Imtiaz Sooliman – Gift of the Givers This is the best country in the world

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.