Africa.
Communities in AfricArXiv
Select a community to browse its collections.
- The general repository is open for individual submissions by researchers, librarians and research administrators.
- Showcase of project activities, presentations, and scholarly contributions curated by the AfricArXiv initiative.
- Scholarly items sorted by country > Institution > Department
- A Rapid Grant Fund to address research questions and implement science engagement activities associated with COVID-19
Recent Submissions
Quantum π-Unification II: Definition, Mathematical Structure, and Foundational Properties of the Quantum π for Molecular Systems
(Publisher, 2025-11-25) Barack Ndenga
The second article in the Quantum π-Unification Series establishes a fully defined, operational, and mathematically rigorous formulation of the Quantum π for molecular systems.
Unlike classical π-electron theory—which only describes delocalized electrons—the Quantum π introduced here represents a phase-information invariant governing chemical stability, resonance, symmetry, and reactivity.
This work develops:
1. the conceptual foundations of the Quantum π,
2. its mathematical structure (phase operator, symmetry factor, information contribution),
3. the connection with chemical resonance, electronegativity flow, and energy minimization,
4. prediction rules for molecular stability and reactivity.
The article also introduces the π-Stability Index (PSI) and the Quantum π-Symmetry Number, two new descriptors that unify chemical information, electronic delocalization, and energetic behavior.
From 8 000 “Criticals” to Fewer Than 200: Five Years of Pathway-Aware Risk Prioritisation in Enterprise Vulnerability Management
(CEMA-USK, 2025-11-20) Nsiangani, Kibavuidi; Ipoli, Christian
Security operations teams are overwhelmed by alerts and routinely wrestle with backlogs of
several thousand “critical” vulnerabilities, yet still experience serious incidents and rising
analyst burnout. During the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic this became particularly
visible: attack surfaces expanded overnight through remote access, while staffing levels and
attention were under pressure.
This article describes five years of experience with a pathway-oriented, open-standard risk
prioritisation model deployed in several Tier-1 European organisations in financial and
automotive sectors. Instead of relying primarily on scanner-provided severity (for example
CVSS-based critical/high/medium/low buckets), the model ranks issues according to their role
in concrete attacker pathways: how they enable entry, lateral movement and impact on critical
assets.
Our research offers three main contributions. First, we detail a natural experiment during the
first COVID-19 wave where an automotive finance subsidiary, using shared infrastructure,
reduced over 6,000 scanner-critical items on its remote-access estate to zero pathway-critical
issues in under six months. This occurred despite increased remote-work exposure and attack
volume, and without successful compromise, unlike branches on the same infrastructure using
traditional CVSS prioritization, which suffered incidents. Second, we generalize this, showing
five large organizations reduced top-priority items by over 90% (from ~8,000 to <200) without
compromising security outcomes. Third, these reductions were achieved within formal
governance frameworks (documented plans and architectures) that have since been formalized
into open, vendor-neutral standards now being reused in Europe and African/EMEA markets.
Embracing the AI Revolution: The Implication for Research and Education.
(2025-10-30) Mutambara, Arthur
DSM-H as an African-Born Global Framework for Structural Pathology
(CEMA-USK, 2025-10-02) Nsiangani, Kibavuidi
The DSM-H (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Human Structural Pathologies) proposes a new way to name harms that do not live inside one person’s “mental disorder” but arise from stable patterns of institutional behaviour. It concentrates on structurally anti-human behaviour clusters (SAHBC / O-SAHBC) that generate preventable damage in health, justice, administration and other vital systems.
This paper places DSM-H in an African psycho-political lineage (Fanon, Amos Wilson, Kimbangu) and within the broader MEN-D work on linguistic colonisation, epistemic warfare and digital harassment. It argues that DSM-H is a logical next step in that lineage: an African-born, globally usable system that treats structural pathology as something observable and measurable, independent of what institutional actors claim to feel or intend. Whether an institution “means well” comes second. What matters first is the pattern of decisions and their consequences for human lives.
We outline the core DSM-H architecture: the Nsiku–Nzola–Bisalu ethical training triad and the MOYO indicators (MOYO-S, a probability scale for life-aligned behaviour, and MOYO-MBI, an index of life deviation and harm). We show how these tools convert African epistemic concepts (Nsiku, Nzola, Bisalu, mbi) into operational metrics. DSM-H starts its testing in the hospital, where structural cruelty cannot hide behind rhetoric, then moves outward to any context where power, reward and identity combine to normalise injury.
DSM-H does not depend on voluntary confession by institutions or professionals. Diagnosis proceeds from pattern and consequence, not from declared motive. This avoids the familiar situation where those who benefit from structural harm can block its naming. DSM-H is built as a protective instrument for populations, with Africa as its starting point and any context of oppression as its horizon. Oppressive systems often recycle the same behavioural templates. DSM-H formalises a safeguard against those templates, from an African vantage point.
The Octet Rule Revisited: A Quantum-Continuum Framework for Chemical Bonding
(Publisher, 2025-11-24) Barack Ndenga
The octet rule is ubiquitously taught as a universal principle of chemical stability, yet it is fundamentally a pedagogical approximation that breaks down across vast regions of chemical space. Hypervalent molecules (e.g., SF₆, PCl₅), electron-deficient systems (e.g., BF₃), transition-metal complexes, and metallic clusters all violate the rule in systematic and predictable ways. Despite this, no unified framework has reconciled these deviations with the underlying quantum-mechanical continuum of electronic interactions.
Here, we propose a fully modern quantum-continuum interpretation of chemical bonding based on electron-density topology, multi-center bonding models, and the interplay between orbital energetics and electron correlation. This framework demonstrates that “octet violations’’ are not anomalies but natural consequences of delocalization, symmetry, and energy minimization in many-electron systems. By replacing the rigid octet paradigm with a continuous, energy-driven model, we resolve the apparent contradictions between introductory rules and real chemical behavior.
Keywords
Octet rule; hypervalent molecules; electron deficiency; quantum continuum model; QTAIM; ELF; multi-center bonding; chemical bonding theory.