William Gumede

The question is often asked whether African culture and traditions are obstacles to development and democracy.

In Brazil, a drought combined with an overlapping fiscal crisis and lack of public and market believability in the government’s ability to deal with these, plunged the country into economic freefall.

The drought scorched Brazil’s agriculture sector, hitting exports, income and jobs.

One of the great mysteries of South African politics is how President Jacob Zuma manages to survive career-ending crisis after career-ending crisis, each sufficient unto itself to have floored any other politician.

Yet Zuma keeps on going.

The Asian dragon has emerged from typical developing country backwardness to the second largest economy in the world within four decades, regularly posting double-digit economic growth rates.

Alarmingly, there has recently been a rise in calls from both within and outside Africa saying that for individual countries on the continent to pursue democracy will undermine their economic growth, development and industrialization.

Every year hundreds of young men and boys die at initiation schools from botched circumcisions, assault or dehydration, yet government, traditional and “cultural” authorities have done very little to intervene.

In politics, like in life generally, a window of opportunity suddenly opens up, to rapidly close thereafter. Unless, one grabs it, the moment and the opportunity pass with astonishing speed.

Official racism may been long abolished in South Africa and the US since anti-race activists such as Assata Shakur in the 1970s US, and anti-apartheid activists in South Africa launched their resistance, yet it’s terrible legacy persists for long thereafter.

South African and African higher education institutions must redefine themselves away from being ‘ivory towers’, and with greater urgency pursue a new democratisation mission of their societies, given the spectacular failure of political leadership in the region to entrench genuine democracy.

The first thing that strikes one as one reads the pages of Nelson Mandela’s speeches, letters and transcripts collected in ‘No Easy Walk to Freedom’, is that he and his generation of ANC and ANC Youth League leaders were political giants compared with the current cohort.