Commonwealth Local Government Forum

Local democracy will prevail

 

CLGF Secretary-General Emeritus Dr Carl Wright

July 2016



It has been a huge privilege to serve CLGF, the Commonwealth and the international community over the past 40 years, with half of that time dedicated to the promotion of local democracy and better services to our local communities. My professional career has been immensely rewarding: remarkable people I have met, some of them great national leaders – like Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, Indira Gandhi, Julius Nyerere, Willy Brandt. And some very ordinary, decent people, struggling in their own way to make a better life for their families; some incredibly inspiring people like the deputy mayor of Harare, persevering with his fight for democracy despite having just had his wife brutally murdered by political thugs. 

Over these 40 years I have seen many changes in the world - the collapse of colonialism across Southern Africa and the demise of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the rise of neo-liberalism and free market forces, 9/11 and the onset of a religious fundamentalism many of us thought we had left long behind, the environmental and women’s movement and the cultural changes driven by a new, young, generation of which I was part of - the  so-called soixante-huits or ‘68s’, 1968 being the year I started my university studies.

It is said that when you grow old you get wiser you become more conservative in your views. I am not sure if I have gotten wiser or more conservative - I have probably become more tolerant and understanding of the world. At the same time I hope I have kept my early radicalism from the time when I was fighting for human and labour rights as a young man: I certainty still burn with indignation at the poverty and injustices in the world, at political and social intolerance and when I see a young person sleeping rough or without a job, when I see a young life with a grim future.

Three years ago the University of KwaZulu Natal Durban was kind enough to bestow an honorary doctorate on me. On that occasion I made a speech warning of the growing inequalities of income and wealth around the world, inequalities which are producing increased anger directed at the rich one per cent. If anything that anger has accentuated in the past few years.  The foolishness and frankly-self destruction of the recent British Brexit vote is an expression of this. So is the rise of demagogic populists like Donald Trump in the USA, Marianne Le Pen in France and Nigel Farage in the UK.

I passionately believe in international understanding among people of all religions, colours and creeds, in the values of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth and its constituent parts like CLGF, indeed all of us, have a duty to address inequality and intolerance and to fight against this wherever it occurs. Not to do so would be an abdication of responsibility, to risk a collapse of the post-1945 international order, a return to the dark days of the 1930s with all that implies.

I am an optimist by nature. I believe in the Commonwealth and the good of ordinary men and women. We have come a long way in the last 40 years and despite everything the world is a better place. Let us not throw away that legacy of progress, let us not extinguish the flames of freedom, let us not break the common bonds that bind us. The Commonwealth, the Commonwealth Local Government Forum and so many international bodies, provide the inspiration and means to achieve a better world. I hope to continue to serve that cause of international understanding in new capacities, to work with you to in the service of our common humanity. That indeed is the greatest privilege, the greatest reward, the best gift I can imagine receiving.

 

 


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One resilient common future

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