Communal land under control of traditional leaders, chiefs and kings, rather than individual owners, is one of the biggest obstacles to development, industrialization and economic growth in Africa.

Emergency services, disaster management, the ward councilor and his committee and other state support structures were missing in action at Glebelands hostel after #DurbanStorm. Many of the rotten, decades-old blocks are structurally unsound, yet there were no officials on site to whom the residents could turn for help. The Glebelands community, as usual, has been left to pick up the pieces themselves as best they could.

Western bodies have long reduced African academics to native informants whose job is simply to collect data for those in New York or London who have the conceptual competence to study it. It is this native informant mentality that Prof. Mamdani is uprooting in his effort to transform Makerere Institute of Social Research from a consultancy unit into a full-fledged research institute. Such a person needs support, not slander.

If the secessionist movements in English-speaking Cameroon continue to pursue the head-on collision option with the Republic of Cameroon, there will likely be many more massacres of citizens, many more toothless mealy-mouthed platitudes from the United Nations and other foreign observers, but no meaningful progress to end the current crisis.

Spanish unity and prosperity resulted from the global plunder and slavery that fuelled the emergence of the capitalist countries. The tonnes of gold looted from the New World by slave labour propped up the feudal aristocracy and its handmaid, the Catholic Church. Capitalism developed slowly and unevenly, and the Spanish state subordinated other territories with their own distinct history, language, culture and economy.