Imtiaz Sooliman – , Gift of the Givers Building South Africa together
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the challenges faced by businesses and people, including negative thoughts and loss of family members. They emphasize the importance of faith and spirituality in achieving positivity and hope, and stress the need for everyone to act like a normal person. They also discuss the struggles faced by the American public, including the failure of the National Defense Force and recent unrest in the Citrus area. The speakers emphasize the importance of trusting government and finding ways to respond to inflation and unrest. They also touch on the negative impact of people moving away from religion and creating conflict, and emphasize the need to create jobs for children and young people to provide them with a job and support. Lastly, they discuss a mobile hospital in Africa and a conversation with a new general manager of Turkish Airline.
AI: Summary ©
Thank you.
Thank you very much for introducing me. Thank you
audgrove, for the for the invitation to come and address you
guys, but I'd like to start off with Mr. Barton. See, true
patriot. You know, wherever you go for the last three years, people
talk about a failed state, negative mindsets, no hope leaving
the country. What's going to happen to our children? What's the
future? Like all those kind of things, when to come with a
positive mindset like that. That's the beginning of change. So let's
start at that point.
Challenges are nothing new.
It's something that we go through from small whether it's in a
preschool, a primary school with bullies, a high school or teacher,
that's complicated, and when you go to universities. In
universities, you throw in the deep end. It's not like school.
The teacher is not there to guide you, the lecturer gives you a few
notes on the board, and you've got to find your own way. And then you
go into companies, and you have challenges there. How do you deal
with the challenges? That's the issue. Challenges will always be
there. It's a fact of life, husband and wife, parents and
children, and today, the children are absolutely complicated. You're
talking about grandchildren. Today's grandchildren, the age of
three, got a man of their own. I know I've got nine grandchildren.
Each one is a monster, more than the other
one. So these are a fact of life. What if you guys remember in the
70s, when the Middle East war, we had a fuel crisis. You can only
buy, I think, five liters or 10 liters of fuel and keep it at
home. We overcame that in 2008 in 2009 we had the banking crisis
worldwide. South Africa survived that. The interest rate at one
point went to 24%
we survived that 2018 Cape Town into day zero, and you're only 50
liters of water per day. And we've survived that. In 2020
came the covid. We lost 2 million jobs, of which we got them back,
and we lost 100,000 people. Not much you can do about that, but
we've come out of that. In 2021 we had the several unrest in KZN, and
we've recovered slowly on its own. 2022 massive floods in KZN,
infrastructure damage, loss of life, big challenges to KZN. We
had floods in 2019
covid In 20 several others in 21 floods in 2222
and we survived that. 23 and 24 we're suffering with E Coli in the
water. And of course, the whole of last year was load shedding. So
these are all negative things in front of you,
but how do you deal with it? You see all of you can be fit and you
can train, and you can exercise, and you can do all those kind of
things, but if you have a negative mindset, a negative mind will
destroy your entire body. There's only two things that give you a
positive mindset and hope, and that is faith and spirituality.
There is no other way. Whether you believe or not is not being
imposed on you, but there's no other way where you can see
positivity and hope. Besides having faith and spirituality,
that's a source of mindset change. You see, two years ago, our trucks
went up into Queenstown komani,
and it's around five o'clock in winter, it's dark, and old lady
comes out of the house from the house from the rural area. She
sees the truck. Everybody knows our branding, everybody knows how
color is green, everybody knows who we are. And as a truck came up
the village, when she came out of a house, she looked at it. She was
on her clutches. She picks her hands up, and she looks
heavenwards, and she says, You never let me down. What's
the implication of that?
You see, she never called us,
she never called me, she never called me. Mr. KT members, she
didn't call anybody an organization, but she called on
gone himself,
and this truck arrived in the area,
not knowing why we went there,
and she gratefully took that food parcel, and a fate was
substantially increased
in 2005
I was in Pakistan,
massive earthquake.
I normally carry my phones with me, but as I was getting into the
truck, I told my friend, my team member, to all the phones, and
then he walked a few meters away to check something, and the truck
driver drove off. But we were in a convoy, so
that was a certain point in the convoy where this truck driver
went off on his own, and.
One vengeance. We want to hold hands. We'll build together. But
the wound was very deep. They know what happened on June 16. They
know what happened on March 21
they know about the cradfore. They know about kufot. They know about
CCB. They know about boss. They know about Solomon maslago. They
know about Imam Harun. They know about detention without trial.
They know about torture and a party, the injustice,
but they didn't say it. But we embrace and hold hands together.
That, to me, ladies and gentlemen, is the greatest salvage of this
country. I know I'm not a normal tourist. I'm a disaster tourist. I
go to the worst places on earth with my teens, where there's
mayhem, chaos, confusion, disorder, killing, murder, and
every type of disorder, every type of evil that you can see in people
we see all over I'm doing this for 32 years. That's all I do, Monday
to Sunday, 65 days a year. And two years before that, I'm a disaster
specialist, and I see all kinds of care, chaos and mayhem. It never
happened here. Count your lucky stars. You can't fix that
poked all you can fix no changing. You can fix water. You can fix
you're already fixing it. Then things you can fix that you can't
fix
something else happened
when Mandela came out, he embraced his jail. He formed
the government of national unity,
and he said no vindictiveness.
He put this stem in coslela. Show me one political party in the
world that will take the national anthem of our people they replace
and put in the new ant. Show me one in the world, 204 countries,
you won't find it
short compromise for reconciliation. And
then the following year, he did the unthinkable,
he wore francophins Number six jersey for the Rugby World Cup.
Great challenge within his party, they were not happy. They were
very unhappy, actually, about why he did that.
But he was a statesman. He understood that on 27th April, 94
the country could have burnt.
They would have won every battle, but they would have lost the war.
Nobody survives when you have several unrest, friction, killing,
mayhem and disorder. So he compromised, and he wore that
jersey. Please tell me how logical and how possible it is for people
who had hundreds of years of colonialism and a party from 1948
to have a black population supporting our white truck meeting
in one year. How is that possible?
It's because people are people of faith and spirituality that's the
greatest grace of this country.
Nurture that. And what Mr. Khan, she is saying is right. We need to
help each other. There is no other way of fixing this country. We are
in the common of habit of saying it's the government's
responsibility
if I take this country and offer it to America,
to Canada, to Germany, to France, anybody in Europe Australia, say,
take it for free.
They will tell me, are you mad?
How can 7.4 million people's taxes look after 65 million people? Can
you do it any of your corporates? It's not possible. No matter which
political party runs the country, it's not possible.
And remember, most of the 65 million people were disadvantaged.
Pre 94
we never gave them a chance to study, to get a degree to be a
professional, to do entrepreneurship. But they said
patiently and quietly and not making any disturbance.
We need to understand that the difficulties that people go
through in your own companies. Can all of you put solar panels? Can
you put new equipment? Well, the bank is you alone easily now,
government doesn't have the wherewithal to fix everything. Put
7.4 million people's taxes. It's just not possible. Yes, they are
responsible for corruption. They are responsible for state capture.
They are responsible for getting tended to their friends. They have
to account for that. They are responsible for mismanagement. But
a lot of the corruption has been started by the private sector. Who
corrupts government? They did self,
who gives incentives? Who over inflates prices? Who had
price fixing on the stadiums, on bread, price on other surprises in
the country, over inflated prices? Who does that? We are equally
responsible. It's human nature to be greedy. You.
Challenges you don't want to take it on. I will keep giving it to
you to test your faith.
The challenges will keep coming. How positive will we remain? How
will we respond? Senegal is a brilliant example of how we need
to respond. I'll
give you one example. You mentioned the floods last year
in Citrus dal when the floods came last year,
people were cut off for seven days.
The wind was too strong, the rain was too harsh. The roads were
gone, the bridges were gone. People were stuck. You couldn't
get inside.
Women mentioned all were hungry. The ATM couldn't work. There was
no money. Goods couldn't come in. You couldn't buy even you had
money in the house. You couldn't get stuff. Those trucks couldn't
go across. People were stranded, no matter what status you are,
high class, middle class, low class. You all caught up in the
same boat, like the stadium story.
What do you do? So we drove there with our trucks.
Government, national and provincial, divers, helicopter
pilots, disaster management, municipality, paramedics,
ambulance services and farmers on our teams and engineers. So we
said, look, this bridge we can't cross. So somebody asked, is there
like another option? So a farmer driving the idea said, I know that
farmer that side, eight to 10 kilometers down the road, who's
got a small bridge that can cross from another side.
This is working together. So the trucks and the buckies and the
police and everybody went to the farms place. We found the bridge,
the water was still running across, and with the oops, I mean,
to go across this bridge.
So the engineer said, we think it will hold.
Not too sure.
My drivers had to make the decision. Well, they drive across
that bridge. I can't impose on them. It's their life. The divers
very happily said, we'll get into the water. If you fall in, we'll
take you out.
So the drivers looked at this, and the first guy said, Me, I'm going
to drive. And
as he went across the bridge, the divers were waiting. Farmers said,
around engineers around, and he crossed,
and the second truck crossed, and the buckets came, and everybody
came. And as we drove into citrus dal, the jubilation, the joy, the
thankfulness, the gratitude that food, blankets, tents, water,
bottle water, sanitary pads, diapers, fruit and everything
came. You see, when you stand together and you have faith, you
can do that in Citrus dal, we did it in McGregor. We've done it in
PE we've done it in other parts of Kuruman, in all parts of the
country. We've done lots of we did it in George with the building
collapse recently, all working together, when you have no ego and
the desire to work together, you can fix anything. And that's the
attitude we need to have. We've proven it over and over again. Let
me give you a story of P
they called us in May 2022, reaching day zero,
we drill 50 boreholes in the city. It's very strategic locations to
prevent civil unrest and to have them not today, we got floods
there
in the same year, in December 2022,
a mess of fire hit. The
fire chief calls acting fire chief. He calls and he says,
number one, my trucks can't reach the fire.
Number two, I don't have enough fire. People. Number three, I
don't have water to fill the trucks. Number four, I don't have
water, energy foods, energy drinks to give the fire people,
I said, You're in deep shit.
Your city is going to burn
because they can't get to the fire. The only way is to drop the
thing from the top. No other way. We brought in two helicopters from
George, two planes from Stellenbosch. We brought in
additional firefighters, brought in the energy drinks and the
biscuits, brought in our own water tankers. Supported those water
tankers opened up all our boreholes and all the kind of
people you guys are very good at handing man work, came with your
buckies and your JoJo tanks, and we loaded all of that stuff, and
everybody took responsibility of burning the fire. You could have
set back and says the municipality's responsibility
whilst waiting for the municipality, you also have burnt
if you took a negative approach.
And within five days, we brought that entire fire to a standstill.
We stopped it. The helicopters were coming to study all the time,
and the planes when we walked into the mall,
a lady came and touched me and started swabbing so I said,
whatever.
And he said, My house was about to burn, and your helicopter came
passed into the water on the fire, my house got saved the mall on the
end to which they wanted to sell out. I think this hole already the
fire was right at the mall, and the helicopter scale and just
stopped the fire at the right time.
We didn't see whose house, whose mall, whose shop, whose land,
whose house. We just did it. A city got saved. Jobs got saved.
Lives got saved. Development took place. Hive was to invest 100
billion rand into PE for ammonium hydroxide, hydrogen energy.
When you do good things, good things come back to you. So let me
go back to the beginning, and then I'll finish off. You see,
everybody knows the gift of the August. Gift of the givers, was
formed on six August, 1992
that's the physical material date.
To me, it goes back way beyond. I'm much older now. I can reflect.
I can think I'm more mature. I've got more reason. And I sit back
and think on my life. I say, No, this thing happened in 1985 1992
in 1980 my mother had passed on. In 1984
I'm born in portraits room, my mother and father got separated. I
moved to Durban. In 74 I finished matric day. I did medical school
day. And in 84 my mother passed on, and in 85 I was doing
internship in King Edward hospital. Now, when you're young,
everybody, we have aspirations. So I said I would have finished an
internship. I will be a medical officer, a registrar, and I will
become a specialist in internal medicine. I want to be a
specialist physician.
1986
no opportunity, no post. Couldn't study further. I had two choices,
much like what everybody in the country is being faced with now. I
can sit in the corner and cry and mope and wail and say I'm
depressed. It's the end of the world, or I can say, fate has
another opportunity for me. I need to do something different. We have
a teaching. We don't pray for what we want.
We pray for what is good for us, because what you want not
necessarily be good for you.
So in January, 86 I moved to be to marysburg. Open a private practice
the week I get there, an African guy from Pretoria comes there, my
butcher. I got a new new building. I got all new neighbors. So my new
neighbor was a butcher. Comes down and said, This guy came from
Pretoria. He bought meat from me, and he's a doctor. So I meet
Miller when I treat him, and then one day, he tells me, I want you.
You treated me for quite some time now, I want to tell you, share
story with you.
He says, Before I came from Pretoria, I was in New York. I
went to the scholarship, and one day, whilst I was walking in the
streets of New York, I was dejected, depressed, broken,
hopeless, loss of everything, and my soul felt empty. My spirit felt
empty. I don't even know why the * I was in New York. I was so
down from the corner of my eye. It's what people have been feeling
everywhere in the world. Everywhere in the world. Said,
from the corner of my eye, I see a man looking at me. I don't know
this man. I've never seen him before, but my heart tells me
follow this man. We have a teaching that whenever you are
lost or confused or don't know what to do, listen to your heart,
not your head. So he follows the man, and the man walks into St
John the Divine. It's a huge Church in New York. I've been
there on my way to 80,
he said. But when I walked to the church, I got a shock.
The man I was following was a Muslim.
I took
a Sufi master, a master of spirituality.
And he said in the church, suddenly, this man start making a
zikr.
A zikr in Islamic terminology, and Islamic tradition is a celebration
of God's names in Arabic.
So in English, you would say God, the one and only. Kai,
compassionate, merciful, eternal, loving, absolute, chedisha,
nourish, sustainer, and so it goes. He said, where he started
doing it in the church. There were other Muslims in the church. There
were Jews, there were Christians from different denominations,
there were Hindus, and there were people say, we don't believe in
anything. But they all participated in the zikr. I
said, Oh, are you sure?
He said I was there. That's right on all night.
And then it struck me. I said, but the world always said that
religion is the cause of conflict.
No, religion is not the cause of conflict. It's people who move
away from religion that cause the conflict, because those people in
the church, the elders of the church, understood the unity of
religion. They understood the Unity of Mankind. They had no
issue what a Muslim practice taking place in the church. And
there's one church in Cape Town that does this, yes.
South Africa. It's called Saint George's cathedral,
where Jews, Christians and Muslims all can pray in a church. Father.
Michael wida, it's happened not once, hundreds of times, because
people have understood this togetherness where we remove our
barriers. Fixing the country is about removing barriers, about
understanding each other as humanity.
He then tells me, we
need to go to Turkey.
I said, Mother, I know you're not feeling well.
It's 1986 I haven't even seen Cape Town yet. When am I going to get
to
Turkey? He said something very profound. And does it seem like
keep repeating? He said, what God was happens? There's a time and a
place.
91 August, my wife and I landed up in Turkey. It's a wrong story,
and I went again. Sixth August, 1992
What mother saw in New York, I saw in Istanbul, what is so in a
church I saw in a Sufi place, a Islamic place in Turkey when I
walked in, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Americans, Russians,
people from Canada,
North America, parts of America, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, New
Zealand, Australia, parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, Germany,
France, Freedom Norway, Denmark, all mixed from different religions
and different nationalities. No friction, no discord, respect for
each other. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Understand there is hope for this world, because we've done
incredible things in this world, in science and technology, but we
still haven't learned how to live with each other,
and we need to prevent that from happening in this country. You
wanted to double into a fantastic, stable
state that night at 10pm the
spiritual teacher after Zikr. Now you won't understand what I'm
telling you. You know, when you do a zikr, you feel the presence of
God Almighty right with you. And in that presence, the spiritual
teacher lifts his eye up, makes eye contact with me, and he looks
heavenward at the same time. So he's looking at me, and he's not
looking at me in FLUENT Turkish, and I don't speak a word of
Turkish, but in FLUENT Turkish, I understood every word that he said
in Turkish that night. He said, My son,
I'm not asking you, I'm instructing you to form an
organization. He gave the name. He said the name in Arabic will be
walkful wakifin. Translated is not exactly correct, but translated,
gift of the givers, you will serve all people of all races, all
religions, all colors, all classes, all cultures, of any
geographical location and of any political affiliation, but you
will serve them unconditionally. When we do this kind of work in
Senegal and everywhere else, don't expect anything in return, you
will serve them unconditionally. You will don't expect anything in
return, not even a thank you. This is an instruction for you for the
rest of your life. I was
30 years old. You said my son, serve people with love, kindness,
compassion and mercy, and remember that dignity of men is foremost.
Stop worrying about potholes and water and food and roads and
management and engineering. When people's dignity is gone, keep
your passport ready, keep your shoe ready. Straight to the
airport,
because that's the day the country well done. When people lose their
dignity, there is no hope, there is no future, there is no
accountability, there is no sense or or, there is no degree of what
disaster will happen, because people have no more nothing left
when there is no hope, there is just no the circumstances. We are
total disaster. And by doing things like what you do in Senegal
and what we need to do all over the country, when you give people
dignity, when you give them hope, when you give them support, you
change their mindset. And that's the most crucial thing to
remember. When you qualified, did you get a job? Same time? What's
like walking around without a job, being alone, feeling lack of self
esteem? We need to create jobs for children, for young people, give
them a stipend, even it's 2000 men, give them some kind of a job.
Write it off your tax expense. You
give them self esteem. You give them hope, you give them thought
processes. You give them experience. They move away from
all kinds of crime and difficulty. One person for 2000 and look after
Samuel seven, the social impact in the country will improve all of
us. I'm sure we can do something like that, claw the naked, feed
the hungry, provide water to the thirsty, and in everything that
you do, be the best at what you do. No second grade the best.
Why?
He said.
Be the best, not because of ego, but because you're dealing with
human life, human suffering, human dignity, and
dignity and human life. And then asked him, Oh, he said something
very important. He said, My son, remember that whatever you do is
done through you and not by you.
No place where you go. Everything that all of you think that I do is
not humanly possible.
I asked him, How come when you speak Turkish? I understand and
other people speak Turkish, I don't understand.
He said, My son, when the hearts connect and the souls connect, the
words become understandable.
Asked him, What exactly am I supposed to do? He told me one
line
you will know.
I said, I will know what
the moment I walked out of that place on six August, 1992
it came to me respond to the civil war in Bosnia that same month, not
10 months later, that same month, I took in 32 contenders of eight
into a war zone all alone. November the same year, I took in
another eight containers of winter items. And the following year, we
designed the world's first containerized mobile hospital, our
world first a product of South African technology and South
African engineering, ourselves in Africa, engineering Yuan. And we
sat together and we designed this container, a container hospital
built in Africa, taken from Africa into Europe. That was in 93 we
need to believe in ourselves. We got the skill to compassion and to
do things in the right way. When CNN film hospital on first
February 94 they said the South African containerized mobile
hospital is equal to any of the best hospitals in Europe. I want
to finish off stories related to that, and one more story I'll
be finishing three minutes. Don't worry. I said, about three
minutes.
You see, let's bring it more forward. January 6, 2014 we got a
call from al Qaeda in Yemen. They said, Are you the guys looking for
two son of agnostics? We said, Yes, that's what we've been seeing
from me last year. They said, Come tomorrow, 10 o'clock, seven,
January to Aden. Come alone.
My team member goes, speaks a language. I'm not there. All
foreigners can't go. He goes, we don't know who it was that took to
Jolanda and pekoki. So he walks in, 10 o'clock. He says, they tell
him, do you know we are? We are al Qaeda. You know what we're capable
of? What do you want? He said, I came for the man and the woman,
South African. Fine. Let's talk about the woman. First you could
have a $3 million
so they allowed him to talk to me. I said, tell him no money. Sorry.
We started discussing with them,
neither he nor me are trained in hostage negotiations. No
university degree, no honors, no masters, no PhD, no hostage
negotiating. The world trained us. No intelligence service, no
security agency. Trained us in three days, from January 7 to
January 10, in three days, understanding the bolide language
their mind him on WhatsApp to me, and I'm talking to him together.
We pulled out Yolandi Koki, alive, unconditional, no ransom in three
days, but no training. We just knew exactly what to do, no
government, no agency, no negotiator, no one has done that
ever, and we did it in three days because the teacher said, You will
know what to do. The final story. November 20 last 2022. I got a
call from Cape Town, and my friend says, Do you want to meet the new
general manager of Turkish Airlines? It's coming from San
Francisco to Cape Town. I said, Yes. In my business, I got to know
everybody and disasters. So he says. I said, but I won't meet him
now. I'll meet you when the time is right. February 1, 220, 23 I'm
on the plane in Durban. I'm about to fly, and the thought comes to
me, You better call the guy now. There's no book, there's no
records, there's no notes.
The thought just comes to you. Ed by phone him. I said, this guy is
a year say I call you back in two minutes. Calls me back. He said,
rappers, nine. Supper. Sorry, restaurant in the waterfront. I
get off the plane, I go straight to the supper. His name is
Mohammed honor.
I said Muhammad tell me I need an airline partner
in the event an earthquake hits a country. I need to move such an
escrow teams, medical teams, dog handlers, dogs, medical equipment,
surgery, equipment and supplies, 10s, blankets, food, medicine and
so and so forth. Can it be done speedily? Because the faster you
get there, the faster you save lives. He said, done five days
later, 4:10am, sixth, February, the earthquake hits his country.
What's the chance of that being a coincidence?
24 hours, your team's on the plane. Where did you stand? Bull
you don't tell the government where you want to go. They tell
you where you just go. 172
countries responded, somewhat more than one team say, let's say an
average of 300 teams arrived. That's very important to
understand
this, only 12 teams were sent to a tie, and I was at AI in November
2022
at I was 95 9% wiped out from the face of the Earth. Only 12 teams
were selected to go to a Thai, two Chinese, two Turkish, Italian,
Jordanian Omani, Saudi Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and South
African. 12 teams, only out of 300 teams were selected to go to Hatay
on day Abu the only guys that had five dorms. Nobody had five dorms
that came to us. Other teams came to us. Can you learn? Borrow your
dog.
I'm an Indian $50 an hour.
Any case, on day eight, the dog says, go to that building and we
pull out alive, a 90 year old granny from the building that the
dog went.
And finally, the last point, the Bosnian team leader comes to us,
touches my team, land on the shoulder, and he starts crying.
And we ask him, like, what happened? He takes out a wallet,
takes out a picture from the wallet, and in the picture there's
a baby and a woman. He said, that baby, that's me, that lady, that's
my mother. We know your guy's name. That's what do you mean? It
said 30 years ago, in 1993
I was born in the hospital. That gift of the givers brought to
Bosnia. 172
countries, 300 teams, 12 teams go to attack. One is Bosnian, one is
South African, and the team leader of the Bosnian team was born in
that hospital. Faith and spirituality, positivity and hope.
Working together, no ego, we would fix this country. This is the
greatest country on Earth. While they told you, how many are
believing? Did they tell you that 400,000 people came back and that
many more want to come back? Be positive. Let's work together. We
can fix this country. Thank you very much.
Thank.