Economic transformation can bridge the ‘seismic fault’ that haunts SA today

This is the challenge to all students graduating today. Much is expected of you. You are the best-educated members of a generation who will take our country, and this continent, into the future.

This is the week in which, 40 years ago, young scholars walked out from their schools to demand better education. It was a cause for which they were prepared to die, as hundreds of them did over the next decade. Education is fundamental in building the capacity to overcome the poverty and inequality which cripple us. How do we create an educational system that does not betray the sacrifice of the 1976 generation?

But there is more than this. If we look at the 12 most southern countries of Africa and ask where each was in 1960 and where each hoped to be 50 years later, we find that many which were hopeful have failed dismally, while two that had the worst prospects, Botswana and Mauritius, have done remarkably well. This is due to several factors but common to all countries is one fact: the quality of leadership. It is this which will determine where we will be 50 years from now.

There is need for a radical creative vision beyond the gods that have failed both on the left and the right. Eastern Europe has tried communism; North America neoliberalism. The results have not been good for either ideology. It is your task to forge that new vision, not least in Southern Africa, and to bring it about.

As a Russian revolutionary once said, what is needed are hearts on fire and heads on ice. The future is in your hands.

Wilson has analysed issues affecting social justice in South Africa for more than 40 years through, for example, launching the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit and directing the 3rd Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in South Africa. This is an edited extract of a speech when he received an honorary doctorate from UCT this week