GLOBAL SOLIDARITY ON INTERNATIONAL MANDELA DAY
Nelson Mandela would have celebrated his 102nd birthday today. Every year, July 18th, is marked as International Mandela Day in his honor, a celebration of the human spirit over adversity. This includes an Annual Lecture hosted by the Nelson Mandela Foundation which for the first time was streamed virtually from Johannesburg and the United Nations headquarters in New York this morning, connecting the world in solidarity as we tackle not only the pandemic, but the ‘inequality’ pandemic’ which was the theme of this year’s lecture.
This year is a particularly momentous year to reflect upon Nelson Mandela’s story and his struggle to liberate South Africa from the deep injustices of apartheid. As South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa said in his speech, “His legacy in fighting apartheid is all the more relevant today as across the world, people are rising and taking a firm stand against racism, injustice and inequality. In his memory, we must strive all the more harder to build societies rooted in mutual respect, tolerance and reconciliation.”
To watch the event, click on the recording below. For a full transcript of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s powerful and thought-provoking Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, “Tackling the inequality pandemic”, click here.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ speech laid out the challenges exposed ‘like an X-ray’ by COVID19:
“One hundred million more people could be pushed into extreme poverty. We could see famines of historic proportions.
COVID-19 has been likened to an X-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built.
It is exposing fallacies and falsehoods everywhere:
The lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all;
The fiction that unpaid care work is not work;
The delusion that we live in a post-racist world;
The myth that we are all in the same boat.
Because while we are all floating on the same sea, it’s clear that some of us are in superyachts while others are clinging to the floating debris”
As President Ramaphosa noted in his address, “Our acts of care and solidarity should also deepen our collaboration to address humankind’s most pressing challenges: better education, eliminating poverty and underdevelopment, food security, climate change and gender-based violence.”
Wild Tomorrow Fund has been able, thanks to our donors, to assist with alleviating food insecurity in our region, KwaZulu-Natal, during the pandemic. Due to the extended lockdown in South Africa, many families have not be able to make an income during this time – those who are precariously employed or earn a living under the no work no pay structure. We feel it is our responsibility to ensure that our neighbors do not go hungry. Next week we will deliver our 3rd monthly food parcel to 100 families living in the community next door to our wildlife reserve. To help with the next delivery, please donate here.
Throughout the lockdown we have also continued to employ our full-time team of five management staff, ten rangers plus pay monthly stipends to the teachers at the Theleluwazi Creche which we proudly built last year. Being able to continue to work throughout this crisis is a financial lifeline for our staff and the extended families and communities they support.
To this, we add what lies at the heart of our mission - the tremendous challenge to preserve wildlife and the world’s last remaining wild places. As more and more people move ever closer to, and put more pressure on once-wild environments, wildlife loses its wild home, and we are at greater risk of spillover events and zoonotic diseases like COVID19. Caught in a negative feedback loop, the pandemic places even more pressure on existing wildlife reserves, with the wildlife authority of our region reported last week to be close to financial collapse. There are grave fears across Africa for the fate of wildlife reserves and the wildlife under their protection, without vital tourism revenue.
To protect people from the next pandemic, we must address the key, human-led drivers that put us at risk: increased forest loss, land conversion for agriculture and development, and illegally-traded live wildlife. These drivers all contribute to dangerous scenarios that increase the risk of new spillover. These are also drivers that we strive to fight against as part of Wild Tomorrow Fund’s mission: we are saving and restoring habitat in a global biodiversity hotspot which otherwise would have been converted to monoculture pineapple farming. We fight against wildlife trafficking by equipping and training rangers on the frontlines of anti-poaching efforts. And we educate people around the world with our volunteer trips and educational talks.
Nelson Mandela was a fierce proponent of conserving biodiversity, for the benefit of people and the planet. He believed in the power of conservation to empower people while also protecting wildlife and habitats. He was a proponent of reaching across international borders to conserve large landscapes and magnificent species like the elephants, rhinos, lions, hyena and smaller yet equally unique and important animals, plants, reptiles and insects that we strive to protect in KwaZulu-Natal South Africa.
An immense task lies before us. We know there is so much more we must strive to do to help fight the inequality pandemic while also fighting for a cause that is so much greater than ourselves: the preservation of wildlife and the last remaining wild places. Nelson Mandela’s story taught us to remain courageous and to persevere. We have it in us to rise above the devastation brought upon us by the pandemic this Mandela Day.
