Dr. Adv. Lower Working Class MomDad - a Guluvakazi

Summary of Dr Thandi Dodo Sidzumo-Mazibuko interview (1986) 1. Any forms and levels of material aid from foreign donors must be limited to what African people themselves have requested. 2. Aid terms and conditions must comme from the people. Communities must determine their most pressing needs and only then can well meaning aid givers come to the party. 3. Most agencies are interested in getting quick results while overlooking the human element in development projects. When you work with human beings you cannot operate in technical and systematic cold fashion. 4. We must look into who creates hunger and who sustains that hunger, the national and International forces with a negative impact on different communities. 5. Assistance must be given on our own terms, we must determine that kind of help we need. 6. Before participating in a community development project, we must first understand that community's perceptions of its needs. 7. On the basis of the community's description of its needs we can use our communication and technical expertise only for the purposes of complementing existing capabilities. 8. We must be clear that development highlights a community's struggle to develop itself. Development is community participation in breaking away from all kinds of dependency, economically or otherwise to attain self reliance. The role of the expert is to increase capability of the focus group. 9. Education is divided between education for LIBERATION and education for DOMINATION. In the case of the latter, self proclaimed development experts like IMF are divorced from the realities of communities where thy they impose their aid programmes. The communities are always left poor ,disempowered and more prone to continued domination. 10. The role of tbe researcher is to provide social analysis, make people aware that when a certain area or community is underdeveloped it is not always because the community members are lazy. Due to historical colonization of Africa by Europe, the question of monocultures has been created such as in Senegal where people were forced to produce rubber while they were experiencing a problem of hunger. 11. There are national forces and international forces that impact lives. International forces like IMF and World Bank impose themselves on governments and enforce anti-development loan or aid conditions. Loans from IMF and World Bank must be rejected as they are not meant to support the livelihoods of our people especially the poorer classes. 12. Researchers have a duty to bring this information to communities so that they develop an understanding of the machinations of different forces with regards to development, how the world functions,and how that affects our situation. 13. Researchers must present data to communities, allow those communities to evaluate the data and give their input so that they don't become objects of research. That is the only effective way of mobilizing for the material and intellectual development of people. Anything else opposite to that will render the researcher an agent of imperialism. 14. The structural cause of hunger in Africa is land pressure which is a product of white colonizers taking all the productive arable land and pushing our people to the dry reserves. Colonizers did not come with civilization, even when you go to the most remote of areas where people have to access to modern sources of agriculture information, in their own rudimentary ways the people know about the differences in soil types and their suitability for certain kinds of crops. The view that Africans don't understand their land is an ugly lie. 15. The role of the researcher is to compliment existing knowledge and share information on organisations that control our lives such as IMF and World Bank. 16. There must be a balance between monetary inputs and communication inputs bearing in mind that in all development projects, our people must attain intellectual development too. 17. Part of the struggle for social and economic justice is say NO to any forms of outside dominance.

Investment into SARS has and will pay off. Last year’s budget was an opportunity to invest more into SARS. The team has delivered over R2Tr collection. Congrats to the commissioner, now we must double our efforts to fight illicit trade.

Cyril Ramaphosa is openly anti-transformation and pro-privatisation. Lately, he's become more blatant. Defining SOEs as monopolies that should be subject to private sector competition is treasonous. South Africa can not function as a developmental state without economic redress.

In South Africa, the pricing structure of illuminating paraffin is specifically designed to provide relief to consumers. Unlike petrol and diesel, paraffin does not include fuel levies and most taxes, as a deliberate policy measure to keep it as affordable as possible, given its importance to low-income households. As a result, reductions in fuel levies cannot be applied to offset increases in paraffin prices. The increase in paraffin prices does not signal any reduction in government support for vulnerable households. As indicated in the earlier statement, work is underway to develop targeted measures to cushion the poor from the impact of high energy costs. These efforts form part of a broader commitment to mitigate the effects of rising living expenses. Government remains firmly committed to protecting vulnerable households and continues to implement both immediate relief interventions and longer-term measures aimed at improving energy affordability and ensuring security of supply for all.

Balloons on my profile 🥳🎈

When will Africans finally outgrow this embarrassing and childish tourist syndrome? An African flies to a European country, sees a shiny building or a fancy train, whips out their phone, and immediately runs to social media to cry, "When will our country have this?!" SPOILER ALERT : those train rides are not free. They are directly subsidized by the missing wealth and uncollected taxes of the developing world. Truth is that, while the rest of Europe was tripping over themselves to aggressively extract African resources by sending gunboats, missionaries, and colonial administrators to do their dirty work, Luxembourg was playing 3D chess. They did not need to get their hands bloody or dirty. Instead, they quietly positioned themselves as the ultimate offshore tollbooth for the wealth being plundered from the Global South. Here is how their white-collar criminal network operates: A massive multinational conglomerate digs up copper in Zambia, pumps crude in Nigeria, or mines cobalt in the DRC Congo. By any standard of fairness, the immense wealth generated from those resources should be taxed locally to build the exact same roads, schools, and train networks we keep drooling over. But the global financial system is rigged. Instead of paying their fair share, that corporation sets up a shell company and often literally just a dusty P.O. Box in Luxembourg. And then through the dark arts of corporate accounting known as "profit shifting" and "transfer pricing," the company manipulates its books. The African subsidiary, the one doing the actual extraction, magically records zero profit. Meanwhile, the Luxembourg P.O. Box records billions. Africa gets the environmental degradation, the exploited labor, and a depleted national treasury. Luxembourg gets the capital. Now, Luxembourg taxes these phantom P.O. boxes just enough to make it look legitimate, pulling in about 5% of their GDP. But that’s just the cover charge. When you factor in the massive ecosystem built to service this racket,the armies of corporate lawyers, wealth managers, auditors, and bankers designing these tax-dodging schemes, it accounts for a staggering 30% of Luxembourg’s entire GDP. Put the math together, and you realize that nearly 40% of their national wealth is a monument to laundered money. It is the most flawlessly executed heist in modern history. They managed to siphon the wealth of a continent without firing a single bullet or toppling a single regime.

All buses, trains, and trams are free in this country. For everyone! Luxembourg is unreal. When will your country have this?