I’m writing from Kampala in Uganda. It’s not regarded as a popular city in Africa. But it’s a tree-lined, temperate city that bustles with traffic, like New Delhi, and thousands of tourists visit.

There’s something about Kampala that intrigues the soul. The views from the Gaddafi mosque are mind-blowing – the slums of Katwe on one end and upmarket buildings on the other.

Beyond the city’s sights and sounds, I’m fortunate that my work here takes me to Makerere University. Once considered the Harvard of Africa, this is one of Africa’s foremost institutions.

This university is the alma mater to many post-independence African leaders, including Ugandan president Milton Obote and Tanzania president Julius Nyerere. And today it’s is home to Mahmood Mamdani who, along with Achille Mbembe, is often considered Africa’s leading intellectual.

But the university is not what it was. Mamdani’s 2007 book Scholars in the Marketplace is an important study of how neoliberal pro-market reforms seriously compromised scholarship at Makarere. In South Africa, our national crisis is so profound that there’s seldom much focus on the state of our universities.

In July an important piece by Michael Nassen Smith and Niall Reddy on the deeply troubling approach taken to the imperative to decolonise by the University of Cape Town inspired a few weeks of discussion. More recently the scandalous abandonment of the criteria for promotion to professorship at Unisa has inspired another round of discussion.

But the most profound social force driving our universities is the global pressure to commodify knowledge. Mamdani’s work shows, with characteristic brilliance and flare, that as soon as commercial forces shape knowledge production, the decline of the university is inevitable.

With the real threat of the ANC having to turn to the IMF to fund an increasingly broke state, discussions about universities may seem like a luxury that we can’t afford in a time of crisis. But our crisis isn’t just about State Capture and a corrupt and sometimes criminal faction of the ruling party trying to get its hands on opportunities for patronage. It is also, importantly, about a lack of ideas. And real universities, universities where knowledge is pursued for its own sake, and a professor is a person of real scholarly accomplishment, are the institutions that are best at generating ideas.

The decline of Makarere, and before that the once great university in Dar es Salaam, are urgent reminders that we must value our universities and fund them properly.

Of course, though, the lessons from Kampala extend beyond the question of its university. Sitting in its shady streets one can’t help but remember Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians in the Seventies.

Mamdani also wrote an important book, Amin – Imperialism and Fascism in Uganda, published in 1984. It’s a great pity that this brilliant little book isn’t read much in South Africa. Mamdani’s super account of the collapse into fascism under Amin is highly relevant to attempts to make sense of the Zuma/Magashule faction of the ANC, and its new allies in the EFF.

Mamdani warns that we shouldn’t understand the rise of fascism in Uganda as simply the result of one problematic individual, Idi Amin. He sees Amin as an expression of a crisis, rather than the fundamental cause of that crisis. Mamdani argues that fascism developed in Uganda, and found its champion in Amin because colonial thought was continued Independence with the result that the new order failed the majority.

Under these circumstances, the emergence of a “strongman” promising to “clean up” society by scapegoating a minority had significant appeal.

Now that South Africa has plunged into a serious economic and social crisis, and the ANC seems incapable of resolving its internal crisis, which means that it can’t act to resolve the national crisis, we are also in a situation where strongmen offering what seem to be easy solutions to complex problems are already starting to become attractive to some sections of society.

The idea that fascism is a uniquely European problem is a classic case of Eurocentrism, and lazy and ahistorical thought at its worst. Uganda collapsed into fascism under Idi Amin. India has collapsed into fascism under Narendra Modi. Any society can collapse into fascism when an existing elite is unable to resolve an entrenched social crisis.

If we actually took the experience of other African countries, and countries in the global south, more seriously we’d know that many societies have collapsed into authoritarianism or even fascism. And if we really understood this we’d understand that the alternative to authoritarianism is not neoliberalism. On the contrary, it is neoliberalism that paved the way for Zuma and Malema to emerge, and more neoliberalism will only strengthen the hand of the authoritarian populists waiting in the wings.

If we are to sustain our democracy and avoid a descent into authoritarianism, or even fascism, we need to build a society that puts people before profit. And in order to do that we need to restore the integrity of the state. Without the latter, the former is not possible.

After all, no one in their right mind would not be concerned about the NHI after the Life Esidimeni scandal, or the scandalous state of many of our state hospitals. Until the state is able to win back the trust of the people there simply will be no realistic way to build a more inclusive society. For this reason, the battle against corruption is our most urgent battle. If that battle can be won, then the next battle must be for a socialist or at least a social democratic alternative to neo-liberalism, including measures like the NHI. DM

Imraan Buccus is senior research associate at ASRI, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN and academic director of a university study abroad programme on political transformation