THE current global financial crisis calls for a complete rethink of the world’s economic systems, President Nelson Mandela said on Friday at an awards ceremony held in his honour at Harvard University in the United States.
Mandela, speaking at the Boston university while receiving an honorary law degree, said economic theorists seem to have hidden real structural defects in the world economic system. “The precepts of the economic theorists who could so confidently prescribe to all, now appear to have drawn much of their apparent intellectual validation from having been unchallenged by the day-to-day operations of a system that operated in the interests of the powerful.
“Not only does this crisis call for fundamental rethinking and reconceptualisation on the part of the theorists of the North. It more particularly and urgently emphasises the need for thinkers and intellectuals of the developing world to sharpen their skills and analyses,” Mandela said.