Imtiaz Sooliman – The Directors Event 2022 , founder and chairman, Gift of the Givers
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The speakers discuss the importance of gift givers in South Africa's well-being, including their involvement in various projects such as social security, emergency, and disaster response. They also emphasize the need for principles of spirituality and ethics to prevent future crises, such as providing essential services and being blunt in their approach. The Eastern Cape is a high population of hungry people, and many people are unhappy with the pandemic, but the speakers emphasize the need for a statement and a change in leadership. The speakers also highlight the importance of providing essential services and being blunt in their approach to avoiding bureaucracy.
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It's wonderful to be speaking to directors of companies and people
interested in the well being of South Africa. Thank you very much
for this invite. Before I go any further, I need those, the
audience, to understand the ethos of gift of the givers. I didn't
get up one morning and say, let me form an organization. See what the
needs are, draw a list of founding principles, get a group of people.
No, it never happened like that. Gift of the givers has a spiritual
basis, a spiritual teacher who commanded the formation of the
organization.
This happened in in Turkey on the sixth of August, 1992
I met a spiritual teacher the year before in Turkey, I was back
taking 92 at 10pm on a Thursday night, the sixth of August, the
spiritual teacher was sitting in the corner of the room. I was the
other corner. He makes eye contact with me, and eye contact
heavenwards and then in FLUENT Turkish. I don't understand a word
of Turkish, but I understood every single word that he said, he tells
me, my son, I'm not asking you, I'm instructing you to form an
organization in Arabic. The name will be walkful wakifi, translated
it means 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. You will expect nothing in return,
not even a thank you. This is an instruction for you for the rest
of your life. And remember, my son, that whatever you do is done
through you and not by you. This was a spiritual connection. I told
you. I don't speak a word of English or Turkish, but I
understood every word of Turkish, he said. At some point I asked
him. I said, Teacher, how is it that when you speak Turkish, I
understand and when other people speak Turkish, I don't understand.
You, said, My son, when the hearts connect and the souls connect, the
words become understandable.
I told him, You gave me this instruction. What does it mean?
What am I supposed to do? I'm a general practitioner in private
practice. I have three surgeries in a place called Peter marisberg
in South Africa. Am I supposed to do? What you want me to do in
weekends, public holidays, after holidays, school holidays, well
and what you told me one line you will know
for 30 years, I do know what to do, how to do, when to do, what
not to do.
The moment I walked out of the place that same night, my
inspiration, it came to me respond to the civil war in Bosnia. We
were talking 32 containers of aid in August, 92 another eight
containers in November, 92 and in 93 we designed and delivered the
world's first containerized mobile hospital, a product of South
Africa's technology. Worked in tutorial, the first of its kind in
the world, and took it from Africa into Europe. Those three events
guided me that gift of the givers, in essence, was going to be a
disaster response and intervention agency. Everything that we do
after that will be around disasters. Disasters being the key
focus, we have 21 different types of projects. Got 21 projects, 21
different categories of projects, and each category has
subcategories. We started off with intellectual disaster. We then
built from tents, blankets, food and medicines. We took in primary
health care teams, trauma teams, post op, rehab teams, trauma
counselors, search and rescue teams. Took in stuff for dogs,
specialized equipment for medical and surgery and rescue. World
hospitals supported agriculture world homes provide provide 10s
blankets and medicines. And by that point, we were the most
complete disaster agency in the world. No other agency in the
world does all the above at the same time, we the only guys in the
world that as the years passed on, you know, we in November, 2016
I cut international marketing, not the projects, only the marketing,
because the media locally were focusing too much on international
projects and didn't know what was happening locally, and the country
needed to.
Know what was happening locally. In 2017
came the first big local intervention that was nice enough
fire at that point the country then understood the capability of
gift of the givers. We send in two lady managers who control the
distribution and packaging of 20,000 food parcels like a
ShopRite gave us a car park in Arizona to do that. The local
people came with Bucky as at forklift to help offload the big
trucks that were coming in. The local people got together and
assisted our teams and managed all of the local people to do those
food parcels, hygiene packs, distributed blankets, sanitary
pads and diapers. We then sent support for the firefighters.
We've provided meals for the firefighters twice a day for the
entire period. We brought in specialized medical personnel and
advanced life support ambulances and advanced life support
paramedic teams to move patients from nice hospital to the other
hospitals. We then people then asked and said, look, the animals,
our pets are hungry. So we brought in pet food for cats and for dogs.
And then somebody came and said, the elephant in elephant Park is
hungry. The wild elephants in a bush are hungry. The cows and the
sheep are hungry, because there was a drought here before this big
fire came. And the drought is still on right now, provided for
the for all those categories. And then a man walked in and said, I
need sugar. And I said, don't you get sugar? He said, No, I didn't
get but it's not for me. So I said, Who's it for? He said, it's
for the bees. And I was stunned. I was shocked about bees eating
sugar. For further explanation, he said, because of the drought, the
plants that bees eat on saliva were destroyed. A fire destroyed
300 beehives. Each beehive holds 75,000 to 80,000 bees, which means
that 22 million of the cape honeybee was destroyed. He needed
sugar because there was no plants, and the pollen, nectar substitute
was far too expensive. We funded the new 300 new hives, money to
regrow the plants, money for sugar, or we provided the sugar
and money for a nectar substitute. That project is now fully
functional. It has been a source of research, and many, many school
and university students have gone there to understand bees. The Cape
honey bee is the most versatile in the world. It is deployed and
deployed, which means that if the honey bee dies, the queen bee
dies, the other bees can remanufacture a new queen bee.
That's how the versatile and resilient dead bees it had to be
saved at any cost. In the same year, we intervened in Sutherland,
the drought there was killing the sheep. Count 440,000
the ship count eventually dropped to 31,000
you couldn't afford to lose those merino sheep, one of the best
sheep in the world. You couldn't bring any other ship that would
survive. The merino sheep had developed an environmental
intelligence, knowing which plants to eat and which ones are not to
eat to survive, we took in millions of rands of fodder and
truckloads of support, and eventually, January this year, we
supported our team members, yanisaki, who put up a special
palette producing machine it has fortified with nutrition at very
low cost, the cheapest in The country that can be provided to
the farmers so they could feed the sheep, not in the open field, but
in an underground in undercover, controlled warehouse, where
animals will not attack the sheep. For the first time since 2017
ship count is starting to rise. Farmers having more ship to sell,
more wool to sell, and upper numbers are multiplying and is
starting to take on more labor as part of our responsibility. We try
to expand the reach and benefit the country in many ways. In the
same year, 2017
the disaster management called us in Beaufort, West Water at the
water system will collapse. There was no water. Nobody could find
water. We sent in our geologist, doctor, and we found water to
drill seven boreholes to push the water through the hamka Dam, down
with gravity, into the city, into the reservoirs and support the
city. We got involved in Day Zero in Cape Town in 2018
brought in 300 containers of water, in 300 containers of water
from Joburg at Durban, by ship and by road, we drill bore holes in
Cape Town. And people need to understand, Cape Town is not
Western Cape. It's part of the Western Cape. It's not the only
part of Western Cape. The lots of suburbs on the outside, a lot of
rural areas required support in terms of water and drilling of
balls. We did that. 2019
came our intervention in Makanda, and we're still there, and we did
again to this month. As we know, the dam levels have dropped
substantially, and it's in a serious problem right now in the
Eastern Cape. We got involved in Makanda for.
15 boreholes, including three in the university, seven in y net,
where the water plant is in saps at the settlers monument, where
they have all the conferences. And also what the SPCA. We put in
those balls, we put in filtration plants, over a million Rand worth
of filtration plants. Put in pipelines to send in water to the
different areas and use our boards to load water tankers to support
support different areas in Makanda. We've been doing that
since 2019
and in other parts of recent Cape came 2020
covid hit in a big way, and to get into government hospitals to
provide services. It's very, very difficult, too much of bucharocy,
too much of red tape, but we broke through no paperwork, nothing in
writing, no request. We delivered essential items for covid to 210
hospitals nationwide, PPEs, pulse oximeters, target non contact
thermometers, scrubs, high flow nasal oxygen machines, CPAP
machines, video, adequate scopes, medical supplies. We upgraded
hospitals, put in beds, put in mattresses and blankets and linen.
We supported the payment of paramedic staff to assisted
hospitals because the healthcare workers thumbs were dropping, they
were dying, and hospitals needed support. They were flooded and
could not manage a patient count. We put in 10 teams of testing, and
we had mobile teams throughout the country, even testing sports
teams, rugby teams, soccer teams, cricket teams, and doing mobile
testing for for schools, universities all over we had teams
dedicated to that. And as we were busy with that, when the lockdown
came, the first year, challenge of hunger became visible in the
Eastern Cape in june 2020
we were in a place called pedi and we saw the people who came for the
first food parcels in that area. And my mother came and said, thank
you very much for the food parcel. Please speak to my children. They
are. They will tell you the taste of every plant in this area. For
the last three months for survival, they've been eating
plants. That is a story throughout the Eastern Cape. The hunger
expands throughout the country. Children and Adults have been
eating tortoises, visits, even cats, to survive. Our teams
witnessed at the dump sites. When the drum trucks came, children ran
to the dump site to scavenge and find whatever they could find to
eat. Then malnourished, hungry.
They would, she would, we would see them putting their fingers in
a peanut butter bottle, turning it around, put their fingers inside,
scooping up and eating whatever little grams they were in there,
we saw them eating from a jamtin serrated jam 10, which carries
infection and danger of getting cut. But they were desperate. We
then supported 100 soup kitchens, besides delivering 1.2 million
food parcels and at the soup kitchens itself, children will
come to the front of the queue, and some of them would say,
please, I won't take too much. Can you give me some for my father, my
mother, my brother and my sister? They are hungry at home. I will
eat too much. Children became martyrs. They sacrificed so the
family, family members could eat. These are the qualities that South
Africans need, the quality of selfless service of children,
leading the example, not looting, not corrupt, not greedy, sharing,
having golden heart so that others can survive. Our country needs
four essential principles, spirituality, morality, values and
ethics. We say government is corrupt, but corruption starts
from the corporates. We need to own that fact and understand that
we have people within our systems that are part of the corruption
that that 10 people with higher money and kickbacks that inflate
prices. In the end, we all suffer, our families, our children, our
extended families, grandchildren and the future generation. If the
country is totally destroyed, none of us going to benefit. It's time
we take this seriously and change circumstances around at the same
in the same breath. I must keep all credit to corporates. For the
first time in 2020
when the pandemic came, corporate CEOs started overriding the CSI.
To be blunt, most of the corporate CSI don't have a clue what's going
on in the country. Then appointed to do some small projects, take
the register, get the bebe certificate, get a tax
certificate, do some PR get some publicity and some coverage, but
you don't address the real needs of the country. So when the CEO
started calling and said.
It. What can we do? How can we save the country? That's true
leadership. And from that day up to today, the CEOs from all the
top corporate companies in the country have been talking to us
and making the interventions and speeding up processes so there's
no bureaucracy. And getting things done. We needed to upgrade
hospitals. We needed to get food parcels to the people. We needed
to drill more balls to provide water. And in that way, the
response has been phenomenal. Then came to July unrest in KZN in 2021
there was an even bigger awareness, bigger need, a bigger
haste from corporate companies, all of them said came to the same
question, is there hope for the country? Can South Africa be
saved? What can we do? But I need to run away. I need to leave the
country. I need to take my money and I need to pull out. No, they
came with a different mindset. Yes, some people want to leave,
but others mostly said, We want to stay here. How do we fix the
situation? And the support came even bigger, that wasn't a
political address, that wasn't rioting, that wasn't about hunger.
If it was about hunger, Eastern Cape would have burned first,
because hunger in Eastern Cape is endemic right now, as we speak, in
the hospitals in Eastern Cape, children are dying of
malnutrition. We're part of the government to support their
support for malnutrition to provide 45 items of food of a
peanut butter paste and a product called Genesis, a Norwegian
company has just sponsored us 15 containers of the enriched
nutritional peanut paste, which is valued just over 21 million Rand.
And a special thank you to all locals for the cash funding and
items and kind of food items coming in so that we can make a
difference to the lives of the people. And that brings us to the
main point. Why is there unrest? Is it because of hunger? Is it
because of the political chaos within the ruling parties? Is it
because there's a huge gap between the rich and the poor is the
people. Is it because the poor people want to have the things
that rich people have no yes, this a part of it. But the most
important part of all this is that when people have no dignity, when
everything is lost, when they are totally humiliated, when they see
no hope, then there's no moment to what a person can do in that
situation when the child cannot get a transport to the hospital,
cannot get medical care, dies from a condition that's treatable,
should have never have happened is hungry, falls out of latter
Indiana School does not have proper teaching, and education
does not have proper incentive or support from teachers or from any
other part of the country, people lose hope. If corporates want to
make a difference, if South Africans want to make a
difference, this is the time. It is time to give hope. It is time
to be spiritual. Their spirituality, morality, values and
ethics. It's not only about investing through NGOs. It is
about changing our own personality and whole character. Let's help in
every way, and this is where the most important intervention needs
to take place. Unfortunately, we can see that all the corporates
have been asking that question. People have been asking that
question, how to help and how do we save the country we had can
create jobs in the construction industry textiles need to be
brought back to South Africa. We need to cut out, you know,
importing from China, tfg, Mr. Price and world was are now
looking at an expanded textile program in South Africa. We need
to bring back the leather industry. And jobs can be created
in a huge way. The building construction industry jobs can be
created in an important way. And how do we make all this happen? We
need to, and people are scared to say, how to intervene, how to
engage government. We lose the tenders, we lose the contracts.
It's important for us to make the statement, and we make that
statement boldly, repeatedly, at quite some time. Now, the country
does not belong to the government. The country belongs to me, you and
60 million South Africans. And it is our responsibility to fix the
country ourselves. We need to understand government itself. 7.2
million people's taxes cannot serve 60 million people whilst
there is government corruption, this only once there's corruption
government? Everyone in government is not corrupt. Everyone is not a
bad person. There are lots of good people in government wanting to do
things a good way. We are brought we obstructed. A lot of them don't
have the skills how to do that, and we can hold hands collectively
as a country, and do it right. There is a problem. Fix the
potholes ourselves, as many people are starting to do to South
Africa, fix the voyages ourselves. Fix pipes ourselves. People are
providing they're opening their balls and providing water to come
places inside Durban, where there's a water crisis. Right now,
South Africans are coming to the party, and we each keep coming to
the party. People teachers are saying, I'm retired, I'll offer
free.
Tuition. That's the kind of Ubuntu that we require in our country,
where people can make things happen at a low cost, or for free,
or to share. And if we do that collectively, we will change our
country. Because there is a mindset, there is a narrative
change where people want to do something to save the country.
Yes, make money. Nobody is stopping you from making money,
but do it the right way, the honest way. Give better salaries.
And if we can provide medical aid programs for all our staff, as far
as possible, we are engaging the medical aids to see if we can
provide packages at a cheaper price so that more people can fall
into the system of medical aids and private health care, and those
who can't
be part of that system, collectively as the country, as
corporates, as government, as ordinary people, as those who are
earning high salaries. Let's let us upgrade the healthcare system.
Spend on more personnel, provide salaries for nurses, for
registrars, for interns, for a few years, until our final situation
within government corrects itself. We lost too much of money with
state capture. What currency fluctuation or covid 19, loss of
trade and economic collapse over over the last two or three years,
it can get fixed up. It just needs our support for the next two or
three years, I think I've covered all these central aspects
important for us to rebuild our country. Thank you very much. You.