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This LEKOMPO celebrities are a problem, I blame shebeshxt for this behaviour 🚮 Minnie Dlamini Nairobi CBD Chicken Licken R Kelly Mr Moloto South Africans Cristiano Lerato Jacob Zuma Sun City Thikho Events #amakhosi4life #OnceAlways Penuel Do Not Comply Proteas

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ThePitBull

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493,116 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

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10 Comments

®️ Cool'est Regular Nigga 👑's profile picture
®️ Cool'est Regular Nigga 👑1 year ago

Nah bruv, the car is moving and you try to open the door? You deserve that.. i wish fans went back to not being entitled.. your favorite artist dont owe you shii

Hope@308's profile picture
Hope@3081 year ago

Why did she open the door

FlyZulu's profile picture
FlyZulu1 year ago

lenna if you randomly opened my car door while I am driving off I will slap you.

Thato Malemone 🇿🇦's profile picture
Thato Malemone 🇿🇦1 year ago

Why was she opening a door? You do randomly walk up to a car in the mall and try to open the door? Let’s stop doing nonsense please

Osborn Mabunda's profile picture
Osborn Mabunda1 year ago

Yena aya kwini??

Islamic Relief USA's profile picture
Islamic Relief USA1 year ago

Thousands injured in Lebanon, death toll rising. Send Humanitarian aid now with IRUSA

iMbaliEnhle's profile picture
iMbaliEnhle1 year ago

Bathong Tribby ke mang? 🤣

ThePitBull's profile picture
ThePitBull1 year ago

You are defending her ?

DengatheDC's profile picture
DengatheDC1 year ago

I don't think 🤔 the slap was based on gender, but rebuke misbehaving

Sterling Archer's profile picture
Sterling Archer1 year ago

Le rata engagement kudu.

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Watch this Tiktok live Ghanaians are dragging the Igbos for their bad behaviour in Ghana Igbos are blaming it on YORUBAS 😂 Watch what a Ghanaian woman said to the Igbos about the Yorubas in Ghana “ What kind of obsession is this”? I have never seen a cowardly people than this in my life Igbos one thing you people do not know how to do is to take “ RESPONSIBILITY “ and that right there will never make you learn from your mistakes or grow at all South Africans complained about you , “ You blame Yorubas “ Ghana complained about you, “ You blamed Yorubas “ Benin people once attacked you all for denigrating their Oba “ You blamed Yoruba “ You started a war and lost “ You blamed Yoruba “ An Ibo man lost the election, you blame the Yoruba Ibo man music no sell, You blame Yoruba Ibo man movies no sell, you blame Yoruba Na Yoruba Colonised you? When exactly will you do away with being a Coward and take Responsibility for your actions? Blaming Your Fuck ups on some else just keep exposing yall as WEAK , COWARDS Always blaming , Bullying and claiming the victim when it doesn't go your way .. “ WEAK “ Empires Yorubas have Ruled And Conquered Years and years ago . This winter cap people are having that mindset in 2025 thinking their wont be a push back if they say “ I BUY THE LAND “ dummy

Nononsense

38,822 views • 1 year ago

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki made some serious mistakes during his presidency, and the two glaring ones were HIV and AIDS policy and Zimbabwe. I would also add his failure to properly groom or allow a successor before the 2007 Polokwane conference. But every time I listen to South African leaders speak, he still stands above all the presidents South Africa has had after Nelson Mandela. Mandela was in a league of his own and served a unique historical purpose during a particular era, so I do not even place him in this comparison. But when you compare Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa, I genuinely enjoy listening to Mbeki because his arguments are backed by facts, empirical evidence, research, economic analysis, scholars and international journals. Whether one agrees with him or not, he constructs arguments intellectually. Listening to this discussion in the video reminded me again that he was a great leader who nevertheless had major flaws, and unfortunately those flaws often overshadow many of the positive things he achieved for the South African economy. I mentioned HIV and AIDS. I mentioned Zimbabwe. I mentioned the failure to groom a successor. I also think one of his major mistakes was the refusal to invest adequately in Eskom at the time when warnings were already being raised about future electricity generation problems. But when you then look at the presidencies of Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa, it becomes a completely different picture. Mbeki’s approach to Zimbabwe was ideological. Zuma, for all his own problems, is probably the only South African president who can genuinely say he at least attempted to engage Zimbabwe politically in a meaningful way. But Ramaphosa’s relationship with Zimbabwe appears deeply compromised by business and political interests, at worst corrupt. And when you assess the three presidencies rationally, especially from an economic management perspective, the figures speak for themselves. South Africa’s economic growth reached around 5% to 6% during parts of the Mbeki era, levels the country has struggled to reach since. The problem today is that many people analyse these leaders emotionally instead of rationally. Economic performance is measured through figures, and those figures are publicly available. So every time I listen to Thabo Mbeki speak, I enjoy listening to him because of the depth, structure and intellectual discipline of the way he makes his arguments.
17:12

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki made some serious mistakes during his presidency, and the two glaring ones were HIV and AIDS policy and Zimbabwe. I would also add his failure to properly groom or allow a successor before the 2007 Polokwane conference. But every time I listen to South African leaders speak, he still stands above all the presidents South Africa has had after Nelson Mandela. Mandela was in a league of his own and served a unique historical purpose during a particular era, so I do not even place him in this comparison. But when you compare Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa, I genuinely enjoy listening to Mbeki because his arguments are backed by facts, empirical evidence, research, economic analysis, scholars and international journals. Whether one agrees with him or not, he constructs arguments intellectually. Listening to this discussion in the video reminded me again that he was a great leader who nevertheless had major flaws, and unfortunately those flaws often overshadow many of the positive things he achieved for the South African economy. I mentioned HIV and AIDS. I mentioned Zimbabwe. I mentioned the failure to groom a successor. I also think one of his major mistakes was the refusal to invest adequately in Eskom at the time when warnings were already being raised about future electricity generation problems. But when you then look at the presidencies of Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa, it becomes a completely different picture. Mbeki’s approach to Zimbabwe was ideological. Zuma, for all his own problems, is probably the only South African president who can genuinely say he at least attempted to engage Zimbabwe politically in a meaningful way. But Ramaphosa’s relationship with Zimbabwe appears deeply compromised by business and political interests, at worst corrupt. And when you assess the three presidencies rationally, especially from an economic management perspective, the figures speak for themselves. South Africa’s economic growth reached around 5% to 6% during parts of the Mbeki era, levels the country has struggled to reach since. The problem today is that many people analyse these leaders emotionally instead of rationally. Economic performance is measured through figures, and those figures are publicly available. So every time I listen to Thabo Mbeki speak, I enjoy listening to him because of the depth, structure and intellectual discipline of the way he makes his arguments.

Hopewell Chin’ono

97,682 views • 2 months ago

Nairobi County, like many other progressive cities including Kigali, Rwanda has embraced modern technology to enhance cleanliness, such as street sweepers, refuse compactors, and other specialized equipment. However, what truly sets cities like Kigali apart is not just the machines they use, but the mindset of their citizens. In Rwanda, they have a national cleanup day Umuganda which is respected, honored, and attended by almost every citizen. People take it seriously because they understand that a clean environment is a shared responsibility. In contrast, here in Nairobi, when residents are called upon to participate in cleaning their own city, many respond with indifference, saying “it’s none of my business.” Rwandans do not dump garbage along road reserves like we often do. They do not blame the government for everything they understand they are the government. They value and protect their country. They do not vandalize public property like we did with our newly installed dustbins. And when they criticize, they do so constructively offering solutions and meaningful advice. My message to Nairobi residents is this: 1.Stop illegal dumping. Do not throw garbage from your cars or matatus along road reserves, where it ends up in rivers and clogs our drainage systems. 2.Stop handing over your household or business waste to street families or unauthorized individuals. This only worsens our garbage problem. 3.Instead, give your waste to licensed and authorized waste collectors who manage it responsibly from the source to final disposal. Alternatively, take your waste to the county-designated transfer points where it can be handled safely and properly. 4.Stop discharging raw sewage or any form of effluent into the environment. This pollutes our water sources and endangers public health. Environmental protection is not the government’s job alone it is a shared responsibility. If we all take ownership of our environment, love it, and reject the “I don’t care” culture, Nairobi can become one of the cleanest and most beautiful cities in the world. Let’s take pride in our city. Let’s be the change we want to see in Nairobi.
5:15

Nairobi County, like many other progressive cities including Kigali, Rwanda has embraced modern technology to enhance cleanliness, such as street sweepers, refuse compactors, and other specialized equipment. However, what truly sets cities like Kigali apart is not just the machines they use, but the mindset of their citizens. In Rwanda, they have a national cleanup day Umuganda which is respected, honored, and attended by almost every citizen. People take it seriously because they understand that a clean environment is a shared responsibility. In contrast, here in Nairobi, when residents are called upon to participate in cleaning their own city, many respond with indifference, saying “it’s none of my business.” Rwandans do not dump garbage along road reserves like we often do. They do not blame the government for everything they understand they are the government. They value and protect their country. They do not vandalize public property like we did with our newly installed dustbins. And when they criticize, they do so constructively offering solutions and meaningful advice. My message to Nairobi residents is this: 1.Stop illegal dumping. Do not throw garbage from your cars or matatus along road reserves, where it ends up in rivers and clogs our drainage systems. 2.Stop handing over your household or business waste to street families or unauthorized individuals. This only worsens our garbage problem. 3.Instead, give your waste to licensed and authorized waste collectors who manage it responsibly from the source to final disposal. Alternatively, take your waste to the county-designated transfer points where it can be handled safely and properly. 4.Stop discharging raw sewage or any form of effluent into the environment. This pollutes our water sources and endangers public health. Environmental protection is not the government’s job alone it is a shared responsibility. If we all take ownership of our environment, love it, and reject the “I don’t care” culture, Nairobi can become one of the cleanest and most beautiful cities in the world. Let’s take pride in our city. Let’s be the change we want to see in Nairobi.

Geoffrey Mosiria

125,905 views • 1 year ago

South Africa Is Playing With Fire Boardrooms are now battlegrounds. Activists are marching into corporate offices across South Africa demanding that "foreigners" pack up and leave. President Cyril Ramaphosa Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 this cannot stand and here's why it's not just wrong, it's dangerously short-sighted. Please ask yourself does South Africa know how deeply it is embedded in the rest of this continent? ✅️1. MTN carries hundreds of millions of subscribers across Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, and beyond a South African company thriving on African soil that isn't its own. MTN South Africa ✅️2. Absa now earns nearly a third of its group profit from outside South Africa — Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania and is still acquiring more African banks as we speak. Absa Group ✅️3.Standard Bank remains the continent's largest bank by assets, moving trillions of rand through African economies every single year. Standard Bank ZA ✅️4. MultiChoice/DStv has for decades been the dominant gatekeeper of entertainment and information across dozens of African households. ✅️5. Sanlam and Old Mutual manage insurance and pension savings for millions of East and West Africans. ✅️6. Nandos, Steers, and Debonairs feed households across Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and Uganda. ✅️7. Bidvest and Imperial Logistics run supply chains that keep goods moving through multiple African economies. ✅8. ️Then there's tourism an industry South Africa depends on heavily, and where the hypocrisy cuts sharpest. Hospitality groups like Tsogo Sun, City Lodge, and Sun International have expanded into Zambia, Nigeria, and beyond. South African Airways, Airlink, and a web of SA-based travel companies have spent decades marketing Cape Town, Kruger, and the Garden Route to the rest of the continent and Africans have answered in huge numbers. Kenyans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, and others fill Sandton hotels, Table Mountain cable cars, and Kruger safari lodges every year, injecting real foreign currency into the South African economy. So which is it? Do you want African wallets in your tills and African bodies in your hotel beds, but not African faces in your boardrooms? Now imagine just for a moment Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, or Ghana adopting the same logic. Boardrooms in Lagos or Nairobi staging walk-ins demanding MTN executives leave, Absa hand back its banking licenses, or Kenyan immigration quietly discouraging South African tourists from checking into Mombasa or Diani hotels. The fallout for South Africa would be instant and brutal and tourism, banking, and telecoms would be the first casualties, not the last. This is the essence of glass houses and stones. You cannot build a continental empire in banking, telecoms, insurance, and tourism, and then slam the door on that same continent's citizens the moment it's convenient at home. It's worth remembering South Africa's most celebrated exports thrive precisely because other nations didn't gatekeep opportunity by passport. Trevor Noah built a global career from a studio in New York. Elon Musk, born in Pretoria, built his fortune in Silicon Valley and Texas. Both benefited from economies that judged them on merit, not nationality. Trevor Noah Elon Musk If Africa responds to South Africa's boardroom nativism with mirrored nativism, no one wins least of all South Africans working, investing, and building across this continent. Mr. President, this is a fire worth putting out before it spreads. As always, I choose to remain an optimist. Mohammed Hersi A true African patriot at heart
2:50

South Africa Is Playing With Fire Boardrooms are now battlegrounds. Activists are marching into corporate offices across South Africa demanding that "foreigners" pack up and leave. President Cyril Ramaphosa Cyril Ramaphosa 🇿🇦 this cannot stand and here's why it's not just wrong, it's dangerously short-sighted. Please ask yourself does South Africa know how deeply it is embedded in the rest of this continent? ✅️1. MTN carries hundreds of millions of subscribers across Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, Côte d'Ivoire, and beyond a South African company thriving on African soil that isn't its own. MTN South Africa ✅️2. Absa now earns nearly a third of its group profit from outside South Africa — Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania and is still acquiring more African banks as we speak. Absa Group ✅️3.Standard Bank remains the continent's largest bank by assets, moving trillions of rand through African economies every single year. Standard Bank ZA ✅️4. MultiChoice/DStv has for decades been the dominant gatekeeper of entertainment and information across dozens of African households. ✅️5. Sanlam and Old Mutual manage insurance and pension savings for millions of East and West Africans. ✅️6. Nandos, Steers, and Debonairs feed households across Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and Uganda. ✅️7. Bidvest and Imperial Logistics run supply chains that keep goods moving through multiple African economies. ✅8. ️Then there's tourism an industry South Africa depends on heavily, and where the hypocrisy cuts sharpest. Hospitality groups like Tsogo Sun, City Lodge, and Sun International have expanded into Zambia, Nigeria, and beyond. South African Airways, Airlink, and a web of SA-based travel companies have spent decades marketing Cape Town, Kruger, and the Garden Route to the rest of the continent and Africans have answered in huge numbers. Kenyans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, and others fill Sandton hotels, Table Mountain cable cars, and Kruger safari lodges every year, injecting real foreign currency into the South African economy. So which is it? Do you want African wallets in your tills and African bodies in your hotel beds, but not African faces in your boardrooms? Now imagine just for a moment Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, or Ghana adopting the same logic. Boardrooms in Lagos or Nairobi staging walk-ins demanding MTN executives leave, Absa hand back its banking licenses, or Kenyan immigration quietly discouraging South African tourists from checking into Mombasa or Diani hotels. The fallout for South Africa would be instant and brutal and tourism, banking, and telecoms would be the first casualties, not the last. This is the essence of glass houses and stones. You cannot build a continental empire in banking, telecoms, insurance, and tourism, and then slam the door on that same continent's citizens the moment it's convenient at home. It's worth remembering South Africa's most celebrated exports thrive precisely because other nations didn't gatekeep opportunity by passport. Trevor Noah built a global career from a studio in New York. Elon Musk, born in Pretoria, built his fortune in Silicon Valley and Texas. Both benefited from economies that judged them on merit, not nationality. Trevor Noah Elon Musk If Africa responds to South Africa's boardroom nativism with mirrored nativism, no one wins least of all South Africans working, investing, and building across this continent. Mr. President, this is a fire worth putting out before it spreads. As always, I choose to remain an optimist. Mohammed Hersi A true African patriot at heart

Mohammed Hersi : Mr Optimist

332,989 views • 27 days ago

ASLAM ISMAIL DHAI- PHOENIX CASH AND CARRY His family owns various grocery wholesalers around the country. South Africa has a massive problem of child headed homes, gogo’s living alone in poverty. his group employs thousands of people. You will not find a single foreigner only South Africans. It’s insane how life has changed for many they used to live in shacks, now they renting apartments, schools nearby. Donations should never be exposed, but YESTERDAY at the very last minute when we needed to buy basic necessities, he said add sweets and chocolates for the kids. Because it was late. We got 300 hampers. What if other South Africans do this hunger will completely eradicated. He was so disappointed that he could only do 300 hampers. The group has water tankers we now the catastrophic conditions of water in eThkweni . No race, colour or religion they give water to all the people every single day. Oh btw this company is the second largest distributor of Coca-Cola in SA., he did not saying this but I am, Goverment gives contracts worth millions to entrepreneur why not give people like Phoenix cash and carry and others. What you did yesterday Mr Aslam, is one for the history books. The fact that you even wanted to add sweets and chocolates. We had a lot this year, BUT HERO OF THE YEAR. The amount of blessings you will get when that child headed home a 13 year old feeding her 4 year old brother. HERO OF THE YEAR 2025 Pls spread your companies wings, Johannesburg needs you, Limpop and other provinces need you. Why not give food hamper packs to someone who bends over backwards to help the poor. He did apply once was rejected. The tenderguys got it and ironically come buy it from him for example they selling for R89.00 tender guys invoice to department at a cool R 1499.99 We need you in jhb. We need you in Limpopo We need you in Mpumalanga One of the multiple vans with yesterday’s deliveries
0:27

ASLAM ISMAIL DHAI- PHOENIX CASH AND CARRY His family owns various grocery wholesalers around the country. South Africa has a massive problem of child headed homes, gogo’s living alone in poverty. his group employs thousands of people. You will not find a single foreigner only South Africans. It’s insane how life has changed for many they used to live in shacks, now they renting apartments, schools nearby. Donations should never be exposed, but YESTERDAY at the very last minute when we needed to buy basic necessities, he said add sweets and chocolates for the kids. Because it was late. We got 300 hampers. What if other South Africans do this hunger will completely eradicated. He was so disappointed that he could only do 300 hampers. The group has water tankers we now the catastrophic conditions of water in eThkweni . No race, colour or religion they give water to all the people every single day. Oh btw this company is the second largest distributor of Coca-Cola in SA., he did not saying this but I am, Goverment gives contracts worth millions to entrepreneur why not give people like Phoenix cash and carry and others. What you did yesterday Mr Aslam, is one for the history books. The fact that you even wanted to add sweets and chocolates. We had a lot this year, BUT HERO OF THE YEAR. The amount of blessings you will get when that child headed home a 13 year old feeding her 4 year old brother. HERO OF THE YEAR 2025 Pls spread your companies wings, Johannesburg needs you, Limpop and other provinces need you. Why not give food hamper packs to someone who bends over backwards to help the poor. He did apply once was rejected. The tenderguys got it and ironically come buy it from him for example they selling for R89.00 tender guys invoice to department at a cool R 1499.99 We need you in jhb. We need you in Limpopo We need you in Mpumalanga One of the multiple vans with yesterday’s deliveries

Goolam

27,017 views • 7 months ago

I’m not gonna keep coming after this kid after this, I’ve made my point, but since he doesn’t want to debate, here are my closing arguments. Jacob aka The Moderate Case is simply wrong on certain topics, which is fine. What’s not fine is how he refuses to admit he’s wrong, and how he reacts to being proven wrong. He’s made it very clear he’s smarter than me, you, and everyone else. He’s made it very clear that he’s more influential and important than you, so your opinion doesn’t matter. He thinks his follower count, status, and popularity makes him the authority figure, so you better shut up and know your place, because he’s doing you (Jews) a favor by gracing you with his support. I watched his live last night with Nick Matau, and this kid is a narcissist, full stop. His inflated ego means if you disagree with him on anything Israel related, the only logical explanation is you’re engaging in “hasbara”, also commonly known as “Israeli propaganda”. He’s used that word enough times in clap backs to come to a logical conclusion that he believes you’re a propagandist if you disagree with him, read that again. If enough Israel supporters disagree with him, the only logical conclusion he will then reach is they are all stupid, and he will stop supporting Israel, bookmark it. What he’s doing is not naivety, because he’s not naive, he’s extremely intelligent. The problem with people like Jacob is they’re intelligent, but they’re not wise. That comes from experience, and failure, which he doesn’t understand, but I do. What I did when I called him out was I put him through a pressure test, and he failed. Just like Megyn Kelly, he made me and you the problem, because “he’s forgotten more than you’ll ever know” One day he will finally realize he got too close to the sun, and pride comes before the fall, but that’s clearly not today. Too bad, because I had high hopes for him. I guess I was wrong, and unlike Jacob, I CAN admit that.
5:23

I’m not gonna keep coming after this kid after this, I’ve made my point, but since he doesn’t want to debate, here are my closing arguments. Jacob aka The Moderate Case is simply wrong on certain topics, which is fine. What’s not fine is how he refuses to admit he’s wrong, and how he reacts to being proven wrong. He’s made it very clear he’s smarter than me, you, and everyone else. He’s made it very clear that he’s more influential and important than you, so your opinion doesn’t matter. He thinks his follower count, status, and popularity makes him the authority figure, so you better shut up and know your place, because he’s doing you (Jews) a favor by gracing you with his support. I watched his live last night with Nick Matau, and this kid is a narcissist, full stop. His inflated ego means if you disagree with him on anything Israel related, the only logical explanation is you’re engaging in “hasbara”, also commonly known as “Israeli propaganda”. He’s used that word enough times in clap backs to come to a logical conclusion that he believes you’re a propagandist if you disagree with him, read that again. If enough Israel supporters disagree with him, the only logical conclusion he will then reach is they are all stupid, and he will stop supporting Israel, bookmark it. What he’s doing is not naivety, because he’s not naive, he’s extremely intelligent. The problem with people like Jacob is they’re intelligent, but they’re not wise. That comes from experience, and failure, which he doesn’t understand, but I do. What I did when I called him out was I put him through a pressure test, and he failed. Just like Megyn Kelly, he made me and you the problem, because “he’s forgotten more than you’ll ever know” One day he will finally realize he got too close to the sun, and pride comes before the fall, but that’s clearly not today. Too bad, because I had high hopes for him. I guess I was wrong, and unlike Jacob, I CAN admit that.

The Misfit Patriot

23,530 views • 16 days ago

WE LIVE IN A REAL MAFIA STATE. Because I have all the bank statements and highly incriminating documents regarding the INDUSTRIAL style looting of G20 funds, the thugs have asked me to not post anything or they will unalive me. Perhaps I was wrong about Ramaphosa and his administration. One of your favourites from DIRCO could be implicated. Cherry on the top, they want us to dislike Surve, they closed his accounts but the same banks are paying him as sponsors of G20 without a blink. What the hell is going on. JACOB ZUMA NEVER DID THIS. WE TRULY LIVE IN A MAFIA STATE. I just hope I will be able to give the details before they unalive me. But I have given the statements to someone else just in case. How much they LOOTED, over R100 million and counting. Most definitely we will hear after the event like they looted Nelson Mandela funeral funds. It’s time for change. Helen Zille for mayor of COJ 2026 Geordin Hill-Lewis for president 2029. The ANC does not care. Just talk talk talk about fighting corruption, but do nothing. PANYAZA Lesufi gave a R3million bonus to the ex CFO of Gauteng health, Lerato Madyo who most probably got Babita Deokaran. Sad… a blistering PP report, but she possibly shared with him before releasing, but the man carries on like nothing happened. BILLIONS LOST. The Public Protector South Africa does not care. I hate to say it but Busisiwe Mkhwebane would not have shoved it under the carpet. The truth will come out.
2:44

WE LIVE IN A REAL MAFIA STATE. Because I have all the bank statements and highly incriminating documents regarding the INDUSTRIAL style looting of G20 funds, the thugs have asked me to not post anything or they will unalive me. Perhaps I was wrong about Ramaphosa and his administration. One of your favourites from DIRCO could be implicated. Cherry on the top, they want us to dislike Surve, they closed his accounts but the same banks are paying him as sponsors of G20 without a blink. What the hell is going on. JACOB ZUMA NEVER DID THIS. WE TRULY LIVE IN A MAFIA STATE. I just hope I will be able to give the details before they unalive me. But I have given the statements to someone else just in case. How much they LOOTED, over R100 million and counting. Most definitely we will hear after the event like they looted Nelson Mandela funeral funds. It’s time for change. Helen Zille for mayor of COJ 2026 Geordin Hill-Lewis for president 2029. The ANC does not care. Just talk talk talk about fighting corruption, but do nothing. PANYAZA Lesufi gave a R3million bonus to the ex CFO of Gauteng health, Lerato Madyo who most probably got Babita Deokaran. Sad… a blistering PP report, but she possibly shared with him before releasing, but the man carries on like nothing happened. BILLIONS LOST. The Public Protector South Africa does not care. I hate to say it but Busisiwe Mkhwebane would not have shoved it under the carpet. The truth will come out.

Goolam

52,219 views • 9 months ago

THE BIGGEST BLOCKBUSTER : It does not take 3 hours to get to the bottom of ANC Secretary General ANC SECRETARY GENERAL | Fikile Mbalula to understand that City Press has gone all Iqbal Surve style FAKE NEWS. Yes Mbalula was in Libya, yes a private jet was hired and fully paid for. He does not do the bookings. Mbalula did not have any idea who it belonged to. From before the election last year, Jacob Zuma has been travelling to Libya and Morocco. I posted about it with pictures. The ANC was busy with GNU and other challenges. Mbalula could not go. It’s clear as daylight Ms BOSSASA and break her leg party with chicken pieces , alcohol worth millions in her birthday party which she was not sure off. leaked false information, it’s not the first but we will hear more. Love him or dislike him. Mbalula followed the ANC rules. Why the hell the media is not checking on Jacob Zumas trips. He literally was a spy against South Africa. NOMVULA MOKANYANE TOGETHER WITH PAUL MASHATILE ARE DOING EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO DISCREDIT MBALULA. Don’t fall for it pls. Unless you want the RET cabal to run the country again. If it was not for Fikile Mbalula at the ROC, where the ANC lost its majority. Mbaks who at that in time was more powerful than Ramaphosa said “we accept the election results. This is the will of the people. All we want is safety and security, for South Africa and its people come first.” One of the most powerful statements ever. You will never get such anywhere in Africa. Stay focused ANC SECRETARY GENERAL | Fikile Mbalula don’t get distracted with fake news. I no who planted this fake story, just a little more digging and we will expose them. JUST READ Mandy Wiener book. The likes of Mbalula played a pivotal road to give us the GNU. Malusi Gigupta Gigaba fought again it. Lindiwe Sisulu going against it. Mandela Masina fought against it. The malkop who allegedly looted over R100 million in the missing festival ,Adele “jug” Lungisa foung against it.
3:06

THE BIGGEST BLOCKBUSTER : It does not take 3 hours to get to the bottom of ANC Secretary General ANC SECRETARY GENERAL | Fikile Mbalula to understand that City Press has gone all Iqbal Surve style FAKE NEWS. Yes Mbalula was in Libya, yes a private jet was hired and fully paid for. He does not do the bookings. Mbalula did not have any idea who it belonged to. From before the election last year, Jacob Zuma has been travelling to Libya and Morocco. I posted about it with pictures. The ANC was busy with GNU and other challenges. Mbalula could not go. It’s clear as daylight Ms BOSSASA and break her leg party with chicken pieces , alcohol worth millions in her birthday party which she was not sure off. leaked false information, it’s not the first but we will hear more. Love him or dislike him. Mbalula followed the ANC rules. Why the hell the media is not checking on Jacob Zumas trips. He literally was a spy against South Africa. NOMVULA MOKANYANE TOGETHER WITH PAUL MASHATILE ARE DOING EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO DISCREDIT MBALULA. Don’t fall for it pls. Unless you want the RET cabal to run the country again. If it was not for Fikile Mbalula at the ROC, where the ANC lost its majority. Mbaks who at that in time was more powerful than Ramaphosa said “we accept the election results. This is the will of the people. All we want is safety and security, for South Africa and its people come first.” One of the most powerful statements ever. You will never get such anywhere in Africa. Stay focused ANC SECRETARY GENERAL | Fikile Mbalula don’t get distracted with fake news. I no who planted this fake story, just a little more digging and we will expose them. JUST READ Mandy Wiener book. The likes of Mbalula played a pivotal road to give us the GNU. Malusi Gigupta Gigaba fought again it. Lindiwe Sisulu going against it. Mandela Masina fought against it. The malkop who allegedly looted over R100 million in the missing festival ,Adele “jug” Lungisa foung against it.

Goolam

54,915 views • 9 months ago

No words to describe the appreciation of Jeff Wicks 🇿🇦 and News24 🇿🇦 What we are seeing at the Madlanga Commission and the Parliamentary Ad Hoc Committee hearings is not because of the 6 July 2025 press conference by Mkhwanazi but because the brilliant Jeff Wicks kept this story of BABITA DEOKARAN alive. I recently watched Jeff in a podcast SMWX, you could feel the emotion in his voice. It was not a job for him. It was not about getting paid. It was to give voiceless heroes like BABITA DEOKARAN a voice. It took guts and courage to do this. The current hearings are because of JEFF WICKS and NEWS24. NOT BECAUSE MKWANAZI. Btw, Jeff said he has not had a peaceful drive for the last four years. Don’t forget he has young wife. Jeff and News24 are the real definition of “NO DNA, ONLY RSA” Basically everything you hearing you will find in perhaps one of the best books in democratic South Africa, THE SHADOW STATE, if you have not read it as yet pls get South Africa’s no 1 selling book, THE SHADOW STATE, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM AT ITS BEST. Jeff basically put his life at stake,to get to the bottom of the truth. He had her gadgets. That is the reason why. Others Hawks take the gadgets and the case never sees the light of the day. We heard again how the corrupt the Hawks are from the top. Never forget , Floyd SHIVAMBU had direct discussions with ex HAWKS head Godfrey Lebeya regarding VBS. This is the reason he is not arrested. This the reason Julius Malema is not arrested. This is the reason Jacob Zuma is not arrested. Thank you Jeff Wicks, thank you News24, you are the real heroes. Oh , don’t ever forget, Jeff told us that during the COVID looting spree, Gauteng Health Department suspended BABITA DEOKARAN without pay, because they knew she would never approve the massive wasteful expenditure and looting spree. The CFO IN Gauteng Health who Babita reported the looting of tembisa hospital, was suspended after her death with full pay. After the COVID looting scandal Babita was cleared and was back at work. The CFO Lerato Madyo was suspended with full pay, then resigned from her position just before the conclusion of a disciplinary inquiry into 13 misconduct charges. This allowed her to keep her pension and a MASSIVE R3 million bonus payout. JUST IMAGINE THE LADY WHO MOST LIKELY GOT BABITA DEOKARAN KIL*ED GOT A R3MILLION BONUS PAYOUT BESIDES HER PENSION FROM THE PANYAZA LESUFI CONTROLLED GAUTENG. No action taken against her. Babita Deokarans daughter try’s to build her life without her mother,an orphaned daughter. WHY NOT TAKE THAT R3 million from that CFO and give it to the orphaned daughter of Babita Deokaran. The more Lesufi talks ,the more I resent him. Because nothing from his mouth is the truth. The first step is to get Helen Zillle elected as a mayor of COJ.
1:47

No words to describe the appreciation of Jeff Wicks 🇿🇦 and News24 🇿🇦 What we are seeing at the Madlanga Commission and the Parliamentary Ad Hoc Committee hearings is not because of the 6 July 2025 press conference by Mkhwanazi but because the brilliant Jeff Wicks kept this story of BABITA DEOKARAN alive. I recently watched Jeff in a podcast SMWX, you could feel the emotion in his voice. It was not a job for him. It was not about getting paid. It was to give voiceless heroes like BABITA DEOKARAN a voice. It took guts and courage to do this. The current hearings are because of JEFF WICKS and NEWS24. NOT BECAUSE MKWANAZI. Btw, Jeff said he has not had a peaceful drive for the last four years. Don’t forget he has young wife. Jeff and News24 are the real definition of “NO DNA, ONLY RSA” Basically everything you hearing you will find in perhaps one of the best books in democratic South Africa, THE SHADOW STATE, if you have not read it as yet pls get South Africa’s no 1 selling book, THE SHADOW STATE, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM AT ITS BEST. Jeff basically put his life at stake,to get to the bottom of the truth. He had her gadgets. That is the reason why. Others Hawks take the gadgets and the case never sees the light of the day. We heard again how the corrupt the Hawks are from the top. Never forget , Floyd SHIVAMBU had direct discussions with ex HAWKS head Godfrey Lebeya regarding VBS. This is the reason he is not arrested. This the reason Julius Malema is not arrested. This is the reason Jacob Zuma is not arrested. Thank you Jeff Wicks, thank you News24, you are the real heroes. Oh , don’t ever forget, Jeff told us that during the COVID looting spree, Gauteng Health Department suspended BABITA DEOKARAN without pay, because they knew she would never approve the massive wasteful expenditure and looting spree. The CFO IN Gauteng Health who Babita reported the looting of tembisa hospital, was suspended after her death with full pay. After the COVID looting scandal Babita was cleared and was back at work. The CFO Lerato Madyo was suspended with full pay, then resigned from her position just before the conclusion of a disciplinary inquiry into 13 misconduct charges. This allowed her to keep her pension and a MASSIVE R3 million bonus payout. JUST IMAGINE THE LADY WHO MOST LIKELY GOT BABITA DEOKARAN KIL*ED GOT A R3MILLION BONUS PAYOUT BESIDES HER PENSION FROM THE PANYAZA LESUFI CONTROLLED GAUTENG. No action taken against her. Babita Deokarans daughter try’s to build her life without her mother,an orphaned daughter. WHY NOT TAKE THAT R3 million from that CFO and give it to the orphaned daughter of Babita Deokaran. The more Lesufi talks ,the more I resent him. Because nothing from his mouth is the truth. The first step is to get Helen Zillle elected as a mayor of COJ.

Goolam

31,938 views • 9 months ago

You are confusing cause and effect, and in doing so, you are missing the deeper structural reality that is the central point of the argument. Migration in Africa does not happen in a vacuum. People do not wake up and casually decide to leave their homes, families, and countries for no apparent reason. Movement of people across colonial borders is driven by economic collapse, political instability, conflict, and governance failures, yes, but also by powerful historical forces that shaped those very conditions in the first place. Not everyone has the third eye to see those historical forces at play unless they read, comprehend and follow ideas and not populist demagoguery. Apartheid was not just a South African policy that ended in 1994. Its effects still live with South Africans to this very day. It was part of a wider political and more importantly economic system of racial capitalism that structured the region’s economy. What you fixed in 1994 was only the political and not the economic side of it. South Africa was designed as the industrial hub, while neighbouring countries were deliberately underdeveloped and turned into labour reserves for South Africa’s economy. Migrant labour from countries like Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Lesotho was not an accident at all, it was built into the system. It was designed that way and remains so to this very day. The owners of the means of production then remain the owners of the means of production today. Black people are largely still workers. You have a few token black individuals at the top, but the majority remain little more than exploited labour. So when people move from their countries today, they are often moving along routes that were created decades ago. The inequality between South Africa and its neighbours did not emerge overnight, and it is not simply the result of “African leaders” in isolation of other key factors. It is the continuation of a historical economic design that concentrated wealth in one place and poverty in others. That does not absolve African governments of responsibility. Many have failed their citizens through corruption, mismanagement, and repression. I write about this daily, and I have gone to prison three times in my lifetime for doing so. I have had to leave my country to save my life for doing so. But to reduce a complex, multi-layered issue to “it is African leaders” is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. It ignores history, economics, and global power dynamics. As for Malema, whether you agree with him or not, his political skill lies in identifying how political and economic narratives are shaped and who benefits from them. He is pointing out that anger is often redirected away from the very systems of inequality and towards vulnerable people, migrants, who did not create those conditions. If you want a serious conversation, then deal with the full picture. Migration is about history, economics, governance, and global inequality. Blaming one factor while ignoring the rest is not analysis at all, it is deceitful propaganda. The economically and intellectually illiterate are often the easiest targets of political propaganda, precisely because they are fed simple, emotionally satisfying explanations for complex structural problems. They are told who to blame for their suffering, migrants, neighbouring countries, or vague notions of “outsiders”, while the real drivers, historical dispossession, entrenched economic inequality, and elite collusion, are deliberately obscured. In Southern Africa, and particularly in South Africa, this manifests in xenophobic narratives that blame Zimbabweans or Mozambicans for unemployment and poverty, when in reality those conditions are rooted in a long standing economic architecture that concentrated wealth and ownership in very few hands. It is easier to turn the poor against the poor than to confront systems that benefit those in power. What is often forgotten in this debate is that the political elites of colonial South Africa and Rhodesia worked in concert to sustain a repressive regional system that enriched a minority while extracting labour and resources from the rest. Your former apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster says it in this video in a very tactful manner. That logic has not disappeared at all, it has merely changed form. Today, segments of the political elite in both South Africa and Zimbabwe continue to operate in ways that protect entrenched economic interests while the majority remain economically marginalised. South Africa was the only true white settler “home”, where wealth, infrastructure, and industry were concentrated, while territories like Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and Nyasaland (Malawi) functioned largely as economic outposts, feeding capital, labour, and raw materials into that system. The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was presented as a project of regional integration, but in practice it reinforced patterns of extraction, with mining in Zambia, agriculture in Zimbabwe, and labour flows from Malawi all tied into a broader economic network dominated by South African capital. The same remains to this very day. The tragedy of focusing on Julius as the messenger rather than the message is something I speak about regularly, the need to focus on ideas and not personalities. You do not have to like Julius Malema. You do not have to agree with everything he says. All you need to do is focus on his message and interrogate it critically. I am not enslaved to Julius Malema’s ideas. I pick and choose what I agree with, and I am able to articulate a reasoned argument for both what I support and what I reject. You should do the same. One of the most powerful weapons of colonialism was the deliberate fragmentation of black people into small Bantustans, into isolated villages where communities were conditioned to view the next village with suspicion. In Rhodesia we had “reserves” and “keeps.” People from other Bantustans were treated as outsiders. That mentality was never dismantled, it still exists today. The idea of seeing others with suspicion simply because of an arbitrary line, a colonial border, remains deeply entrenched. Many do not fully appreciate how powerful and enduring that mentality and conditioning is. Yet when you look at the descendants of colonialists, they do not view each other through those same lenses. White Zimbabweans move into South Africa without attracting the same hostility because of the economic architecture that allows them to stay away from the so called lumpen. White people from across the world come and settle with ease in South Africa. In fact, one of the most visible figures advocating for the secession of the Western Cape is a British citizen, yet there is no comparable outrage from black South Africans. The same energy of protests and marches that is directed at fellow Africans is rarely directed there. That is not accidental at all, it is well designed that way. It speaks to the protection afforded by entrenched economic power and privilege, but also to a deeper psychological conditioning in how black people are taught to see each other and to see whiteness. This will not disappear overnight. It may not even disappear in my lifetime. But the task is to keep planting the seeds of awareness and unity. As Bob Marley said, you give your more to get your little. What you do today may seem small, but in time it contributes to something much larger, especially if there is collective effort to confront and resolve these divisions. One of the most important things colonialists understood was that education is the key to discernment, to the ability to interrogate and understand issues such as those I raised in this essay. That is precisely why they restricted access to it. Only a few black people were allowed meaningful education, and the consequences of that exclusion remain with us today, not only in South Africa but across much of the continent. We did not dismantle the systems that underpinned colonialism. We largely inherited them, changed the faces at the top, and continued to operate within the same structures. So I will end by saying this, if anyone truly wants change on the issues being debated, you must fix the foundation. You cannot repair window panes when the foundation itself is cracking. Immigration, whether legal or illegal, will always exist, but it is sustained not by foreigners alone, but by the system itself. When Zimbabweans cross the border without passports, they are often enabled by South Africans within a broken system. When documents are obtained illegally, it is again the system that enables it. When Zimbabwe’s political crisis persists without free and fair elections, regional dynamics, including South Africa’s political and economic interests, often play a role in sustaining that status quo. There is a web of political and economic interests that mirrors, in some respects, the relationships that existed during the colonial and apartheid eras. As long as those interests remain, there is little incentive for those in power to confront injustice decisively. The corruption and governance failures in Zimbabwe are real and significant, but they are part of a broader structural problem. The real issue is the foundation. If black South Africans were living well, with access to quality education, meaningful employment, and economic security, they would not be marching in the streets. The anger you see today is not simply about immigration. It is a reflection of an economic structure that has remained fundamentally unchanged, even after 1994. Repression underpinned by racism in Rhodesia effectively came to an end when South Africa shifted its position and recognised that the system was no longer sustainable. The same principle applies today. Repression underpinned by political corruption in Zimbabwe will begin to end the day South Africa, the regional power whether one accepts it or not, decides that the current situation is no longer acceptable. Zimbabwe’s crisis has, over time, been treated as a largely domestic issue rather than a regional one, yet the political and economic realities of Southern Africa make that distinction artificial. What happens in Zimbabwe does not exist in isolation, it is shaped, sustained, and, at times, enabled by regional dynamics, particularly South Africa’s stance. This may be an uncomfortable truth, but history consistently shows that regional power centres play a decisive role in determining outcomes. Ignoring that reality does not change it, it only delays the moment when it must be confronted. It was convenient then for John Vorster and successive apartheid regimes to continue using illegal migrants as a source of cheap labour in South Africa for menial jobs. It remains the same today. As I have said, the political and economic architecture of the apartheid era largely remains in place. What has changed are the political faces, the white faces that held power then and the black faces that hold office today, often operating within and alongside the same entrenched economic structures. Whether one accepts it or not, that is the reality of our politics in the region and of the economic architecture that continues to shape it. There is a reason why certain political actors avoid critically engaging with the structural drivers of immigration, particularly those that sustain flows of cheap labour. There is also a reason why figures like Helen Zille often emphasise the need to document illegal immigrants in South Africa, that position can be understood within the broader context of preserving an economic order that has long depended on controlling and managing labour rather than fundamentally transforming the conditions that produce it. That economic order is rooted in historical structures of concentrated power that shaped not only South Africa, but the wider region more than a century ago. How black Africans view themselves is often reflected in how they respond to political messages. It is why some are quick to criticise Julius Malema for positions that are, in substance, not fundamentally different from those expressed by Helen Zille. On immigration, there is significant overlap in what has been said across the political spectrum, including by the DA and the EFF. Yet the EFF is frequently viewed through a lens of hostility, in part because it is a black-led party, and that perception shapes the reaction it receives. As a result, some black citizens, influenced by long-standing narratives, direct harsher and more emotive criticism towards it. When similar points are made by figures like Helen Zille, the response is often markedly different. That contrast speaks to deeper historical conditioning and the psychological legacy of colonialism. It has not disappeared, and changing it will take time. The fundamental difference, however, lies in the intent and framing of their messages. Malema’s position on immigration is part of a broader effort to confront and address the structural inequalities created by colonial rule. Zille’s position, by contrast, can be seen as operating within and reinforcing an existing economic framework that has its roots in that same colonial architecture which feeds off cheap migrant labour. However, you can't fix the broken system by chasing away immigrants, legal or illegal, you can only empower black South Africans by allowing them to own the means of production and not fighting in the streets for crumbs. Have a lovely weekend.
6:23

You are confusing cause and effect, and in doing so, you are missing the deeper structural reality that is the central point of the argument. Migration in Africa does not happen in a vacuum. People do not wake up and casually decide to leave their homes, families, and countries for no apparent reason. Movement of people across colonial borders is driven by economic collapse, political instability, conflict, and governance failures, yes, but also by powerful historical forces that shaped those very conditions in the first place. Not everyone has the third eye to see those historical forces at play unless they read, comprehend and follow ideas and not populist demagoguery. Apartheid was not just a South African policy that ended in 1994. Its effects still live with South Africans to this very day. It was part of a wider political and more importantly economic system of racial capitalism that structured the region’s economy. What you fixed in 1994 was only the political and not the economic side of it. South Africa was designed as the industrial hub, while neighbouring countries were deliberately underdeveloped and turned into labour reserves for South Africa’s economy. Migrant labour from countries like Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Lesotho was not an accident at all, it was built into the system. It was designed that way and remains so to this very day. The owners of the means of production then remain the owners of the means of production today. Black people are largely still workers. You have a few token black individuals at the top, but the majority remain little more than exploited labour. So when people move from their countries today, they are often moving along routes that were created decades ago. The inequality between South Africa and its neighbours did not emerge overnight, and it is not simply the result of “African leaders” in isolation of other key factors. It is the continuation of a historical economic design that concentrated wealth in one place and poverty in others. That does not absolve African governments of responsibility. Many have failed their citizens through corruption, mismanagement, and repression. I write about this daily, and I have gone to prison three times in my lifetime for doing so. I have had to leave my country to save my life for doing so. But to reduce a complex, multi-layered issue to “it is African leaders” is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. It ignores history, economics, and global power dynamics. As for Malema, whether you agree with him or not, his political skill lies in identifying how political and economic narratives are shaped and who benefits from them. He is pointing out that anger is often redirected away from the very systems of inequality and towards vulnerable people, migrants, who did not create those conditions. If you want a serious conversation, then deal with the full picture. Migration is about history, economics, governance, and global inequality. Blaming one factor while ignoring the rest is not analysis at all, it is deceitful propaganda. The economically and intellectually illiterate are often the easiest targets of political propaganda, precisely because they are fed simple, emotionally satisfying explanations for complex structural problems. They are told who to blame for their suffering, migrants, neighbouring countries, or vague notions of “outsiders”, while the real drivers, historical dispossession, entrenched economic inequality, and elite collusion, are deliberately obscured. In Southern Africa, and particularly in South Africa, this manifests in xenophobic narratives that blame Zimbabweans or Mozambicans for unemployment and poverty, when in reality those conditions are rooted in a long standing economic architecture that concentrated wealth and ownership in very few hands. It is easier to turn the poor against the poor than to confront systems that benefit those in power. What is often forgotten in this debate is that the political elites of colonial South Africa and Rhodesia worked in concert to sustain a repressive regional system that enriched a minority while extracting labour and resources from the rest. Your former apartheid Prime Minister John Vorster says it in this video in a very tactful manner. That logic has not disappeared at all, it has merely changed form. Today, segments of the political elite in both South Africa and Zimbabwe continue to operate in ways that protect entrenched economic interests while the majority remain economically marginalised. South Africa was the only true white settler “home”, where wealth, infrastructure, and industry were concentrated, while territories like Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and Nyasaland (Malawi) functioned largely as economic outposts, feeding capital, labour, and raw materials into that system. The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was presented as a project of regional integration, but in practice it reinforced patterns of extraction, with mining in Zambia, agriculture in Zimbabwe, and labour flows from Malawi all tied into a broader economic network dominated by South African capital. The same remains to this very day. The tragedy of focusing on Julius as the messenger rather than the message is something I speak about regularly, the need to focus on ideas and not personalities. You do not have to like Julius Malema. You do not have to agree with everything he says. All you need to do is focus on his message and interrogate it critically. I am not enslaved to Julius Malema’s ideas. I pick and choose what I agree with, and I am able to articulate a reasoned argument for both what I support and what I reject. You should do the same. One of the most powerful weapons of colonialism was the deliberate fragmentation of black people into small Bantustans, into isolated villages where communities were conditioned to view the next village with suspicion. In Rhodesia we had “reserves” and “keeps.” People from other Bantustans were treated as outsiders. That mentality was never dismantled, it still exists today. The idea of seeing others with suspicion simply because of an arbitrary line, a colonial border, remains deeply entrenched. Many do not fully appreciate how powerful and enduring that mentality and conditioning is. Yet when you look at the descendants of colonialists, they do not view each other through those same lenses. White Zimbabweans move into South Africa without attracting the same hostility because of the economic architecture that allows them to stay away from the so called lumpen. White people from across the world come and settle with ease in South Africa. In fact, one of the most visible figures advocating for the secession of the Western Cape is a British citizen, yet there is no comparable outrage from black South Africans. The same energy of protests and marches that is directed at fellow Africans is rarely directed there. That is not accidental at all, it is well designed that way. It speaks to the protection afforded by entrenched economic power and privilege, but also to a deeper psychological conditioning in how black people are taught to see each other and to see whiteness. This will not disappear overnight. It may not even disappear in my lifetime. But the task is to keep planting the seeds of awareness and unity. As Bob Marley said, you give your more to get your little. What you do today may seem small, but in time it contributes to something much larger, especially if there is collective effort to confront and resolve these divisions. One of the most important things colonialists understood was that education is the key to discernment, to the ability to interrogate and understand issues such as those I raised in this essay. That is precisely why they restricted access to it. Only a few black people were allowed meaningful education, and the consequences of that exclusion remain with us today, not only in South Africa but across much of the continent. We did not dismantle the systems that underpinned colonialism. We largely inherited them, changed the faces at the top, and continued to operate within the same structures. So I will end by saying this, if anyone truly wants change on the issues being debated, you must fix the foundation. You cannot repair window panes when the foundation itself is cracking. Immigration, whether legal or illegal, will always exist, but it is sustained not by foreigners alone, but by the system itself. When Zimbabweans cross the border without passports, they are often enabled by South Africans within a broken system. When documents are obtained illegally, it is again the system that enables it. When Zimbabwe’s political crisis persists without free and fair elections, regional dynamics, including South Africa’s political and economic interests, often play a role in sustaining that status quo. There is a web of political and economic interests that mirrors, in some respects, the relationships that existed during the colonial and apartheid eras. As long as those interests remain, there is little incentive for those in power to confront injustice decisively. The corruption and governance failures in Zimbabwe are real and significant, but they are part of a broader structural problem. The real issue is the foundation. If black South Africans were living well, with access to quality education, meaningful employment, and economic security, they would not be marching in the streets. The anger you see today is not simply about immigration. It is a reflection of an economic structure that has remained fundamentally unchanged, even after 1994. Repression underpinned by racism in Rhodesia effectively came to an end when South Africa shifted its position and recognised that the system was no longer sustainable. The same principle applies today. Repression underpinned by political corruption in Zimbabwe will begin to end the day South Africa, the regional power whether one accepts it or not, decides that the current situation is no longer acceptable. Zimbabwe’s crisis has, over time, been treated as a largely domestic issue rather than a regional one, yet the political and economic realities of Southern Africa make that distinction artificial. What happens in Zimbabwe does not exist in isolation, it is shaped, sustained, and, at times, enabled by regional dynamics, particularly South Africa’s stance. This may be an uncomfortable truth, but history consistently shows that regional power centres play a decisive role in determining outcomes. Ignoring that reality does not change it, it only delays the moment when it must be confronted. It was convenient then for John Vorster and successive apartheid regimes to continue using illegal migrants as a source of cheap labour in South Africa for menial jobs. It remains the same today. As I have said, the political and economic architecture of the apartheid era largely remains in place. What has changed are the political faces, the white faces that held power then and the black faces that hold office today, often operating within and alongside the same entrenched economic structures. Whether one accepts it or not, that is the reality of our politics in the region and of the economic architecture that continues to shape it. There is a reason why certain political actors avoid critically engaging with the structural drivers of immigration, particularly those that sustain flows of cheap labour. There is also a reason why figures like Helen Zille often emphasise the need to document illegal immigrants in South Africa, that position can be understood within the broader context of preserving an economic order that has long depended on controlling and managing labour rather than fundamentally transforming the conditions that produce it. That economic order is rooted in historical structures of concentrated power that shaped not only South Africa, but the wider region more than a century ago. How black Africans view themselves is often reflected in how they respond to political messages. It is why some are quick to criticise Julius Malema for positions that are, in substance, not fundamentally different from those expressed by Helen Zille. On immigration, there is significant overlap in what has been said across the political spectrum, including by the DA and the EFF. Yet the EFF is frequently viewed through a lens of hostility, in part because it is a black-led party, and that perception shapes the reaction it receives. As a result, some black citizens, influenced by long-standing narratives, direct harsher and more emotive criticism towards it. When similar points are made by figures like Helen Zille, the response is often markedly different. That contrast speaks to deeper historical conditioning and the psychological legacy of colonialism. It has not disappeared, and changing it will take time. The fundamental difference, however, lies in the intent and framing of their messages. Malema’s position on immigration is part of a broader effort to confront and address the structural inequalities created by colonial rule. Zille’s position, by contrast, can be seen as operating within and reinforcing an existing economic framework that has its roots in that same colonial architecture which feeds off cheap migrant labour. However, you can't fix the broken system by chasing away immigrants, legal or illegal, you can only empower black South Africans by allowing them to own the means of production and not fighting in the streets for crumbs. Have a lovely weekend.

Hopewell Chin’ono

21,194 views • 3 months ago

King MisuZulu kaZwelithini of South Africa says the Zulu nation has historical and cultural links with various communities in other Southern African Development Community countries, including Zimbabwe, reminding people that African identities transcend colonial borders, but being family should not mean visiting and living with each other improperly and in violation of applicable rules. MisuZulu said that shared history and cultural ties did not exempt anyone from complying with immigration laws and other rules of a sovereign country. “Being family does not exempt us from respecting one another’s homes. On the contrary, family respects family. It is therefore inaccurate to portray South Africans as a people who hate Africans. South Africans have for generations welcomed students, entrepreneurs, professionals, investors, refugees and visitors from across the continent," the king said in a prepared speech released by his office earlier today. The Zulu king narrated the history of how Nguni people migrated from Zululand in the 19th century to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania. He gave examples of Mzilikazi kaMashobane who migrated to Zimbabwe and Soshangane Nxumalo keZikode who went to Mozambique. Queen Nyamazane Dlamini left Swaziland to Zimbabwe, while Zwangendaba Jele went to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and southern Tanzania. This ensured ensured there are Nguni communities across the region. The mass migration was triggered by the rise of Zulu King Shaka KaSenzangakhona in 1816, a period of upheavals known as Mfecane. “Communities with common historical roots are also found in Eswatini, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania and elsewhere across our continent. These histories remind us that African identity has never been confined to colonial borders. Our shared ancestry should inspire mutual respect. It should never be used to justify disregarding the immigration laws of sovereign nations," King MisuZulu said. The Zulu king illustrated his point by explaining that upon arrival in Zimbabwe, he was required to present his travel documents and declare the purpose of his visit. “As I arrived here in Zimbabwe, I presented my passport to the immigration authorities. My passport was stamped, I declared my nationality, I declared the purpose of my visit and I informed the authorities where I would be residing during my stay. He added: “By entering Zimbabwe, I accepted that while I remain King of the Zulu Nation, I am nevertheless a visitor within the sovereign territory of the Republic of Zimbabwe, and I am duty-bound to respect and obey the laws of this country for the duration of my visit. “Likewise, every sovereign nation has the right to know who enters its territory, for what purpose they enter, how long they intend to remain, and whether they comply with that nation’s laws." Misuzulu further said respect for immigration laws was not unique to Africa, but formed part of the system through which countries across the world regulated their borders and migration. The king said: “Every member state of the United Nations maintains borders, every member state issues visas. Every member state enforces immigration laws. Africa should never be expected to apologise for exercising rights that every sovereign nation in the world already exercises.” He also expressed concern that the debate over undocumented immigration and anti-immigrants protests had become increasingly polarised across the continent. He said some people wrongly treated every concern about unlawful immigration as an expression of xenophobia, while others unfairly blamed foreign nationals for every social and economic problem facing their communities in South Africa. Anti-immigrant groups led by March and March under their Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma have been hounding, evicting and chasing away immigrants, illegals but also legal ones, through an aggresive campaign of crude vigilantism characterised by xenophobic, Afrophobic and ethnophobic overtones.
2:47

King MisuZulu kaZwelithini of South Africa says the Zulu nation has historical and cultural links with various communities in other Southern African Development Community countries, including Zimbabwe, reminding people that African identities transcend colonial borders, but being family should not mean visiting and living with each other improperly and in violation of applicable rules. MisuZulu said that shared history and cultural ties did not exempt anyone from complying with immigration laws and other rules of a sovereign country. “Being family does not exempt us from respecting one another’s homes. On the contrary, family respects family. It is therefore inaccurate to portray South Africans as a people who hate Africans. South Africans have for generations welcomed students, entrepreneurs, professionals, investors, refugees and visitors from across the continent," the king said in a prepared speech released by his office earlier today. The Zulu king narrated the history of how Nguni people migrated from Zululand in the 19th century to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania. He gave examples of Mzilikazi kaMashobane who migrated to Zimbabwe and Soshangane Nxumalo keZikode who went to Mozambique. Queen Nyamazane Dlamini left Swaziland to Zimbabwe, while Zwangendaba Jele went to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and southern Tanzania. This ensured ensured there are Nguni communities across the region. The mass migration was triggered by the rise of Zulu King Shaka KaSenzangakhona in 1816, a period of upheavals known as Mfecane. “Communities with common historical roots are also found in Eswatini, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania and elsewhere across our continent. These histories remind us that African identity has never been confined to colonial borders. Our shared ancestry should inspire mutual respect. It should never be used to justify disregarding the immigration laws of sovereign nations," King MisuZulu said. The Zulu king illustrated his point by explaining that upon arrival in Zimbabwe, he was required to present his travel documents and declare the purpose of his visit. “As I arrived here in Zimbabwe, I presented my passport to the immigration authorities. My passport was stamped, I declared my nationality, I declared the purpose of my visit and I informed the authorities where I would be residing during my stay. He added: “By entering Zimbabwe, I accepted that while I remain King of the Zulu Nation, I am nevertheless a visitor within the sovereign territory of the Republic of Zimbabwe, and I am duty-bound to respect and obey the laws of this country for the duration of my visit. “Likewise, every sovereign nation has the right to know who enters its territory, for what purpose they enter, how long they intend to remain, and whether they comply with that nation’s laws." Misuzulu further said respect for immigration laws was not unique to Africa, but formed part of the system through which countries across the world regulated their borders and migration. The king said: “Every member state of the United Nations maintains borders, every member state issues visas. Every member state enforces immigration laws. Africa should never be expected to apologise for exercising rights that every sovereign nation in the world already exercises.” He also expressed concern that the debate over undocumented immigration and anti-immigrants protests had become increasingly polarised across the continent. He said some people wrongly treated every concern about unlawful immigration as an expression of xenophobia, while others unfairly blamed foreign nationals for every social and economic problem facing their communities in South Africa. Anti-immigrant groups led by March and March under their Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma have been hounding, evicting and chasing away immigrants, illegals but also legal ones, through an aggresive campaign of crude vigilantism characterised by xenophobic, Afrophobic and ethnophobic overtones.

TheNewsHawks

12,399 views • 19 days ago

This video has been extremely painful to watch for any sane Zimbabwean. It has made Zimbabweans the butt of jokes across the region, especially in Southern Africa and other African countries on social media. I have written extensively about the father of this child, Paul Tungwarara, who is President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s so-called Presidential Investment Adviser. You see, this is what shows just how detached President Emmerson Mnangagwa has become from the realities of the lives Zimbabweans are living and how ordinary citizens actually feel about him. I do not know whether his intelligence services are failing to give him the correct information, whether he receives the correct information and simply ignores it, or whether this is now a reflection of a deeply dysfunctional system in which people around him are too afraid to tell him the truth. What is clear is that a cartel of opportunists like Paul Tungwarara has formed around him, abusing proximity to power while lacking the emotional intelligence to understand what should and should not be done in public. They think these comical stunts are pleasing him, when in reality they are humiliating him, destroying his image, and ensuring that no meaningful legacy remains behind him. You cannot go to one of the biggest hospitals in Zimbabwe and humiliate nurses by asking them to dance for US$100 as if they are beggars. It is degrading and insulting in a country where healthcare workers are already suffering because of economic collapse and poor governance. It does not end there. Paul Tungwarara’s daughter, Tinotenda Tungwarara, went to the Mbudzi Interchange in Harare, threw around US$500, and asked desperate Zimbabweans to scramble for the money. People went because they are suffering. They have been pushed into abject poverty, humiliation, and economic desperation by years of economic failure under President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government. This is precisely why many Zimbabweans are rejecting any attempt to extend the Constitution to give him an extra two years in office. If Zimbabwe had a functioning economy, if citizens had jobs, dignity, decent salaries, and functioning public services, people would not care much about political manoeuvres. Across Africa, citizens tolerate many things from politicians as long as their quality of life is improving or at least stable. But this is different. This is public humiliation of citizens by people connected to power. And if somebody close to the President is reading this, please whisper this into his ear that the people around him are damaging him politically every single day with these idiotic and comical antics. If there is ever an attempt to remove him from office, these actions are creating the emotional atmosphere that would make citizens support such a move. It is almost as if the people around him are deliberately creating a body of evidence to justify his political downfall. Nothing destroys a leader faster than surrounding himself with arrogant people who mistake public suffering for entertainment, and who are detached from public opinion. As for these nurses, journalists cannot continue writing about these things forever. We do not have an opposition or a political opposition leader, so we have reached a point where Zimbabweans need to use their own heads and decide what kind of society they want to live in. If nurses are prepared to be abused and humiliated like that, then they have become part of the problem. A society that normalises the humiliation of professionals, especially healthcare workers who are already working under terrible conditions, has much deeper problems than it is prepared to admit. At some point, you also have to reflect on what some South Africans have been saying, that Zimbabweans have chosen a timid path of enduring abuse and humiliation. I do not think that in any normal society people would be made to dance like that for crumbs, it is deeply dehumanising. There comes a point where people must ask themselves difficult questions about what they are prepared to tolerate and why they continue tolerating it. The excruciating level of unsophisticated behaviour is shocking. Chibharanzi chaicho. I cannot believe that a state with intelligence services would allow something like this to happen publicly. The level at which President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s rule has sunk is absolutely staggering. I know there are people inside that government who fully understand exactly what I am saying, that this has now reached a point where the entire country is being embarrassed and humiliated by these antics. Zimbabwe is being laughed at across the region, on the continent, and beyond. And the frightening part is that a President who is supposed to be the first citizen of the country, either cannot understand, is failing to understand, or has completely lost the capacity to understand that this is wrong. That is what makes this situation so alarming. I want to speak directly to President Mnangagwa. If any one of your soldiers were to decide to go into the streets and move against you because of this behaviour, which you have failed to curtail and stop, I want to assure you, sir, that the majority of Zimbabweans would support such a person. I do not know whether that is what you want, or whether you understand that things have now sunk that low, from the gutter into the sewer. And to all the people who are behaving like this, humiliating Zimbabweans, making them dance for trinkets, putting money under the interchange and asking people to go and look for it, preying on their poverty, the abject poverty that has been induced by your actions, I want to assure you that when the day comes that the President is no longer there, you will be dragged into the streets. Some of you will face brutal consequences, and unfortunately, many Zimbabweans will celebrate because of your behaviour and the humiliation you have subjected people to. You are not the first people to have access to state money, and you will not be the last. Across the continent, there are many people with access to state resources, but they are far more sophisticated than you are. They understand how to behave, how to carry themselves, and how not to embarrass their principal and dehumanise suffering citizens. When elites begin turning citizens’ suffering into entertainment, they should never forget that history has a brutal way of eventually humiliating those who humiliate others.
5:57

This video has been extremely painful to watch for any sane Zimbabwean. It has made Zimbabweans the butt of jokes across the region, especially in Southern Africa and other African countries on social media. I have written extensively about the father of this child, Paul Tungwarara, who is President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s so-called Presidential Investment Adviser. You see, this is what shows just how detached President Emmerson Mnangagwa has become from the realities of the lives Zimbabweans are living and how ordinary citizens actually feel about him. I do not know whether his intelligence services are failing to give him the correct information, whether he receives the correct information and simply ignores it, or whether this is now a reflection of a deeply dysfunctional system in which people around him are too afraid to tell him the truth. What is clear is that a cartel of opportunists like Paul Tungwarara has formed around him, abusing proximity to power while lacking the emotional intelligence to understand what should and should not be done in public. They think these comical stunts are pleasing him, when in reality they are humiliating him, destroying his image, and ensuring that no meaningful legacy remains behind him. You cannot go to one of the biggest hospitals in Zimbabwe and humiliate nurses by asking them to dance for US$100 as if they are beggars. It is degrading and insulting in a country where healthcare workers are already suffering because of economic collapse and poor governance. It does not end there. Paul Tungwarara’s daughter, Tinotenda Tungwarara, went to the Mbudzi Interchange in Harare, threw around US$500, and asked desperate Zimbabweans to scramble for the money. People went because they are suffering. They have been pushed into abject poverty, humiliation, and economic desperation by years of economic failure under President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government. This is precisely why many Zimbabweans are rejecting any attempt to extend the Constitution to give him an extra two years in office. If Zimbabwe had a functioning economy, if citizens had jobs, dignity, decent salaries, and functioning public services, people would not care much about political manoeuvres. Across Africa, citizens tolerate many things from politicians as long as their quality of life is improving or at least stable. But this is different. This is public humiliation of citizens by people connected to power. And if somebody close to the President is reading this, please whisper this into his ear that the people around him are damaging him politically every single day with these idiotic and comical antics. If there is ever an attempt to remove him from office, these actions are creating the emotional atmosphere that would make citizens support such a move. It is almost as if the people around him are deliberately creating a body of evidence to justify his political downfall. Nothing destroys a leader faster than surrounding himself with arrogant people who mistake public suffering for entertainment, and who are detached from public opinion. As for these nurses, journalists cannot continue writing about these things forever. We do not have an opposition or a political opposition leader, so we have reached a point where Zimbabweans need to use their own heads and decide what kind of society they want to live in. If nurses are prepared to be abused and humiliated like that, then they have become part of the problem. A society that normalises the humiliation of professionals, especially healthcare workers who are already working under terrible conditions, has much deeper problems than it is prepared to admit. At some point, you also have to reflect on what some South Africans have been saying, that Zimbabweans have chosen a timid path of enduring abuse and humiliation. I do not think that in any normal society people would be made to dance like that for crumbs, it is deeply dehumanising. There comes a point where people must ask themselves difficult questions about what they are prepared to tolerate and why they continue tolerating it. The excruciating level of unsophisticated behaviour is shocking. Chibharanzi chaicho. I cannot believe that a state with intelligence services would allow something like this to happen publicly. The level at which President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s rule has sunk is absolutely staggering. I know there are people inside that government who fully understand exactly what I am saying, that this has now reached a point where the entire country is being embarrassed and humiliated by these antics. Zimbabwe is being laughed at across the region, on the continent, and beyond. And the frightening part is that a President who is supposed to be the first citizen of the country, either cannot understand, is failing to understand, or has completely lost the capacity to understand that this is wrong. That is what makes this situation so alarming. I want to speak directly to President Mnangagwa. If any one of your soldiers were to decide to go into the streets and move against you because of this behaviour, which you have failed to curtail and stop, I want to assure you, sir, that the majority of Zimbabweans would support such a person. I do not know whether that is what you want, or whether you understand that things have now sunk that low, from the gutter into the sewer. And to all the people who are behaving like this, humiliating Zimbabweans, making them dance for trinkets, putting money under the interchange and asking people to go and look for it, preying on their poverty, the abject poverty that has been induced by your actions, I want to assure you that when the day comes that the President is no longer there, you will be dragged into the streets. Some of you will face brutal consequences, and unfortunately, many Zimbabweans will celebrate because of your behaviour and the humiliation you have subjected people to. You are not the first people to have access to state money, and you will not be the last. Across the continent, there are many people with access to state resources, but they are far more sophisticated than you are. They understand how to behave, how to carry themselves, and how not to embarrass their principal and dehumanise suffering citizens. When elites begin turning citizens’ suffering into entertainment, they should never forget that history has a brutal way of eventually humiliating those who humiliate others.

Hopewell Chin’ono

77,430 views • 2 months ago

RETWEET Watching Dimakatso Makoena saying that “I Hate Foreigners” with such raw emotion and painfully crying in this attached BBC documentary film makes you realise how evil and manipulative failed politicians can be towards unsuspecting citizens who are victims of their failures. South Africa has an immigration crisis that can’t be wished away, but it is also a complex problem that can’t be explained in simplistic terms as many try to do, especially the authors of the crisis, politicians. South Africans were not born hating foreign nationals, like racism, they were taught to hate and to believe that all their problems were authored by African foreign nationals, both legal and illegal immigrants. The explanation for every political and economic failure in South Africa is now on foreigners, even someone who can’t get an erection at home will soon probably blame foreigners too. It is true that South Africa has attracted more foreigners than any other country on the continent because of its historic successful and big economy, and how the apartheid economic architecture attracted cheap migrant labour from surrounding countries to maximise on its profits. Apartheid was a racist business model run by politicians and businesspeople, today’s South Africa is also run by one of the richest businesspeople in Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, whose many businesses have benefited from migrant labour. Unlike in the past where mass immigration was triggered mainly by weak economies coming out of colonial rule that surrounded the apartheid regime, the bulk of illegal immigration today is now triggered by failed economies around South Africa particularly Zimbabwe, which has failed due to grand incompetence and political repressive corrupt rule. Why is it like this, and who is responsible for this immigration crisis, and how can this be changed to bring a healthy balance of immigration/migration which is not only one way? This has been caused by a dead economy in Zimbabwe which was killed by corrupt rule and the plunder of that country’s natural resources. Zimbabweans used to find work in Zimbabwe and had working public services like hospitals after that country's independence in 1980, and only went to South Africa to buy things to come and sell back home, it was business from top to bottom. Of course, as I said earlier, there was an earlier flow of migrants from Zimbabwe and other African countries during the colonial days of the famed WNLA which stood for Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), more popularly known as WENELA. It was set up by the gold mines in South Africa as a recruiting agency for migrant workers. Before that people were always moving around the region looking for better pastures and a better standard of living, Africa was a village. That is how you ended up with the Ray Phiris, Hugh Masekelas (whose real surname was Munyepawu from Zimbabwe) and Herman Mashabas of this world. Their parents, grandparents and great grand parents came to South Africa to seek better lives and also to seek work mostly in mines after the nineteenth century, they were born in South Africa to migrant workers or children of migrant workers. Today’s illegal immigration crisis is driven by old factors of cheap labour on the part of South African businesses, and it is accentuated by new political players, the failed regional ruling parties like ZANUPF. In normal countries this is easily resolved by an election where the citizens can choose a different government and remove the crooks and incompetent parties from power. But Zimbabwe is not normal, it has a ruling party which came into power with its own military wings, ZANLA/ZIPRA which became the national army. Elections are routinely rigged, and citizens beaten to pulp or killed for resisting the failed political and economic status quo which is anchored by corruption and incompetence. The only organization that can stop this is SADC, which is a regional grouping of 16 countries with election protocols that all member states must follow and adhere to. However, ZANUPF has been able to repeatedly violate these protocols for 23 years with the support of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress. ANC is powerful because it runs the most diverse and sophisticated economy on the African continent, so what it says in SADC matters, and what it doesn’t say matters too. Recently the ANC endorsed the shambolic Zimbabwean elections as democratic, ignoring the mountain of evidence to the contrary. It called the Zimbabwean opposition leader a puppet of the West, and it said it will support ZANUPF regardless. Indirectly it called the millions that voted for the opposition puppets of the West too, what motivates the ANC to say such scurrilous stuff if not bungs? So, the ANC literally endorses the causes and drivers of illegal immigration in South Africa, possibly for corrupt reasons, yet when back home it insults Zimbabweans asking them to leave South Africa and go back to Zimbabwe. The ANC is also riding on the xenophobic/anti-foreign nationals’ campaign as seen recently when South Africa's Minister for Police, Bheki Cele took to the highways to personally inspect public transport and remove Zimbabweans without proof on residence on them. This of course is done for politicking reasons, it is an empty explanation to why the economy in South Africa has terribly tanked. ZANUPF blames sanctions for all its failures with the help of Ramaphosa who trumpets the sanctions propaganda everywhere he goes, yet he knows that Zimbabwe has failed due to corrupt rule, incompetence and economic mismanagement. The ANC has now joined the scapegoating bandwagon of blaming foreigners for its failures to govern. It surreptitiously supports Dudula, which is a vigilante group agitating for foreign nationals to leave South Africa regardless of whether they are legal or illegal using the lie that South Africa has collapsed economically due to foreign nationals. Citizens are easy to deceive especially in poor townships, but why are they easily deceived. It is however true that illegal foreign nationals access social and health delivery services in South Africa, creating flash points with locals who complain that they are squeezed out because of the competitive unbudgeted use of public services by illegal foreign nationals. Seventy-five percent of women who give birth at Musina hospital in South Africa’s Limpopo province are Zimbabwean according to the South African Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi. This is because Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital only has one working maternity theatre built in 1977 by Ian Smith’s colonial government. 2500 Zimbabwean woman die every year giving birth and as a result, many run away to South Africa to avoid dying when giving birth. This could be easily fixed because a maternity theatre costs only US$37,000 (R666,000) to build, but the Zimbabwean government has failed to do this for its citizens. In a normal society, and in normal times, you simply vote out such an uncaring government, but Zimbabweans have repeatedly tried to do so, but failed due to repression and the failure by SADC to force Zimbabwe to adhere to its constitutional commitments and regional election protocols. The ZANUPF regime has also been repeatdly supported by the ANC and the South African Government on many times to evade this SADC scrutiny as has happened in the recently held shambolic and rigged election, where citizens spent more than 12 hours waiting for ballot papers in opposition strongholds which were 5 minutes away from the election commission offices. It means that South Africa will receive more undocumented Zimbabweans looking for health and social services, and more importantly looking for jobs. South African ANC elites don’t care about this because they don’t use public hospitals, and they don’t live in the townships where there is a shortage of public service amenities. They only care when it is election time, they only care for votes. As South Africa heads towards the 2024 general election, spare a thought for immigrants regardless of whether they are legal or not, particularly African foreign nationals because they will be scapegoated by both the ruling ANC party, and the many fringe one-issue parties that have all congregated around the immigration issue for easy pickings of votes. Immigration is a real crisis in South Africa that has ceased to be a foreign policy issue anymore, it is now a domestic policy issue because it now has the real potential of stopping the ANC from crossing the fifty percent mark in the 2024 elections, forcing the possibility of a coalition government of sorts not out of choice, but out of necessity, a first since 1994. I said the immigration crisis is complex, it has created social pressures in poor communities, but it is not the reason why the South African economy has tanked. Illegal immigration can be fixed by allowing citizens to have free, fair and credible elections particularly in Zimbabwe so that they don’t flock into South Africa, but how can this be possible when the ANC sanitises stolen and shambolic elections? Nobody wants to leave their own home to go to a place where they are not wanted, but they do it because at times it is the difference between living and death. Both South Africa and Zimbabwe require leadership scrutiny, the leaders on both sides of Limpopo are responsible for the immigration crisis, yet it is the poor people that batter each other whilst the politicians are locked away in their mansions. Something must give, the citizens must wake up to the realities of corrupt and incompetent rule and not allow scapegoating to be used as a deceptive tool to explain failed governance. Sadly, it might be too late for 2024, but perhaps the 2024 election result might force the ANC to have a change of heart and for once do the right thing on the Zimbabwe political crisis that has staggered on since 2023.
51:25

RETWEET Watching Dimakatso Makoena saying that “I Hate Foreigners” with such raw emotion and painfully crying in this attached BBC documentary film makes you realise how evil and manipulative failed politicians can be towards unsuspecting citizens who are victims of their failures. South Africa has an immigration crisis that can’t be wished away, but it is also a complex problem that can’t be explained in simplistic terms as many try to do, especially the authors of the crisis, politicians. South Africans were not born hating foreign nationals, like racism, they were taught to hate and to believe that all their problems were authored by African foreign nationals, both legal and illegal immigrants. The explanation for every political and economic failure in South Africa is now on foreigners, even someone who can’t get an erection at home will soon probably blame foreigners too. It is true that South Africa has attracted more foreigners than any other country on the continent because of its historic successful and big economy, and how the apartheid economic architecture attracted cheap migrant labour from surrounding countries to maximise on its profits. Apartheid was a racist business model run by politicians and businesspeople, today’s South Africa is also run by one of the richest businesspeople in Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, whose many businesses have benefited from migrant labour. Unlike in the past where mass immigration was triggered mainly by weak economies coming out of colonial rule that surrounded the apartheid regime, the bulk of illegal immigration today is now triggered by failed economies around South Africa particularly Zimbabwe, which has failed due to grand incompetence and political repressive corrupt rule. Why is it like this, and who is responsible for this immigration crisis, and how can this be changed to bring a healthy balance of immigration/migration which is not only one way? This has been caused by a dead economy in Zimbabwe which was killed by corrupt rule and the plunder of that country’s natural resources. Zimbabweans used to find work in Zimbabwe and had working public services like hospitals after that country's independence in 1980, and only went to South Africa to buy things to come and sell back home, it was business from top to bottom. Of course, as I said earlier, there was an earlier flow of migrants from Zimbabwe and other African countries during the colonial days of the famed WNLA which stood for Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA), more popularly known as WENELA. It was set up by the gold mines in South Africa as a recruiting agency for migrant workers. Before that people were always moving around the region looking for better pastures and a better standard of living, Africa was a village. That is how you ended up with the Ray Phiris, Hugh Masekelas (whose real surname was Munyepawu from Zimbabwe) and Herman Mashabas of this world. Their parents, grandparents and great grand parents came to South Africa to seek better lives and also to seek work mostly in mines after the nineteenth century, they were born in South Africa to migrant workers or children of migrant workers. Today’s illegal immigration crisis is driven by old factors of cheap labour on the part of South African businesses, and it is accentuated by new political players, the failed regional ruling parties like ZANUPF. In normal countries this is easily resolved by an election where the citizens can choose a different government and remove the crooks and incompetent parties from power. But Zimbabwe is not normal, it has a ruling party which came into power with its own military wings, ZANLA/ZIPRA which became the national army. Elections are routinely rigged, and citizens beaten to pulp or killed for resisting the failed political and economic status quo which is anchored by corruption and incompetence. The only organization that can stop this is SADC, which is a regional grouping of 16 countries with election protocols that all member states must follow and adhere to. However, ZANUPF has been able to repeatedly violate these protocols for 23 years with the support of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress. ANC is powerful because it runs the most diverse and sophisticated economy on the African continent, so what it says in SADC matters, and what it doesn’t say matters too. Recently the ANC endorsed the shambolic Zimbabwean elections as democratic, ignoring the mountain of evidence to the contrary. It called the Zimbabwean opposition leader a puppet of the West, and it said it will support ZANUPF regardless. Indirectly it called the millions that voted for the opposition puppets of the West too, what motivates the ANC to say such scurrilous stuff if not bungs? So, the ANC literally endorses the causes and drivers of illegal immigration in South Africa, possibly for corrupt reasons, yet when back home it insults Zimbabweans asking them to leave South Africa and go back to Zimbabwe. The ANC is also riding on the xenophobic/anti-foreign nationals’ campaign as seen recently when South Africa's Minister for Police, Bheki Cele took to the highways to personally inspect public transport and remove Zimbabweans without proof on residence on them. This of course is done for politicking reasons, it is an empty explanation to why the economy in South Africa has terribly tanked. ZANUPF blames sanctions for all its failures with the help of Ramaphosa who trumpets the sanctions propaganda everywhere he goes, yet he knows that Zimbabwe has failed due to corrupt rule, incompetence and economic mismanagement. The ANC has now joined the scapegoating bandwagon of blaming foreigners for its failures to govern. It surreptitiously supports Dudula, which is a vigilante group agitating for foreign nationals to leave South Africa regardless of whether they are legal or illegal using the lie that South Africa has collapsed economically due to foreign nationals. Citizens are easy to deceive especially in poor townships, but why are they easily deceived. It is however true that illegal foreign nationals access social and health delivery services in South Africa, creating flash points with locals who complain that they are squeezed out because of the competitive unbudgeted use of public services by illegal foreign nationals. Seventy-five percent of women who give birth at Musina hospital in South Africa’s Limpopo province are Zimbabwean according to the South African Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi. This is because Zimbabwe’s biggest hospital only has one working maternity theatre built in 1977 by Ian Smith’s colonial government. 2500 Zimbabwean woman die every year giving birth and as a result, many run away to South Africa to avoid dying when giving birth. This could be easily fixed because a maternity theatre costs only US$37,000 (R666,000) to build, but the Zimbabwean government has failed to do this for its citizens. In a normal society, and in normal times, you simply vote out such an uncaring government, but Zimbabweans have repeatedly tried to do so, but failed due to repression and the failure by SADC to force Zimbabwe to adhere to its constitutional commitments and regional election protocols. The ZANUPF regime has also been repeatdly supported by the ANC and the South African Government on many times to evade this SADC scrutiny as has happened in the recently held shambolic and rigged election, where citizens spent more than 12 hours waiting for ballot papers in opposition strongholds which were 5 minutes away from the election commission offices. It means that South Africa will receive more undocumented Zimbabweans looking for health and social services, and more importantly looking for jobs. South African ANC elites don’t care about this because they don’t use public hospitals, and they don’t live in the townships where there is a shortage of public service amenities. They only care when it is election time, they only care for votes. As South Africa heads towards the 2024 general election, spare a thought for immigrants regardless of whether they are legal or not, particularly African foreign nationals because they will be scapegoated by both the ruling ANC party, and the many fringe one-issue parties that have all congregated around the immigration issue for easy pickings of votes. Immigration is a real crisis in South Africa that has ceased to be a foreign policy issue anymore, it is now a domestic policy issue because it now has the real potential of stopping the ANC from crossing the fifty percent mark in the 2024 elections, forcing the possibility of a coalition government of sorts not out of choice, but out of necessity, a first since 1994. I said the immigration crisis is complex, it has created social pressures in poor communities, but it is not the reason why the South African economy has tanked. Illegal immigration can be fixed by allowing citizens to have free, fair and credible elections particularly in Zimbabwe so that they don’t flock into South Africa, but how can this be possible when the ANC sanitises stolen and shambolic elections? Nobody wants to leave their own home to go to a place where they are not wanted, but they do it because at times it is the difference between living and death. Both South Africa and Zimbabwe require leadership scrutiny, the leaders on both sides of Limpopo are responsible for the immigration crisis, yet it is the poor people that batter each other whilst the politicians are locked away in their mansions. Something must give, the citizens must wake up to the realities of corrupt and incompetent rule and not allow scapegoating to be used as a deceptive tool to explain failed governance. Sadly, it might be too late for 2024, but perhaps the 2024 election result might force the ANC to have a change of heart and for once do the right thing on the Zimbabwe political crisis that has staggered on since 2023.

Hopewell Chin’ono

179,271 views • 2 years ago

In a podcast with Penuel Mlotshwa, Vuyo Zungula argued that the government is deliberately keeping Black people poor. I’m just gonna come out and say it: Mr Zungula is off base on this one. Contrary to what Zungula claims, the ANC has, since the 1990s, been concerned with keeping the rich people rich. This is not the same as keeping people poor. In reality, the ANC’s policies, particularly since 1996, have been tailored around maintaining and expanding existing wealth patterns. This automatically and unfortunately clashes with the interests of the poor. However, according to Zungula, the government deliberately keeps the masses poor because if you are hungry, your brain is trapped in survival mode. You cannot afford the mental energy to ask big structural questions about who owns the banks or the mines. Therefore, the ANC keeps people poor to keep them politically quiet. Well, if this were true, the ANC would have a massive problem with the “liberated” middle class in Sandton and Umhlanga. In reality, the middle class in South Africa is the most risk-averse group because they have the most to lose, with their bonds, cars and private schooling. In reality, radicalism in South Africa often comes from what Prof Guy Standing calls the “precariat” or “the dangerous class”, the young and unemployed, who have nothing to lose. This contradicts Zungula’s idea that poverty makes people easy to control. If money liberates people to ask dangerous questions, as he argues, why is the most “monied” part of South Africa the part most committed to the existing constitutional and economic framework? Instead, the people asking for the nationalisation of banks or the “seizing of the means of production” are not the comfortable people eating three meals a day; it’s the people who feel the current system has failed them entirely. If financial independence led to radicalism and a loss of state control, the government would be terrified of the private sector and the professional class. Instead, the middle class acts as a stabilising force for the economy, even when they are often the government’s harshest critics. The truth of the matter is that the poverty we see is just a by-product of the state’s actual goal: to maintain investor confidence. The more they prioritise the “stability” of existing wealth, they inadvertently entrench the barriers that keep the poor, poor. For instance, the ANC’s lynchpin policies, like inflation targeting and fiscal restraint, are “pro-rich” because they protect the value of accumulated assets. However, for someone in a township looking for a massive state-led infrastructure job, those same policies look like a deliberate handbrake on growth. Zungula further suggests the government uses foreign nationals to “sideline” locals. Zungula’s logic suggests that by allowing an influx of migrants into sectors like farming, hospitality and spaza shops, the government creates a race to the bottom for wages. This, he argues, keeps Black South Africans out of the economic loop and in a state of dependency. Again, this is not a “plan”, but rather a symptom of a weak state. The government isn’t “using” foreign nationals; it simply lacks the political will to regulate the informal economy or secure borders. The result is the same: the marginalisation of locals. Still, the cause is disinterest rather than a master plan for subjugation. Yes, it’s true that capital benefits considerably from cheap immigrant labour, but again, this is about the benefits of the arrangement rather than a deliberate attempt to keep natives impoverished. Capital doesn’t care about keeping South Africans poor; it cares about maximising returns. If exploitable migrant labour exists and the state won’t enforce regulations, capital will exploit the loophole. The displacement of South African workers is not the objective. Because the ANC lacks the ideological framework to regulate capital effectively, capital does what it naturally does: seek the cheapest, most compliant labour available, and this happens to be foreign labour. Zungula’s central claim is that the ANC is “working with capital”, and this I fully agree with. Where we diverge is the intent behind the collusion. He argues that they work together to create poverty. My argument is that the pair work together to maintain wealth, and poverty is the unfortunate “cost of doing business”. In simple terms, there’s a meaningful difference between deliberately creating poverty as a control mechanism versus prioritising wealth preservation in ways that reproduce poverty. The former requires intentional conspiracy and malicious coordination; the latter is simply how capital-friendly governance works. In fact, I would go as far as to say that if the ANC could create a massive Black middle class, they would jump at the opportunity. The only reason they don’t do it is that this requires massive wealth redistribution, which unfortunately clashes with their alliance with capital. In this sense, the ANC is trapped between its political need to deliver transformation and its economic commitment to maintaining investor confidence. If the ANC wanted to keep people poor for control, as Zungula insists, they wouldn’t have built the largest social grant system on the continent. They’d shut that thing down and openly embrace austerity. Similarly, if Zungula were right, the state would have dismantled the middle class to ensure total dependency. Instead, they promise transformation while implementing policies that make it impossible. This is the predictable result of trying to serve two masters: their political base demanding economic justice and capital demanding protection of accumulated wealth. So, no, the government isn’t trying to keep Black people poor; they are just prioritising the protection of the wealthy to keep the “engine” of the formal economy running. Zungula’s conspiracy theory confuses the outcome with intent. This is the long and short of it.
2:33

In a podcast with Penuel Mlotshwa, Vuyo Zungula argued that the government is deliberately keeping Black people poor. I’m just gonna come out and say it: Mr Zungula is off base on this one. Contrary to what Zungula claims, the ANC has, since the 1990s, been concerned with keeping the rich people rich. This is not the same as keeping people poor. In reality, the ANC’s policies, particularly since 1996, have been tailored around maintaining and expanding existing wealth patterns. This automatically and unfortunately clashes with the interests of the poor. However, according to Zungula, the government deliberately keeps the masses poor because if you are hungry, your brain is trapped in survival mode. You cannot afford the mental energy to ask big structural questions about who owns the banks or the mines. Therefore, the ANC keeps people poor to keep them politically quiet. Well, if this were true, the ANC would have a massive problem with the “liberated” middle class in Sandton and Umhlanga. In reality, the middle class in South Africa is the most risk-averse group because they have the most to lose, with their bonds, cars and private schooling. In reality, radicalism in South Africa often comes from what Prof Guy Standing calls the “precariat” or “the dangerous class”, the young and unemployed, who have nothing to lose. This contradicts Zungula’s idea that poverty makes people easy to control. If money liberates people to ask dangerous questions, as he argues, why is the most “monied” part of South Africa the part most committed to the existing constitutional and economic framework? Instead, the people asking for the nationalisation of banks or the “seizing of the means of production” are not the comfortable people eating three meals a day; it’s the people who feel the current system has failed them entirely. If financial independence led to radicalism and a loss of state control, the government would be terrified of the private sector and the professional class. Instead, the middle class acts as a stabilising force for the economy, even when they are often the government’s harshest critics. The truth of the matter is that the poverty we see is just a by-product of the state’s actual goal: to maintain investor confidence. The more they prioritise the “stability” of existing wealth, they inadvertently entrench the barriers that keep the poor, poor. For instance, the ANC’s lynchpin policies, like inflation targeting and fiscal restraint, are “pro-rich” because they protect the value of accumulated assets. However, for someone in a township looking for a massive state-led infrastructure job, those same policies look like a deliberate handbrake on growth. Zungula further suggests the government uses foreign nationals to “sideline” locals. Zungula’s logic suggests that by allowing an influx of migrants into sectors like farming, hospitality and spaza shops, the government creates a race to the bottom for wages. This, he argues, keeps Black South Africans out of the economic loop and in a state of dependency. Again, this is not a “plan”, but rather a symptom of a weak state. The government isn’t “using” foreign nationals; it simply lacks the political will to regulate the informal economy or secure borders. The result is the same: the marginalisation of locals. Still, the cause is disinterest rather than a master plan for subjugation. Yes, it’s true that capital benefits considerably from cheap immigrant labour, but again, this is about the benefits of the arrangement rather than a deliberate attempt to keep natives impoverished. Capital doesn’t care about keeping South Africans poor; it cares about maximising returns. If exploitable migrant labour exists and the state won’t enforce regulations, capital will exploit the loophole. The displacement of South African workers is not the objective. Because the ANC lacks the ideological framework to regulate capital effectively, capital does what it naturally does: seek the cheapest, most compliant labour available, and this happens to be foreign labour. Zungula’s central claim is that the ANC is “working with capital”, and this I fully agree with. Where we diverge is the intent behind the collusion. He argues that they work together to create poverty. My argument is that the pair work together to maintain wealth, and poverty is the unfortunate “cost of doing business”. In simple terms, there’s a meaningful difference between deliberately creating poverty as a control mechanism versus prioritising wealth preservation in ways that reproduce poverty. The former requires intentional conspiracy and malicious coordination; the latter is simply how capital-friendly governance works. In fact, I would go as far as to say that if the ANC could create a massive Black middle class, they would jump at the opportunity. The only reason they don’t do it is that this requires massive wealth redistribution, which unfortunately clashes with their alliance with capital. In this sense, the ANC is trapped between its political need to deliver transformation and its economic commitment to maintaining investor confidence. If the ANC wanted to keep people poor for control, as Zungula insists, they wouldn’t have built the largest social grant system on the continent. They’d shut that thing down and openly embrace austerity. Similarly, if Zungula were right, the state would have dismantled the middle class to ensure total dependency. Instead, they promise transformation while implementing policies that make it impossible. This is the predictable result of trying to serve two masters: their political base demanding economic justice and capital demanding protection of accumulated wealth. So, no, the government isn’t trying to keep Black people poor; they are just prioritising the protection of the wealthy to keep the “engine” of the formal economy running. Zungula’s conspiracy theory confuses the outcome with intent. This is the long and short of it.

Sizwe SikaMusi

22,348 views • 5 months ago

There is a delicious irony in the way our governing centrists, in the UK and in the EU, are lamenting the Trump Shock. They wax lyrical about the globalised, financialised capitalist order which they now mourn. They portray it as a golden age, a natural global system of free trade and benign capital flows. Are they truly oblivious to the facts of recent economic history? Do they not know that the grossly imbalanced, extractive, Ponzi-like financialised global capitalism which has spawned the crises that propelled Trump into the White House was also birthed by a major shock? The Nixon shock? Centrists admonish the Trump boys for having turned on their allies but they forget that the Nixon Shock was equally, if not more so, an intentional devastating assault on Europe, Japan and the UK. They seem unaware that precisely because of the economic devastation caused in the 1970s and 1980s, including in America’s heartlands, the Nixon Shock’s architects, men like Paul Volcker, achieved their main long-term objective: to ensure that American hegemony grew alongside America’s trade and government budget deficits, not to mention on the back of financial rents earned at the expense of real value creation. Many seem puzzled that, while the EU and the Britain differ in important ways - mainly in that the EU is running a huge surplus with the US while the UK remains a deficit economy - our centrist regimes on both sides of the Channel seem equally at a loss. There is a reason for this. Since 1971, our economies have been hooked into the same US-centric global surplus recycling mechanism whose deep crisis is steering our politics into the arms of the xenophobic ultra-right – with our electorates increasingly pummelled by nasty undercurrents fuelled by the crisis of this global recycling mechanism that once drove Europe’s and Britain’s growth and relative stability. The essence of this global recycling mechanism (which I once labelled The Global Minotaur) is simple: Since the 1970s, America’s deficits provided Germany, Japan and later China the demand for their factories’ manufactures. In return, the European Union, Japan and later China sent their accumulated profits to Wall Street and its appendage, the City of London, to be recycled into the US rentier sector: private and public debt, some equities, and real estate. A Chinese official once described this mechanism to me as a Dark Deal. “Our Dark Deal with the Americans,” he explained, “turns on the US trade deficit, which keeps demand for our manufactures high. In return, our capitalists invest the bulk of their dollar superprofits into America’s rentier economy - Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Once this process got underway”, he concluded, “America shifted much of its industrial production to our shores.” The problem with this global recycling mechanism was that, to function smoothly, it had to generate larger and larger imbalances, greater trade deficits for the US, and more accumulated rents for Northern Europe and East Asia. But, there are limits to how large imbalances can grow, both in terms of trade deficits and in terms of profits versus rents. Ruptures are inevitable. The longer they are delayed the greater the pain they inflict – a truth that centrists never acknowledged, not even when the Crash of 2008 was tearing down their houses. Trump’s boys have dared asked the pressing question that the centrists refuse to countenance: What comes after the Dark Deal once the imbalances built on the US trade deficit proved unsustainably massive? Their proposed solutions may seem wrongheaded, half-baked, even crazy but at least Trump’s team has identified the American ruling class’s problem: How to maintain US hegemony in the face of America’s rapid de-industrialisation, with the Triffin Dilemma hanging over their heads, and now that financial rents are being replaced by what I call cloud rents. In contrast, UK and EU politicians are utterly out of their depth, running around like decapitated chickens, oscillating between vacuous bravado and servility to The Donald. Guy Standing suggested that, today, I focus on how Europe and the UK should respond to the Trump Shock. I could talk endlessly on this. I could, for example, recommend not just a 10% cloud tax by which to clobber Big Tech but also repealing all regulations that we introduced in Europe to comply with Bill Clinton’s despicable ‘anticircumvention’ Act which is why you can’t buy a jailbreaking tool so your printer is able to recognise and use cheaper, generic ink cartridges. I could recommend that our governments rescind all tariffs imposed at the behest of Washington on excellent Chinese solar panels and electric vehicles, while entering into a serious EU-UK-Chinese dialogue with a view to stimulate our economies in a coordinated fashion so as to stem the recessionary wave coming from Trump’s America. I could recommend that Europe starts its own Peace negotiations with Moscow over Ukraine, rejecting the plunder of Ukraine’s underground wealth by Trump’s boys. But, in all honesty, I can’t find the energy to make these recommendations when I know that the Radical Centre in power, in Britain and in the EU, will do everything they can to not do any of that – in exactly the same way they botched the euro crisis or the opportunities offered by the pandemic. Determined to remain wedded to America’s rentier economy, Europe’s and Britain’s elites will not deviate from current policies – not unless we overthrow them first. But for this we need an agenda bolder than Trump’s and Farage’s and, of course, a radically humanist one – an agenda that is not fearful of radical proposals like a public green investment bank, a trust fund for everyone yielding an unconditional personal income, the termination of all quasi-energy markets, the socialisation of housing and, last but not least, a surge in corporations practising one-employee-one-member-one-vote. Meanwhile, as we stuggle to give political representation to such an agenda, all eyes on China – the only country, for better or for worse, that seems willing and able (though not predestined) to counter Trump’s bullies, to boost green energy production, to work toward turning the BRICS into a new Bretton Woods serving the interests of the Global South. For more thoughts on the world’s response to the Trump Shock, watch this space.
7:13

There is a delicious irony in the way our governing centrists, in the UK and in the EU, are lamenting the Trump Shock. They wax lyrical about the globalised, financialised capitalist order which they now mourn. They portray it as a golden age, a natural global system of free trade and benign capital flows. Are they truly oblivious to the facts of recent economic history? Do they not know that the grossly imbalanced, extractive, Ponzi-like financialised global capitalism which has spawned the crises that propelled Trump into the White House was also birthed by a major shock? The Nixon shock? Centrists admonish the Trump boys for having turned on their allies but they forget that the Nixon Shock was equally, if not more so, an intentional devastating assault on Europe, Japan and the UK. They seem unaware that precisely because of the economic devastation caused in the 1970s and 1980s, including in America’s heartlands, the Nixon Shock’s architects, men like Paul Volcker, achieved their main long-term objective: to ensure that American hegemony grew alongside America’s trade and government budget deficits, not to mention on the back of financial rents earned at the expense of real value creation. Many seem puzzled that, while the EU and the Britain differ in important ways - mainly in that the EU is running a huge surplus with the US while the UK remains a deficit economy - our centrist regimes on both sides of the Channel seem equally at a loss. There is a reason for this. Since 1971, our economies have been hooked into the same US-centric global surplus recycling mechanism whose deep crisis is steering our politics into the arms of the xenophobic ultra-right – with our electorates increasingly pummelled by nasty undercurrents fuelled by the crisis of this global recycling mechanism that once drove Europe’s and Britain’s growth and relative stability. The essence of this global recycling mechanism (which I once labelled The Global Minotaur) is simple: Since the 1970s, America’s deficits provided Germany, Japan and later China the demand for their factories’ manufactures. In return, the European Union, Japan and later China sent their accumulated profits to Wall Street and its appendage, the City of London, to be recycled into the US rentier sector: private and public debt, some equities, and real estate. A Chinese official once described this mechanism to me as a Dark Deal. “Our Dark Deal with the Americans,” he explained, “turns on the US trade deficit, which keeps demand for our manufactures high. In return, our capitalists invest the bulk of their dollar superprofits into America’s rentier economy - Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Once this process got underway”, he concluded, “America shifted much of its industrial production to our shores.” The problem with this global recycling mechanism was that, to function smoothly, it had to generate larger and larger imbalances, greater trade deficits for the US, and more accumulated rents for Northern Europe and East Asia. But, there are limits to how large imbalances can grow, both in terms of trade deficits and in terms of profits versus rents. Ruptures are inevitable. The longer they are delayed the greater the pain they inflict – a truth that centrists never acknowledged, not even when the Crash of 2008 was tearing down their houses. Trump’s boys have dared asked the pressing question that the centrists refuse to countenance: What comes after the Dark Deal once the imbalances built on the US trade deficit proved unsustainably massive? Their proposed solutions may seem wrongheaded, half-baked, even crazy but at least Trump’s team has identified the American ruling class’s problem: How to maintain US hegemony in the face of America’s rapid de-industrialisation, with the Triffin Dilemma hanging over their heads, and now that financial rents are being replaced by what I call cloud rents. In contrast, UK and EU politicians are utterly out of their depth, running around like decapitated chickens, oscillating between vacuous bravado and servility to The Donald. Guy Standing suggested that, today, I focus on how Europe and the UK should respond to the Trump Shock. I could talk endlessly on this. I could, for example, recommend not just a 10% cloud tax by which to clobber Big Tech but also repealing all regulations that we introduced in Europe to comply with Bill Clinton’s despicable ‘anticircumvention’ Act which is why you can’t buy a jailbreaking tool so your printer is able to recognise and use cheaper, generic ink cartridges. I could recommend that our governments rescind all tariffs imposed at the behest of Washington on excellent Chinese solar panels and electric vehicles, while entering into a serious EU-UK-Chinese dialogue with a view to stimulate our economies in a coordinated fashion so as to stem the recessionary wave coming from Trump’s America. I could recommend that Europe starts its own Peace negotiations with Moscow over Ukraine, rejecting the plunder of Ukraine’s underground wealth by Trump’s boys. But, in all honesty, I can’t find the energy to make these recommendations when I know that the Radical Centre in power, in Britain and in the EU, will do everything they can to not do any of that – in exactly the same way they botched the euro crisis or the opportunities offered by the pandemic. Determined to remain wedded to America’s rentier economy, Europe’s and Britain’s elites will not deviate from current policies – not unless we overthrow them first. But for this we need an agenda bolder than Trump’s and Farage’s and, of course, a radically humanist one – an agenda that is not fearful of radical proposals like a public green investment bank, a trust fund for everyone yielding an unconditional personal income, the termination of all quasi-energy markets, the socialisation of housing and, last but not least, a surge in corporations practising one-employee-one-member-one-vote. Meanwhile, as we stuggle to give political representation to such an agenda, all eyes on China – the only country, for better or for worse, that seems willing and able (though not predestined) to counter Trump’s bullies, to boost green energy production, to work toward turning the BRICS into a new Bretton Woods serving the interests of the Global South. For more thoughts on the world’s response to the Trump Shock, watch this space.

Yanis Varoufakis

78,095 views • 1 year ago

ARE COLONIAL WHITES TO BLAME FOR THE STATE OF AFRICA TODAY? DO THEY HAVE ANY RESPONSIBILITY? I am posing this question and re-posting part of an earlier threat as a separate tweet just to capture this point. This is also arising from the claims of some that Africa has been independent for so long so much that there is no more reason to blame colonial whites for the state of Africa. It is being suggested by some that all blame should be laid at the feet of "corrupt and incompetent African leaders". Let's be clear, many an African leader has been a serious disappointment, some have been corrupt, some incompetent. But perhaps, the question also needs to be asked: what kind of African leader has this been? Is this the Pan African leader that actually fought for Africa and was selected by Africans, or is it the comprador bourgeoisie puppet leader imposed on Africa by the colonialists? Yes, it's been almost 30 years since the independence of South Africa and 43 years since the independence of Zimbabwe and some 60 years since the independence of Ghana, the DR Congo and others. While one would have expected a lot of progress to have been made - and a lot of progress was being made in the early days - one must also ask the question: what kind of leadership did post-colonial Africa get? It is instructive to note that in almost every single African country, there was destabilisation after destabilisation: coups, assassination of African leaders, and replacement with western puppets. In Ghana, the CIA overthrew the Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and replaced him with their puppet Joseph Arthur Ankrah, decapitating Ghana's progress in the process. In Ivory Coast the French installed Félix Houphouët-Boigny who would go on to rule for decades, actively serving the interests of France. In the DR Congo the Belgians and CIA and their accolytes Moise Tshombe and Joseph Kasavubu, assassinated Patrice Emery Lumumba and installed Mobutu Sese Seko. The same would happen to Thomas Sankara who they assassinated and replaced with their puppet Blaise Compaoré. In Nigeria they overthrew Nnamdi Azikiwe and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and replaced them with their puppets. In Ethiopia they overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie and replaced him with the dictator and Genocidaire Mengistu Haile Mariam. In Zimbabwe they decapitated Dr. Joshua Nkomo through Genocide against his people and placed Mugabe in power instead of him. In Uganda they used Idi Amin to overthrow Apollo Milton Obote and Uganda has never been the same. In Mali they overthrew Modibo Keita and replaced him with Moussa Traoré. In Togo they had assassinated Silvanus Olympio and replaced him with their puppets. In Mozambique and Angola they fomented rebellions in Renamo under Afonso Dhlakama and Jonas Savimbi and decapitated any progress. In the frontline states that were opposed ot Apartheid, bombing raids were carried out by the South African Defence Force, in addition to all kinds of subversion and sabotage. Tanzania, Zambia, Angola and other frontline states were to suffer both under the hands of the Apartheid Government and the Americans and Europeans. Many of these African states got caught up in the Big Power rivalry between the USA and the USSR. Now, what is instructive is that all these comprador bourgeoisie puppet leaders that were used by the West to overthrow Pan African leaders would go on to rule each for between 20 and 40 years, despite visiting the most horendous of crimes against their own people, presiding over gross incompetence and grotesque corruption. Their mission was to keep Africa divided, poor, fighting, unable to control its resources, and open to exploitation by Western corporations. The same people telling us about democracy today are the same people who imposed the most evil rulers upon us. It may well be said that Africa has yet to have its own legitimate leaders that have been fairly selected. And if we have learned anything from South Africa and Tanzania recently, any such leaders will still be persecuted if not outright assassinated. We find President Zuma in this category (do you realise that President Zuma went down the same way President Lula da Silva went down in Brazil, Dr. Mamohan Singh in India, and clearly the Presidents of Russia and China have been too powerful for the west to overthrow). In Ethiopia Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died allegendly naturally but your guess is as good as mine. The same tragedy visited President Pombe John Magufuli in Tanzania. But as Thomas Sankara warned in his famous A "United Front Against the Debt" speech to the OAU in Addis Ababa in July 1987, if we stand united as Africans, we will be able to prevent all these assassinations, coups, inteference, and neocolonial agendas. He argued: "I hope our conference sees the necessity of stating clearly that we cannot pay the debt. Not in a warmongering or warlike spirit. This is to avoid our going off to be killed one at a time. If Burkina Faso alone were to refuse to pay the debt, I wouldn’t be at the next conference. On the other hand, with the support of all, which I greatly need, with the support of all, we can avoid paying. And if we can avoid paying, we can devote our meager resources to our development." The time has come for the younger generation of Africans to rediscover the vision of the African Greats, the Pan Africanists in the mould of the Osegyafo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Dr. Joshua Nkomo, Patrice Emery Lumumba, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Modibo Keita, Julius Nyerere, Keneth Kaunda, and lately, Thabo Mbeki, Pombe John Magufuli, Meles Zenawi, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, etc. Now, this is not to say that these leaders were perfect. By no means. But they were clear on the direction that Africa should take. They were clear on the need for African unity, and the need for Africa to determine its own destiny as a united force. They worked against almost insurmountable challenges, economic sanctions, persistent propaganda from the west, sabotage, etc, but they still held dear the vision of a united Africa that legitimately serves its own people. To come back to the original question posed: do we still have reason to blame colonial whites? I would say absolutely. It is them that imposed on Africa their puppets that have ruled for, in some cases, 40 years and above: Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Paul Biya in Cameron, Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Ivory Coast, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Idi Amin in Uganda, etc.; fomented rebellions, coups, assassinations, etc. If we are to solve the problems of Africa, we need to start with the question: what is the best way to select truly competent pro- and Pan African leaders that will ensure the unity, power, and prosperity of Africa? We need to ask ourselves: is this so-called democracy from the west bringing us the best of leaders, or it's just a rent-seeking mechanism for the west to continue to control us by sponsoring their puppets? Do we need perhaps to go back to our traditional institutions and find out how we can select the best of the best among us following some form of meritocracy? Perhaps replace the political parties with residents associations and community Lekgotlas to select the best who meet certain qualification and experience criteria?
3:00

ARE COLONIAL WHITES TO BLAME FOR THE STATE OF AFRICA TODAY? DO THEY HAVE ANY RESPONSIBILITY? I am posing this question and re-posting part of an earlier threat as a separate tweet just to capture this point. This is also arising from the claims of some that Africa has been independent for so long so much that there is no more reason to blame colonial whites for the state of Africa. It is being suggested by some that all blame should be laid at the feet of "corrupt and incompetent African leaders". Let's be clear, many an African leader has been a serious disappointment, some have been corrupt, some incompetent. But perhaps, the question also needs to be asked: what kind of African leader has this been? Is this the Pan African leader that actually fought for Africa and was selected by Africans, or is it the comprador bourgeoisie puppet leader imposed on Africa by the colonialists? Yes, it's been almost 30 years since the independence of South Africa and 43 years since the independence of Zimbabwe and some 60 years since the independence of Ghana, the DR Congo and others. While one would have expected a lot of progress to have been made - and a lot of progress was being made in the early days - one must also ask the question: what kind of leadership did post-colonial Africa get? It is instructive to note that in almost every single African country, there was destabilisation after destabilisation: coups, assassination of African leaders, and replacement with western puppets. In Ghana, the CIA overthrew the Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and replaced him with their puppet Joseph Arthur Ankrah, decapitating Ghana's progress in the process. In Ivory Coast the French installed Félix Houphouët-Boigny who would go on to rule for decades, actively serving the interests of France. In the DR Congo the Belgians and CIA and their accolytes Moise Tshombe and Joseph Kasavubu, assassinated Patrice Emery Lumumba and installed Mobutu Sese Seko. The same would happen to Thomas Sankara who they assassinated and replaced with their puppet Blaise Compaoré. In Nigeria they overthrew Nnamdi Azikiwe and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and replaced them with their puppets. In Ethiopia they overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie and replaced him with the dictator and Genocidaire Mengistu Haile Mariam. In Zimbabwe they decapitated Dr. Joshua Nkomo through Genocide against his people and placed Mugabe in power instead of him. In Uganda they used Idi Amin to overthrow Apollo Milton Obote and Uganda has never been the same. In Mali they overthrew Modibo Keita and replaced him with Moussa Traoré. In Togo they had assassinated Silvanus Olympio and replaced him with their puppets. In Mozambique and Angola they fomented rebellions in Renamo under Afonso Dhlakama and Jonas Savimbi and decapitated any progress. In the frontline states that were opposed ot Apartheid, bombing raids were carried out by the South African Defence Force, in addition to all kinds of subversion and sabotage. Tanzania, Zambia, Angola and other frontline states were to suffer both under the hands of the Apartheid Government and the Americans and Europeans. Many of these African states got caught up in the Big Power rivalry between the USA and the USSR. Now, what is instructive is that all these comprador bourgeoisie puppet leaders that were used by the West to overthrow Pan African leaders would go on to rule each for between 20 and 40 years, despite visiting the most horendous of crimes against their own people, presiding over gross incompetence and grotesque corruption. Their mission was to keep Africa divided, poor, fighting, unable to control its resources, and open to exploitation by Western corporations. The same people telling us about democracy today are the same people who imposed the most evil rulers upon us. It may well be said that Africa has yet to have its own legitimate leaders that have been fairly selected. And if we have learned anything from South Africa and Tanzania recently, any such leaders will still be persecuted if not outright assassinated. We find President Zuma in this category (do you realise that President Zuma went down the same way President Lula da Silva went down in Brazil, Dr. Mamohan Singh in India, and clearly the Presidents of Russia and China have been too powerful for the west to overthrow). In Ethiopia Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died allegendly naturally but your guess is as good as mine. The same tragedy visited President Pombe John Magufuli in Tanzania. But as Thomas Sankara warned in his famous A "United Front Against the Debt" speech to the OAU in Addis Ababa in July 1987, if we stand united as Africans, we will be able to prevent all these assassinations, coups, inteference, and neocolonial agendas. He argued: "I hope our conference sees the necessity of stating clearly that we cannot pay the debt. Not in a warmongering or warlike spirit. This is to avoid our going off to be killed one at a time. If Burkina Faso alone were to refuse to pay the debt, I wouldn’t be at the next conference. On the other hand, with the support of all, which I greatly need, with the support of all, we can avoid paying. And if we can avoid paying, we can devote our meager resources to our development." The time has come for the younger generation of Africans to rediscover the vision of the African Greats, the Pan Africanists in the mould of the Osegyafo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Dr. Joshua Nkomo, Patrice Emery Lumumba, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Modibo Keita, Julius Nyerere, Keneth Kaunda, and lately, Thabo Mbeki, Pombe John Magufuli, Meles Zenawi, Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, etc. Now, this is not to say that these leaders were perfect. By no means. But they were clear on the direction that Africa should take. They were clear on the need for African unity, and the need for Africa to determine its own destiny as a united force. They worked against almost insurmountable challenges, economic sanctions, persistent propaganda from the west, sabotage, etc, but they still held dear the vision of a united Africa that legitimately serves its own people. To come back to the original question posed: do we still have reason to blame colonial whites? I would say absolutely. It is them that imposed on Africa their puppets that have ruled for, in some cases, 40 years and above: Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Paul Biya in Cameron, Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Ivory Coast, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Idi Amin in Uganda, etc.; fomented rebellions, coups, assassinations, etc. If we are to solve the problems of Africa, we need to start with the question: what is the best way to select truly competent pro- and Pan African leaders that will ensure the unity, power, and prosperity of Africa? We need to ask ourselves: is this so-called democracy from the west bringing us the best of leaders, or it's just a rent-seeking mechanism for the west to continue to control us by sponsoring their puppets? Do we need perhaps to go back to our traditional institutions and find out how we can select the best of the best among us following some form of meritocracy? Perhaps replace the political parties with residents associations and community Lekgotlas to select the best who meet certain qualification and experience criteria?

Unathi Afrika

126,707 views • 3 years ago

For “God's sake” - wow. Our PM is more interested in what our immigrant population has to say than what a Kiwi has to say, and a Maori at that! I have said it a hundred times, this is not about racism, it is not about immigration - it is about “mass” immigration / ethnic immigration that is changing the culture of New Zealand! It’s about infiltration verse assimilation! Many other immigrants - Polynesian / British / South Africa etc have come here and are a huge blessing as they become a part of the kiwi fabric! At City Impact Church, we have well over 70 nationalities including many wonderful Indian and Asian folk, people in fact from all over who have assimilated into the kiwi way of life, and I am grateful for them and genuinely love them all! (and they know that) But we do need to talk about the culture difference that “New Zealand's” past Christian religion / heritage has been compared to the coming invading Hindu / Muslim religion will bring! They talk about diversity / inclusion - but if you go to a Hindu and Muslim nation and see how much diversity there is there - zero (re acceptance of Christians in their Parliaments etc!) Don’t be fooled NZ, our culture, our kiwi way of life is under threat and like frog in hot water, it will happen slowly and before you know it they will be influencing laws / rules and way of life. One would be blind not to see that when Muslim, Hindu, Sikh candidates get involved and gain positions of power in local and national politics, they will undermine our values and culture, bringing in theirs! If you think that is a good idea, try living in their countries that they have left / fled and see how you like it! We will even probably have more national holidays to celebrate their religious festivals (now all the slackers may like that without realizing the spiritual ramifications) yet it will run more employers into the ground! Kiwis, are you not interested in your children’s and their children’s future! Even here in this clip, Luxon says immigrants work darn hard (which is true - anyone been to Fiji can see the same problem) the PM continues they take up two or three jobs, no wonder our young people can’t find work! For our PM to put them ahead of a kiwi concern is just unbelievable - he should be interested in what we have to say - we pay his wages, we voted him in! Whether you agree with Brian’s concern or not, the point is the government should listen to all New Zealanders concern rather than dismissing them with “For Gods sake, I don’t care what he is saying” That behaviour is, by the looks of it, why he will be voted out - he cannot and should not dismiss New Zealanders concerns so easily! I may not agree (like you) with everything Brian says, but I agree that one should be a NZ citizen to have the privilege to vote, and only people born in NZ should be in Parliament, at least then all our politicians have grown up here in NZ.
0:59

For “God's sake” - wow. Our PM is more interested in what our immigrant population has to say than what a Kiwi has to say, and a Maori at that! I have said it a hundred times, this is not about racism, it is not about immigration - it is about “mass” immigration / ethnic immigration that is changing the culture of New Zealand! It’s about infiltration verse assimilation! Many other immigrants - Polynesian / British / South Africa etc have come here and are a huge blessing as they become a part of the kiwi fabric! At City Impact Church, we have well over 70 nationalities including many wonderful Indian and Asian folk, people in fact from all over who have assimilated into the kiwi way of life, and I am grateful for them and genuinely love them all! (and they know that) But we do need to talk about the culture difference that “New Zealand's” past Christian religion / heritage has been compared to the coming invading Hindu / Muslim religion will bring! They talk about diversity / inclusion - but if you go to a Hindu and Muslim nation and see how much diversity there is there - zero (re acceptance of Christians in their Parliaments etc!) Don’t be fooled NZ, our culture, our kiwi way of life is under threat and like frog in hot water, it will happen slowly and before you know it they will be influencing laws / rules and way of life. One would be blind not to see that when Muslim, Hindu, Sikh candidates get involved and gain positions of power in local and national politics, they will undermine our values and culture, bringing in theirs! If you think that is a good idea, try living in their countries that they have left / fled and see how you like it! We will even probably have more national holidays to celebrate their religious festivals (now all the slackers may like that without realizing the spiritual ramifications) yet it will run more employers into the ground! Kiwis, are you not interested in your children’s and their children’s future! Even here in this clip, Luxon says immigrants work darn hard (which is true - anyone been to Fiji can see the same problem) the PM continues they take up two or three jobs, no wonder our young people can’t find work! For our PM to put them ahead of a kiwi concern is just unbelievable - he should be interested in what we have to say - we pay his wages, we voted him in! Whether you agree with Brian’s concern or not, the point is the government should listen to all New Zealanders concern rather than dismissing them with “For Gods sake, I don’t care what he is saying” That behaviour is, by the looks of it, why he will be voted out - he cannot and should not dismiss New Zealanders concerns so easily! I may not agree (like you) with everything Brian says, but I agree that one should be a NZ citizen to have the privilege to vote, and only people born in NZ should be in Parliament, at least then all our politicians have grown up here in NZ.

Peter Mortlock

17,557 views • 1 month ago

Dear LA, The industry is not coming back. In the entertainment capital of the world - “Hollywood” - there are fewer television shows and movies being produced today than when Governor Newsom was arresting people for going to the beach. The downstream carnage is piling up across our city, and we aren’t going to shame or strike or tax our way out of it. Drive down Sunset Blvd and you’ll see countless “Jay Luchs - For Lease” signs draped like flowers at a funeral. Ask your friends working in retail, restaurants, or real estate just how bad things are, and you’ll be reminded that every business in our city flows downstream of the entertainment industry, the sword that LA lives by, and dies by. Rick Caruso, native Angeleno, creator of the Grove, & former mayoral candidate, has recently begun pleading to “bring Hollywood back,” ironically via TikTok, in order to protect all of the adjacent “below the line” businesses. It is the right end goal but the wrong strategy. But what can Mr Caruso do to bring Hollywood back? Ask the unions to ease up? They run this town, even when they cut off their nose to spite their face. Ask Sacramento to give up their fruitless addiction to over-taxation & regulation? It would be easier to convince Count Dracula to give up blood. Ask consumers to change their tastes and abandon TikTok? He’d certainly have my blessing, but that ship has sailed. We can build our way out of LA’s cost-of-housing problem, as Caruso has rightfully pointed out, but more housing alone won’t be enough to save Los Angeles, any more than it would have been able to save Detroit after their own respective monopoly [automobiles] crumbled. Beyond rebrands & gimmicks & political rhetoric, the time has come for a complete product refresh, starting with a reimagining of how LA entertains the world. My idea is simple: pivot Los Angeles from the capital of production to the global capital of LIVE entertainment, events, & hospitality. Almost everyone needed in production, and every business downstream of production, has a year-round parallel role to offer in the AI-proof world of LIVE events. Actors can continue to delight audiences, but with a greater emphasis on in-person performances. Production services can become event logistics providers. And for everyone else it will be an all-hands-on-deck effort to ideate & create the new California dream. Outside of the highly protected walls of Disneyland, a few gated communities in Brentwood, and the smoothie bar at Erewhon we’ve earned a bad reputation. The tourist consensus is that LA is dirty, dangerous, & disappointing. New travelers come to LA as a bucket list item, most vowing to never return, which never seemed to bother anyone, perhaps because previously we just didn’t need their business. We need to become the city that people want to date, not take out for a one-night-stand. And that starts by no longer acting like the prom-queen who peaked in high school. We need to collectively clean up & reorganize our entire city from LAX-it’s uber-lot-from-hell all the way to the open air drug markets surrounding our hotels. And I’m sorry if this hurts Mayor Bass’ feelings, but our inability to manage our addiction & mental health crisis should not be the burden of our guests. The easiest place to start is Hollywood, my home of 18 years. 10,000,000 people travel annually to the Hollywood Walk of Fame despite its dubious honor as “the worst tourist trap in the world.” Imagine a walk-of-fame permanently closed to car traffic, protected by security, with an open-carry-beverage farmer’s market, minus the pushy hustlers, that takes over the asphalt, leaving the stars for guided experiences. Why-oh-why do we expect travelers to care about stars from 50 years ago when we refuse to make any effort to give them minimal context? I see an LA that can take the same movie magic that made it the best marketed city on earth, and use it to deliver a travel experience that warrants a 2nd, 3rd & 4th helping. The Olympics & World Cup both present once-in-a-generation opportunities for Los Angeles to reintroduce itself on a global stage. But these tentpole events should be considered the grand re-opening of LA, not the grand finale. Every celebrity on earth should already be living here, assuming they haven’t fled for their family’s own well being after we seemingly abandoned law & order sometime around 2020, so it is easy to imagine around the clock creator driven events led by Gen-Z stars from Mr Beast to Alix Earle, galvanizing their fan bases alongside our own versions of Graceland for names like Cruise, Hepburn, & Kobe. This plan offers a little bit of something for everyone, even our wealth-gap obsessed activist class, as hospitality outcomes are flatter and more egalitarian, something our Hollywood elite at least claim they want. The biggest challenge to making Los Angeles the LIVE entertainment capital of the world will be getting our political leaders to stop sabotaging us with endless red tape, excuses, and kleptocracy. Rampant political corruption has been enabled by LA’s toothless media who, aside from Elex Michaelson & Bill Melugin - both formerly of FoxLA, have been unable to hold our politicians accountable. Reality TV star turned Influencer turned mayoral candidate (as of yesterday) Spencer Pratt has been effective in keeping the media from completely ignoring the victims of the Palisades fire, but LA still considers my former employers - KTLA & the LA TIMES- to be the watchdogs of record. Without mainstream media support I fear our new media warriors won’t be enough to prevent leaders like Gavin Newsom & Karen Bass from continuing to pillage California with a trail of failed programs, despite bottomless budgets, that make Minnesota’s recently unearthed $18 billion fraud scheme seem like, forgive my pun, kiddie stakes. Can someone please light the Bat-Signal for Nick Shirley? Gotham *cough cough* I mean LA needs him. Some might remember in the last mayor's race when Karen Bass said that if we elected Rick Caruso “he’d just turn LA into The Grove!” I believe the Grove’ification of LA is exactly what we need to successfully pivot as a city, and it would ultimately mean cheaper housing, better jobs for everyone, and happier repeat travelers. So to echo Elex Michaelson, who aptly quipped back at Bass, “what’s wrong with that?” But why hasn’t Caruso declared himself in the next mayor’s race? Maybe it’s because he has his sights set on a California gubernatorial run or maybe he just doesn’t want to risk another disheartening defeat. Not even his inner circle knows what he’ll do next. But I do know one thing… Many of the most successful people in the world call California home and we are going to need them if Los Angeles is ever going to make its comeback.
7:40

Dear LA, The industry is not coming back. In the entertainment capital of the world - “Hollywood” - there are fewer television shows and movies being produced today than when Governor Newsom was arresting people for going to the beach. The downstream carnage is piling up across our city, and we aren’t going to shame or strike or tax our way out of it. Drive down Sunset Blvd and you’ll see countless “Jay Luchs - For Lease” signs draped like flowers at a funeral. Ask your friends working in retail, restaurants, or real estate just how bad things are, and you’ll be reminded that every business in our city flows downstream of the entertainment industry, the sword that LA lives by, and dies by. Rick Caruso, native Angeleno, creator of the Grove, & former mayoral candidate, has recently begun pleading to “bring Hollywood back,” ironically via TikTok, in order to protect all of the adjacent “below the line” businesses. It is the right end goal but the wrong strategy. But what can Mr Caruso do to bring Hollywood back? Ask the unions to ease up? They run this town, even when they cut off their nose to spite their face. Ask Sacramento to give up their fruitless addiction to over-taxation & regulation? It would be easier to convince Count Dracula to give up blood. Ask consumers to change their tastes and abandon TikTok? He’d certainly have my blessing, but that ship has sailed. We can build our way out of LA’s cost-of-housing problem, as Caruso has rightfully pointed out, but more housing alone won’t be enough to save Los Angeles, any more than it would have been able to save Detroit after their own respective monopoly [automobiles] crumbled. Beyond rebrands & gimmicks & political rhetoric, the time has come for a complete product refresh, starting with a reimagining of how LA entertains the world. My idea is simple: pivot Los Angeles from the capital of production to the global capital of LIVE entertainment, events, & hospitality. Almost everyone needed in production, and every business downstream of production, has a year-round parallel role to offer in the AI-proof world of LIVE events. Actors can continue to delight audiences, but with a greater emphasis on in-person performances. Production services can become event logistics providers. And for everyone else it will be an all-hands-on-deck effort to ideate & create the new California dream. Outside of the highly protected walls of Disneyland, a few gated communities in Brentwood, and the smoothie bar at Erewhon we’ve earned a bad reputation. The tourist consensus is that LA is dirty, dangerous, & disappointing. New travelers come to LA as a bucket list item, most vowing to never return, which never seemed to bother anyone, perhaps because previously we just didn’t need their business. We need to become the city that people want to date, not take out for a one-night-stand. And that starts by no longer acting like the prom-queen who peaked in high school. We need to collectively clean up & reorganize our entire city from LAX-it’s uber-lot-from-hell all the way to the open air drug markets surrounding our hotels. And I’m sorry if this hurts Mayor Bass’ feelings, but our inability to manage our addiction & mental health crisis should not be the burden of our guests. The easiest place to start is Hollywood, my home of 18 years. 10,000,000 people travel annually to the Hollywood Walk of Fame despite its dubious honor as “the worst tourist trap in the world.” Imagine a walk-of-fame permanently closed to car traffic, protected by security, with an open-carry-beverage farmer’s market, minus the pushy hustlers, that takes over the asphalt, leaving the stars for guided experiences. Why-oh-why do we expect travelers to care about stars from 50 years ago when we refuse to make any effort to give them minimal context? I see an LA that can take the same movie magic that made it the best marketed city on earth, and use it to deliver a travel experience that warrants a 2nd, 3rd & 4th helping. The Olympics & World Cup both present once-in-a-generation opportunities for Los Angeles to reintroduce itself on a global stage. But these tentpole events should be considered the grand re-opening of LA, not the grand finale. Every celebrity on earth should already be living here, assuming they haven’t fled for their family’s own well being after we seemingly abandoned law & order sometime around 2020, so it is easy to imagine around the clock creator driven events led by Gen-Z stars from Mr Beast to Alix Earle, galvanizing their fan bases alongside our own versions of Graceland for names like Cruise, Hepburn, & Kobe. This plan offers a little bit of something for everyone, even our wealth-gap obsessed activist class, as hospitality outcomes are flatter and more egalitarian, something our Hollywood elite at least claim they want. The biggest challenge to making Los Angeles the LIVE entertainment capital of the world will be getting our political leaders to stop sabotaging us with endless red tape, excuses, and kleptocracy. Rampant political corruption has been enabled by LA’s toothless media who, aside from Elex Michaelson & Bill Melugin - both formerly of FoxLA, have been unable to hold our politicians accountable. Reality TV star turned Influencer turned mayoral candidate (as of yesterday) Spencer Pratt has been effective in keeping the media from completely ignoring the victims of the Palisades fire, but LA still considers my former employers - KTLA & the LA TIMES- to be the watchdogs of record. Without mainstream media support I fear our new media warriors won’t be enough to prevent leaders like Gavin Newsom & Karen Bass from continuing to pillage California with a trail of failed programs, despite bottomless budgets, that make Minnesota’s recently unearthed $18 billion fraud scheme seem like, forgive my pun, kiddie stakes. Can someone please light the Bat-Signal for Nick Shirley? Gotham *cough cough* I mean LA needs him. Some might remember in the last mayor's race when Karen Bass said that if we elected Rick Caruso “he’d just turn LA into The Grove!” I believe the Grove’ification of LA is exactly what we need to successfully pivot as a city, and it would ultimately mean cheaper housing, better jobs for everyone, and happier repeat travelers. So to echo Elex Michaelson, who aptly quipped back at Bass, “what’s wrong with that?” But why hasn’t Caruso declared himself in the next mayor’s race? Maybe it’s because he has his sights set on a California gubernatorial run or maybe he just doesn’t want to risk another disheartening defeat. Not even his inner circle knows what he’ll do next. But I do know one thing… Many of the most successful people in the world call California home and we are going to need them if Los Angeles is ever going to make its comeback.

Darwyn Metzger ⚫️

516,126 views • 6 months ago

Confidence Pro Max: Remembering a Brother, a Filmmaker, and a Warrior Nick’s untimely death is a devastating blow to his family, friends, and Kenya as a whole. We didn’t see it coming, even after he was diagnosed in October 2025 with hypocellular myelodysplastic syndrome (h-MDS), a rare bone marrow disorder. When we went to see him in the hospital, he possessed such positive energy, he was convinced that he would beat this. He was Rambo a "one-man army" and we all believed he could beat it, too. He never looked defeated, or depressed, even as he began to lose weight. When he shaved his head in November, he sent me a photo and asked me to call him "Michael Jordan," after the Chicago Bulls legend whose signature look was a bald head. Even in sickness, he found a reason to smile. I met Nick in 2015, before he became a filmmaker. I remember him sitting in my office wearing a suit, asking for my support to go study filmmaking in Italy. After completing his course in Italy, his first major project upon his return was the award-winning documentary Softie, directed by Sam Soko. The film followed my journey as I ran for political office during the 2017 elections, and Nick was the one behind the drone shots. We became friends, and I enjoyed a front-row seat watching as he went on to document important stories. One of my favourites was his powerful 2021 BBC Africa Eye documentary, "Street Dreams." He directed and filmed a group of seven homeless young men in Nairobi who formed the "Street Family Dance Crew." He embedded with them to capture their raw determination to escape poverty, police harassment, and family issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a story that feels like a distant world today; those dancers used to perform outside nightclubs in the CBD, but the city has since become a ghost town. Many bars closed down and replaced by restaurants that shut their doors by 9:00 PM. It’s a story that captured a time in Nairobi that is long gone. In 2024, Nick and I united as he covered the protests. While I participated in the demonstrations, he worked on an unnamed film and we often discussed safety tips. I was a storyteller before I was an activist, so I knew a thing or two about staying safe in the streets while documenting potentially dangerous stories. When Nick was falsely arrested in May 2025, for allegedly producing the BBC documentary, Blood Parliament - two of the three people arrested with him were working with me. I received a call shortly after their arrest and faced the difficult task of calling my colleagues' parents to deliver the news. The arrest was hostile; they were forced to hand over their phones and passwords, and when their equipment was finally returned, it was infected with spyware. What remains hidden from the public eye after an arrest are the cold cells, the degrading police interrogations, the court arraignments, the stares, and the judgment from both friends and strangers. Sometimes even the loss of clients who don’t want to be associated with “enemies of the state.” On a personal level, the trauma of such an arrest can lead to depression, alcoholism, or insomnia. In Nick’s case, his body crumbled, a hidden disease manifested, and before we could truly understand what it was, it stole him from us. His passing is an indictment of our failed healthcare system. Good healthcare is not free. We do not have enough blood in our blood banks and patients must organize their own donors in both public and private hospitals. Furthermore, specialized medical care is so expensive and out of reach that his family and friends were in the middle of fundraising for a life-saving bone marrow transplant in India. I am glad that he was able to produce his latest work, The People Shall, last year. The documentary is a first-hand eyewitness account of the events of June 25th, 2024, when a new republic was born. In his honour, and in honour of the hundreds of thousands suffering due to poor healthcare in this country, may we take our power back. Nick was good people. He had a positive attitude toward life and brought love and laughter into every room he entered. He could lift heavier weights at the gym than people much older and bigger than him. I had the chance to lift weights with him and his co-accused friends; he was so confident that he was the only one lifting bare-chested. That was 'confidence pro-max,' and he beat us in lifting heavier weights and doing more sets. In September 2025, I woke up early to ensure my son was ready to go drone filming with Nick. My son had recently acquired his drone pilot license, and Nick had taken him under his wing as he worked on a new film - a project he was looking forward to finishing. He surprised us all with his early exit on January 7th, but we thank God we had the chance to spend time with him. As we grieve Nick’s death, may his story inspire you to leave that boring job, find your purpose, and live a life that leaves an impact. I am so grateful for Nick’s life. May God comfort his family and friends and give them strength. He will be dearly missed.
2:50

Confidence Pro Max: Remembering a Brother, a Filmmaker, and a Warrior Nick’s untimely death is a devastating blow to his family, friends, and Kenya as a whole. We didn’t see it coming, even after he was diagnosed in October 2025 with hypocellular myelodysplastic syndrome (h-MDS), a rare bone marrow disorder. When we went to see him in the hospital, he possessed such positive energy, he was convinced that he would beat this. He was Rambo a "one-man army" and we all believed he could beat it, too. He never looked defeated, or depressed, even as he began to lose weight. When he shaved his head in November, he sent me a photo and asked me to call him "Michael Jordan," after the Chicago Bulls legend whose signature look was a bald head. Even in sickness, he found a reason to smile. I met Nick in 2015, before he became a filmmaker. I remember him sitting in my office wearing a suit, asking for my support to go study filmmaking in Italy. After completing his course in Italy, his first major project upon his return was the award-winning documentary Softie, directed by Sam Soko. The film followed my journey as I ran for political office during the 2017 elections, and Nick was the one behind the drone shots. We became friends, and I enjoyed a front-row seat watching as he went on to document important stories. One of my favourites was his powerful 2021 BBC Africa Eye documentary, "Street Dreams." He directed and filmed a group of seven homeless young men in Nairobi who formed the "Street Family Dance Crew." He embedded with them to capture their raw determination to escape poverty, police harassment, and family issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a story that feels like a distant world today; those dancers used to perform outside nightclubs in the CBD, but the city has since become a ghost town. Many bars closed down and replaced by restaurants that shut their doors by 9:00 PM. It’s a story that captured a time in Nairobi that is long gone. In 2024, Nick and I united as he covered the protests. While I participated in the demonstrations, he worked on an unnamed film and we often discussed safety tips. I was a storyteller before I was an activist, so I knew a thing or two about staying safe in the streets while documenting potentially dangerous stories. When Nick was falsely arrested in May 2025, for allegedly producing the BBC documentary, Blood Parliament - two of the three people arrested with him were working with me. I received a call shortly after their arrest and faced the difficult task of calling my colleagues' parents to deliver the news. The arrest was hostile; they were forced to hand over their phones and passwords, and when their equipment was finally returned, it was infected with spyware. What remains hidden from the public eye after an arrest are the cold cells, the degrading police interrogations, the court arraignments, the stares, and the judgment from both friends and strangers. Sometimes even the loss of clients who don’t want to be associated with “enemies of the state.” On a personal level, the trauma of such an arrest can lead to depression, alcoholism, or insomnia. In Nick’s case, his body crumbled, a hidden disease manifested, and before we could truly understand what it was, it stole him from us. His passing is an indictment of our failed healthcare system. Good healthcare is not free. We do not have enough blood in our blood banks and patients must organize their own donors in both public and private hospitals. Furthermore, specialized medical care is so expensive and out of reach that his family and friends were in the middle of fundraising for a life-saving bone marrow transplant in India. I am glad that he was able to produce his latest work, The People Shall, last year. The documentary is a first-hand eyewitness account of the events of June 25th, 2024, when a new republic was born. In his honour, and in honour of the hundreds of thousands suffering due to poor healthcare in this country, may we take our power back. Nick was good people. He had a positive attitude toward life and brought love and laughter into every room he entered. He could lift heavier weights at the gym than people much older and bigger than him. I had the chance to lift weights with him and his co-accused friends; he was so confident that he was the only one lifting bare-chested. That was 'confidence pro-max,' and he beat us in lifting heavier weights and doing more sets. In September 2025, I woke up early to ensure my son was ready to go drone filming with Nick. My son had recently acquired his drone pilot license, and Nick had taken him under his wing as he worked on a new film - a project he was looking forward to finishing. He surprised us all with his early exit on January 7th, but we thank God we had the chance to spend time with him. As we grieve Nick’s death, may his story inspire you to leave that boring job, find your purpose, and live a life that leaves an impact. I am so grateful for Nick’s life. May God comfort his family and friends and give them strength. He will be dearly missed.

The People’s President

37,999 views • 6 months ago