Malema fooling the workers
IT amazing that Julius Malema claims to speak on behalf of workers, but always fails to mention socialism in any of his speeches. Workers continue to be fooled by Malema’s “economic freedom” rhetoric.
It has been said that there can never be real freedom, economic or political, for workers unless and until a socialist state is reached. There is no point in talking about economic freedom within capitalism, no matter how much you raise the minimum wage. SAVING the life of a rhino or, say, an elephant is not just about caring about wild animals over everything else.
It is about preserving our national treasure, our national heritage.
I know that in this turbulent Heritage Month, it may be easy to be selective or even forget about what we need to do to protect and preserve our varied national resources.
I must confess that there have been many times when I have felt also that saving wild animals has attracted more attention and support than Wages will remain wages, which is entirely different from socialism where there is equitable sharing of the economy.
Workers should not be fooled by Malema, who does not know anything about working on a mine and has amassed the amount of wealth that he has through nothing but dubious tender processes.
He will never have the best interests of workers at heart. All that he cares about is his political career. Thabo Thwala many of life’s other needs.
But the truth is that SA without its wild animals is an even poorer country, and certainly cannot be the place that we fought for so hard, many of us even making the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.
I was reminded of this when I visited the Madikwe Game Reserve on a wild conservation programme recently.
Until then, I had completely forgotten that protecting and preserving our heritage cannot be about one thing only.
Our heritage is about everything, and all species, including A BRILLIANT interview last week by Talk Radio 702’s Stephen Grootes with the Tshwane police chief, Stephen Ngubeni, showed why the SAPS and various metro police divisions have become so tainted by police brutality and general excesses.
Grootes’s interview with the blustering chief showed that he had no respect for the freedom of the media to report at crime scenes, and has a poor grasp on what the law prescribes.
The freedom of journalists to report and photograph police actions is protected by legal statutes, but I doubt if the prescripts of their rights to wild animals.
It took the effort of Dr Vincent Maphai, a member of the National Planning Commission, to gather a few of us in the wild and involve us directly in the desperate process of saving the rhinos and elephants that are being poached at alarming rates.
With less than 5 000 rhinos left in SA, many experts believe that it is now conceivable that these amazing animals may become extinct in our lifetime.
For Maphai and his colleagues in the National Planning Commission, every little perform their duties have been adequately conveyed through the ranks by weak management structures to poorly trained police bullies.
The police illegally forcing journalists and the public to delete legal camera footage has become all too common.
Two eNews TV journalists accused the Tshwane officers of forcing them at gunpoint to delete footage on their cellphones of what they described as the cops manhandling a effort sharing, preserving and protecting our national resources is critical.
Having been to Madikwe and seen the anti-poaching efforts, I can only hope that many feel called to action. The revival of our country, indeed our continent, requires every effort from us irrespective of how we may feel at one time or the other. Dumisani Kumalo Former representative of SA to the UN, now the CEO of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation.
Writing in his personal capacity. suspect. The interview started with Ngubeni rejecting the allegations. He was clearly taking the word of his implicated officers and pre-empting the results of an internal inquiry.
He should just have conveyed to Grootes what his officers had reported in their defence, and then announced a full inquiry into the matter.
This in an all too common knee-jerk reaction from police management. He also told Grootes that he considered the eNews actions to be interfering in police duties at a crime scene. Despite probing from the tenacious 702 newsman, Ngubeni could not explain how the eNews team had interfered in a crime scene by taking photographs.
With such a biased mindset from the chief of police, there is little likelihood of the Tshwane internal inquiry finding any wrongdoing in the bully-boy cops’ actions.
The eNews reporters should escalate their complaint to the Independent Police Investigative Directorate. Jean LePalisseur