In the midst of the Olympic Games, Brazil faces a disgraceful political crisis and has been forced to impeach its president Dilma Rousseff. Brazil is the first country which would be hosting the Olympics while being forced to put its president on trial.
They faced a better choice during the last presidential elections in the person of Marina Silva, a woman who would have become the country’s first Afro American President.
The thing about Brazil is that it is a potentially great country that still has to atone for its sins of slavery and discrimination against its large African majority. Yes, you heard me well. Most people in Brazil are Afro Americans. But these people are so discriminated against that you wouldn’t know.
The Afro American majority in Brazil mostly live in ghettos called favelas, where poverty,crime and  disease order of the day.
Other Afro Americans of Brazilian citizenship, also called Afro-Brazilians, leave on rural lands, that wealthy property developers are always trying to take over.
In fact, what is still going on beyond the surface in Brazil is 21st Century Apartheid. Brazil needs a Nelson Mandela, a member of the Afro American community that would  heal the wounds and bring them true unity.
That is the opportunity they missed when Marina Silva was passed over for the presidency in the last elections. Instead, they are left with a president whose government is accused of padding economic figures to a very much unacceptable extent.
Brazil with its large land mass, large economy and large role as keeper of the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon, deserves better than the disgraceful political scandal it is going through now.
It has been touted as a member of the emerging BRICS economic giants, but has faltered and seems to have veered hopelessly off course.
But there is still hope. The Brazilian elite needs to embrace its silently suffering Afro American majority. It needs to draw them out of the favelas so that Brazil will gain the advantages of unity and rapid expansion of its tiny middle class via the creation of opportunities for millions of impoverished Afro Americans (a rapidly expanding middle class is one of China’s secrets of success).
Then politically, Brazil needs to heal itself and embrace unity. It should become a place where citizens of all races are given a level playing ground to reach any level of achievement they can fairly attain.
If affirmative action is the answer, then the White minority elite should provide it for its people. That is the only way they can achieve their dream of becoming a truly global power.
They should borrow a leaf from the United States of America. I believe sincerely that the claim fo the US to be the Leader of the Free World wouldn’t have been taken seriously, had it not seriously tackled the problems of racism and slavery.
Brazil, by resolutely fighting those special interests that seek to take over the ancestral lands of Afro Americans, can by so doing, bolster its faltering environmental credentials as a protector of the largely rural ancestral lands.
As Abraham Lincoln said, a house divided against itself cannot stand. Â The House of Brazil has to unite itself.
Discrimination most especially racism is bad!
May God protect all the blacks