Imtiaz Sooliman – Gift of the Givers This is the best country in the world
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The speakers discuss the impact of COVID-19 on South Africa, emphasizing the importance of protecting people's lives and privacy. They emphasize the need for policies and principles to solve the crisis and emphasize the importance of community involvement and collaboration in addressing the crisis. The speakers emphasize the need to fix supply and prevent criminal behavior, improve conditions for cities, and take ownership of South Africa to save it. They emphasize the importance of community involvement and collaboration in addressing the crisis.
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Shoulders to the wheel, so please, a warm round of applause for MTR
Suleiman, dr, MTR Suleiman,
thanks. I wasn't expecting to be speaking here tonight.
Martin, thank you very much. Imran, Vivian, Hamid, everybody
else here, KZN, government and all the awardees. Thank you very much.
I just want to take up from the point that you said you spoke
about, we have gold, all other types of commodities. Our greatest
commodities are people.
This is a great country. What great people? And to me, Martin is
the best country in the
world. And I like to take it up from there. You know, we talk
about disasters, we spoke about the floods, we spoke about the
unrest, we spoke about covid. But you don't know the quality of
people unless we have challenges, and if anything that showed our
survival capability is the presence of these three big events
that happened in the last two years when covid came. I mean, we
were told we were probably the only country in the world that
shut down the country on the 27th of March, 2020
when there was no wave. To me, sorry, but that wasn't a very
credible decision. Wasn't a very sensible decision. How do you shut
the country down when there's no wave? And the excuse to say is
that you're preparing hospitals to my mind and my understanding, and
I've been to 210 hospitals throughout covid In the last two
years. Not a single hospital was prepared. Not enough staff, not
enough oxygen, not enough equipment, not enough beds, not
enough linen, no set up points to put up. The country was not
prepared. Our doctors and our healthcare personnel were already
dying. They were saying dying, I don't mean death. They were
exhausted. They were overworked. They were not paid for the extra
time when any doctor was of well care worker resigned. Nobody
filled the gap. The patients were climbing. The hours were climbing.
The healthcare workers were burnt out. And on top of that, you come
covid comes in as a challenge. We don't meet that challenge. We
don't address the challenge. Our greatest asset, our people, the
CEOs, the healthcare workers, the doctors. Everybody stood up, and
even the population stood up. If there was the covid patient, they
didn't say, We scared. They cooked food and took to the house of the
covid patient. That is the best spirit of Ubuntu. We seen. You
could put your own life at risk. But they got up and they went
across and they gave food to the houses, and the accused of people
waiting to do that. It shows South Africa as a nation, was not
affected by color, by race, by class or difficulty. Actually,
every difficulty brought us together. There was a time in 2020
December, I'm sure to give snippets, because I don't want to
be speaking all night here, and you guys want to get to the ones.
There was a time 2020 another tragic story,
Department of Trade and Industry Prime Minister Ibrahim Patel,
credible decision, clever decision, asked the country to get
together and form an oxygen design, oxygen delivery device. So
the guys from the SKA telescope and all other engineers got
together and they formed the National ventilator group. This is
purely South African. This is our engineering. This is our brains,
our technology, our universities. And they got together and they
designed a CPAP machine. The High Flow nasal oxygen machines that
were importing were taking 60 liters to 100 liters of oxygen per
minutes. The high flow machine took five to 10 liters of oxygen
per minute and was doing an equal, if not a better, job. The high
flow machine had to be connected in ICU because 10 beds, eight
beds, 15 beds, finished after you can't do anything else. The CPA
machines can be put in any oxygen point in any bed in any hospital.
So it was very, very clever idea to do that the CSI are
manufactured 20,000 machines. Sapra approved it. Solidarity fund
paid for it. There was one problem,
the government couldn't get the CPAP machine designed by
government, manufactured by government, produced by
government, paid by government, approved by government, put into a
government hospital. They couldn't do
that and asked, What's the problem? They were blocked. They
were blocked by somebody in some Department not to deliver
machines. This is the thing that we have to stop in this country,
the corruption, the obstruction, the bureaucracy. I call those
people traitors and anti patriots, and we got to get up and set up
against this kind of people, because our people die because of
that, whilst we had no oxygen delivery devices in the Eastern
Cape, when they were coming to all the rural hospitals and Livingston
and PE provincial and other hospitals in South Africa, they
were standing in the queue, smiling and dropping dead within
seconds they were.
Awards. They were dropping dead in the ambulance, in the taxi, in the
car park, in the casualty they were dropping dead. So I told a
professor, where's these machines? A professor called me from Rhodes
University. He said, they're lying in Cape Town. I said, I'm in Cape
Town. Send me the machine. So I took it to Tiger book hospital. I
told him, test it. They phoned me. An hour later. They said we saved
two lives. I then took it to kailitha, and I said, test his
machines. They called me two hours later, and they said, we save four
lives. I put it on the list all the CEOs of the hospitals, and
they said, Cape, do you want oxygen machine? Everyone put up
there? And yes, I said, forget the rules. Send me the machines in 48
hours, we delivered 900 machines. We didn't ask anybody's
permission. We didn't take advice, we didn't write a letter, we
didn't get an MOU because when it comes to saving life, I don't ask
anybody's permission. This country does not belong
and a clear message to government, this country does not belong to
you. It belongs to me and 65 million South Africans. And we get
up and we fix our country ourselves, because it's about our
lives and our people. When those machines went into a first
hospital called Kala, the CEO called Monday morning. He said,
For the first time in covid, I am smiling. So he said, what
happened? He said, Every weekend during covid, we have this
terrible job on a Monday morning to count the number of dead people
in our wards. It's a terrible job. It's demoralizing, it's
heartbreaking, and this is the first Monday that nobody died.
Thank you very much for the machine.
In November of last year, again, we get a call from the Eastern
Cape. The CEOs are crying. I'll come back to what they're crying
for. But it showed the quality of our people. The CEO didn't look
the other side. The CEO was crying because of his humanity or her
humanity. Because 40 hospitals, the patients had no food to eat,
all those people who stole money, the tenderpreneurs, the people who
got contracts, your uncle, your grandfather, your brother, your
cat, your dog, we need to fix that up. It cannot be allowed while
people are starving from malnutrition in the Eastern Cape.
Once we're talking now, every day there's children dying of hunger
in the Eastern Cape because of malnutrition.
We need to reverse that. And the CEOs were crying, and we sent in
food for patients in 40 hospitals. These are all things that can be
fixed. There's not things that can't be fixed. There's enough
money. It's the management of the money that's the problem and how
it's being used. And of course, to corporate South Africa, you are
part of the problem. Everybody says, government's corrupt, but
who corrupts government? Scope of South Africa, everybody is not a
crook in government. Everybody is not bad in government. But there
are people in our industries across the board that make things
the wrong way, and we have to change that. Four values. We need
four important principles. We need spirituality, morality, values and
ethics. We need to ingrain debt from small into every sector of
society, right to the top. To be fair to government, whether this
country was run by the UK, but the Australians, but the Canadians or
the Americans, they're going to have the same problem because 7
million people's taxes. Can't look after 65 million people. It's
impossible. The covid at the budget up, not the * budget. It
ate the entire budget up. We have the prom of the fuel price, the
food prices, the inflation, the rent, dollar, currency, exchange
rate, all these impacts on poor people. But there's a glimmer you
see corporates. In spite of what I said, there's criminal people
everywhere there's criminal people, in doctors, in lawyers, in
the religious sector, in the non government sector, in the non
profit sector, everywhere there's criminal people. It doesn't make
the institutions bad. Those people have to be corrected. The
institutions are good, the policies are good, the principles
are good. It's those people who go away with that spoil the name of
everything that's good. So we now have to solve the problem. And how
do we solve the problem? Government, corporates, civil
sector, all have to hold hands together. There is no other way to
do this job. Nobody can do this alone. And to the credit of the
private sector and corporates, you see, in the past, what your
corporates did, okay, let's see CSI, put a good manager on the
top. Send a message, are you 90% be yes. Tick, did you get tax
certificate? Yes. Tick, thirdly, make announcement in the media. We
did this debt in the other it was all for credibility purposes, not
serious intervention in the country. But when covid came,
there was a mind shift change. CEOs call and said, How do we save
our people? When humanity comes into corporates, there's great
hope for the country. Because whether you believe it or not,
spirituality plays a big role in terms of blessings, in terms of
progress, in terms of success. May not understand.
It, but it plays a very vital role. When the floods came on the
11th of April, not a single individual called me to say, I
need a boat or my house fell down. I need help. This happened. The
only guys that called at 11 o'clock at night and 12 o'clock
was corporate South Africa, and said, How do we help
you guys staying awake late at night, not how to make money, but
how to give money. Something has changed. And to that, I salute the
corporates, and I salute government that's lifting the
barriers to work together. We walked into Nelson Mandela Bay
Metro on the 13th of June because the municipality called us and
said we got a problem. The water is a crisis. The business chamber
called in, and we walked in, and within 15 minutes, we laid out a
blueprint what to do and how to do it. We got a full corporation of
the municipality, corporates from the chamber and from the country,
the people and everybody working together. And when you do this,
when you regard the country as yours, because when 65 million
people take ownership of the country, when you say the country
belongs to you, then you have to be active citizens. You can't
complain. I paid my taxes. I paid this, I paid that. I did that.
Yes, you've paid that. Yes, people have stolen money. But you can't
sit there and say, I'm not going to do anything and let the company
country fall apart. It's your country. You gotta save it. And as
I said, 7 million people's taxes can't fix everything. So if you
got extra money, what does it tell you to pay a little extra
willowton, the oil company in Peter matters, look, fix the whole
road up. Took all the potholes and fixed it up. Didn't say we going
to wait and see what we can do. Later on, I spoke to them two days
ago. I said, I want buying from corporates. I want to upgrade the
entire hospital. They say, You got us in, I said, TPA school in
marysburg. We need to upgrade it. You see, our children got no
chance in a school where it's got 40 kids in a class. In TPA school,
there's 173 70 learners with learning difficult difficulties.
There is no Alison teacher, a teacher with with special
education needs there isn't what is the future of these children?
That's only one school. What about the rest of the country? We need
to invest we're taking our center. We've already put in alts teacher,
we bring in physiotherapist, occupational teacher, therapist,
upgrading the building, and will not have said, Give me the
proposal. I'll take over the building. That's the kind of buy
in we want from corporate South Africa. And you guys are doing it.
We've upgraded Mrs. Plain hospital, Bishop Glen, gray, gray
hospital, Bella TB, Butterworth, Adelaide. Put in balls in nine
different hospitals in the Eastern Cape. We put in 23 balls in
Nelson, Mandela, Bay, Metro. Already, in the last five weeks,
we're now producing 7 million liters of water per day access to
support the city, and we're going on that process all the time.
We've drilled 500 balls in the last 24 months, and we doing catch
up surgery in various hospitals. Catch up surgery is critical to
take the pain and the suffering of people away right now, our teams
and Charlotte mckeke, and we're starting next week, what a 41
million and upgrade of the hospital. We need support from
corporates. Government. Lift barriers, no obstacle, no
bureaucracy. Crofters come on board civil society. We work
together. This is our country. We save it together. Thank you.
Applause.