Judge Dennis Davis slams politicians implicated in corruption for attacking Pravin Gordhan:
Judge Dennis Davis said on Monday it was outrageous that some politicians at the forefront of corruption had questioned the reputation of former minister and former South African Revenue Services (SARS) commissioner, Pravin Gordhan.
Davis was speaking at a memorial service for Gordhan held by SARS in Pretoria.
Davis said it was “outrageous” that Gordhan had been treated so badly by “populist politicians, people who in fact are very much in the forefront of corruption and who have the absolute gall to call into question the reputation of someone who I certainly consider to be a constitutional citizen”.
Following his death, the Economic Freedom Fighters said Gordhan’s legacy was one of failure, exploitation and corruption, adding that the party “will not shed a tear for the likes of Pravin Gordhan”.
“Now he dies with his crimes and goes unpunished,” the party said.
The EFF has also been at the forefront of accusing Gordhan of running the so-called rogue unit at SARS to target politicians like EFF leader Julius Malema.
The party has also accused the former minister of presiding over the “most disastrous” period when he was minister of public enterprises.
In an investigation later dismissed in the constitutional court, former public protector Busisiwe Mkhwebane accused Gordhan of establishing an unlawful intelligence unit at the SARS in 2007, when he was the tax agency’s commissioner.
In 2018, Mkhwebane received a complaint from Floyd Shivambu, then EFF deputy president, who claimed Gordhan “willingly established an intelligence unit against the intelligence laws of South Africa”.
Shivambu based this claim on a 2014 investigative report compiled by a panel chaired by advocate Muzi Sikhakhane.
The EFF leader has close links with alleged cigarette smuggler Adriano Mazotti, who has funded the party over the years and who is among those who had been targeted by SARS in its attempts to crack down on the illegal tobacco industry.
SARS receives no revenue from smuggled tobacco and cigarettes.
Davis praised Gordhan as someone who stood in the way of state capture when most people kept quiet about it.
“[Gordhan] was effectively the leader of the opposition in South Africa and we should never forget that role because that is a role which you have to play if you are to preserve democracy.”
Former finance minister Trevor Manuel said the SARS “rogue unit” allegations had been “the beginning of the onslaught against Gordhan”.
Manuel said the unit had been established to understand how abalone – which was not eaten by locals – was being fished out on the south coast of the Western Cape and smuggled out of the country.
“As we understood how the abalone got out, we understood how our drugs got in, how counterfeit goods got in and we needed to get better at that. Ivan [Pillay] and [Johann] van Loggerenberg and people then said what we need is to deal with this problem because it pointed to other things,” he said
Manuel said the need had been identified to triangulate information about money laundering, counterfeiting and other organised criminal activity.
“If we understand what happens to the money, who has bought what car with what resource, who purchased property with what resources, what are the bank accounts…If you have that kind of information, then you can deal with a tax system that is perceived to be fair,” Manuel said. “That quality of leadership is something that we need to take very seriously.”
Manuel said the unit’s operations brought it into direct conflict with criminal networks, which had responded using fake intelligence.
“And so the idea of a rogue intelligence unit was born, but what they described as a rogue intelligence unit was merely SARS extending its work and saying, if we want people to pay tax, there must be a sense of fairness about taxation,” he said.
“That in many ways, was the beginning of the onslaught against Pravin, the beginning of the endeavour to dismantle the revenue service, the beginning of the breaking of friendships.”
Former director general of treasury Ismail Momoniat said SARS “meant a lot” to Gordhan, which was why it was so painful to see how, despite more than a decade of building the revenue collection service, it was almost destroyed very quickly when the “wrong appointment” was made.
Momoniat also rubbished the existence of the rogue unit, saying it was an “attack” on SARS.
Cabanac and Gouws, racism’s Distruction Boyz:
In a move more surprising than John Steenhuisen smiling slavishly at Chinese President Xi Jinping, (alleged) racists Renaldo Gouws and Roman Cabanac were kicked out of politics faster than black men at a Steve Hofmeyr concert.
But this move could do far more harm than good as the pod bros — millennial parlance for podcast brothers — have vowed vengeance in the mould of a kung-fu prodigy growing up to avenge the death of his father.
In case you missed it, about two weeks ago, Gouws — who served a mere three months as a Democratic Alliance (DA) MP — was booted from the Smurf party for rattling off a raft of K words like an Afrikaner Adam Catzavelos.
“Kill the fucking kaffirs, kill all the fucking niggers. That’s all I’ve got to say — kill all the fucking kaffirs, kill all the fucking niggers,” the short-lived MP muttered in a now-deleted 2009 video he recorded to rile against anti-apartheid songs that referenced the killing of “boers” as a metaphor for South Africa’s repressive past.
On 12 September, a day before Gouwsie’s removal, his best prejudicial friend forever, Roman Cabanac, was removed by DA leader Steenhuisen as his chief of staff in Papa Smurf’s ministry of agriculture, having started his tenure at the beginning of the month.
Like his BPFF, Cabanac’s sins were to spew a slew of bigoted nonsense, such as downplaying the March 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in which tens of anti-apartheid protesters were killed, as well as calling the cupcake-in-chief, President Cyril Ramaphosa, a poes.
What’s worse is that a day before he chucked him out, Steenie made Cabanac release a public statement repudiating his past “idle and poorly considered” positions — a level of political humiliation that was several degrees colder than the N3 this past weekend.
Now, much of the country hailed Gouws and Cabanac’s removal like they were the 1 000 bottles of baby oil taken from the (in)famous US music entrepreneur and alleged sex pest Sean “Diddy” Combs’s homes as part of that country’s criminal case against the disgraced rap mogul.
I, however, believe that the pair’s axing will restart their mission to kill non-racialism and feed it to the pigs. A task reminiscent of the gruesome alleged murder of two black women on a Limpopo farm.
For example, Gouws and Cabanac have tag-teamed better than Triple H and Shawn Michaels to bellow their bigoted bile, such as in their podcast four years ago when they giggled like the Gilmore Girls while hurling horrid homophobia about Queen frontman Freddy Mercury’s death from an Aids-related illness.
“I mean, I would like Queen — the only problem is, you know, he’s [Mercury] gay… and he died because of it,” Cabanac contended, a vile suggestion that the music icon’s homosexuality caused his death.
All the while Gouws sat grinning like a Chesire cat.
Now that they have been unleashed, what stops them from reviving their Distruction Boyz routine, sans the melodies that won that group a South African Music Award for record of the year?
And why did Steenhuisen hire the two in the first place when there was ample evidence of their errant ways? I honestly don’t know.
However, I posit that the DA leader’s visit to communist China at the beginning of the month could have ignited the egalitarian alter ego he didn’t know he had.
Yes, in a moment as ironic as rain on your wedding day, a free ride when you have already paid, or the good advice that you just did not take — to paraphrase songstress Alanis Morissette — the agriculture minister has seemingly foregone capitalism in favour of the hammer and sickle, such was the charm of Xi during the South African government’s visit to the land of the Communist Party of China.
Be that as it may, Steenhuisen has created a monster that he might not be able to contain because Gouws has indicated that he will not take his removal lying down, asserting that he was “exploring all legal and ethical options available to me to challenge this decision and clear my name”.
The end goal — judging from Gouws’s and Cabanac’s tone on their respective social media pages of late — will be for the pod bros to plummet the DA’s electoral votes harder than Afrikaner nationalist Eugène Terre’Blanche fell from his horse in the early 1990s.
HIV treatment gaps persist among KZN youth, despite overall decline in prevalence:
While there has been a decline in the overall prevalence of those living with HIV in KwaZulu-Natal, there are worrying gaps in treatment and prevention efforts, particularly among young people.
According to the sixth South African national HIV prevalence, incidence and behaviour survey for the province, KwaZulu-Natal had the second-highest HIV numbers in the country at 16.0% in 2022 — behind Mpumalanga at 17.4% — although it was down from 18.0% in 2017.
Nearly two million people in the province remain HIV-positive.
“HIV prevalence is still high among individuals aged 25 to 49, peaking at 44.5% in those aged 45 to 49,” said principal study investigator Professor Khangelani Zuma.
The Human Sciences Research Council conducted the survey in partnership with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the South African Medical Research Council, the University of Cape Town and the National Institute for Communicable Diseases.
The findings of the survey, conducted between 2022 and 2023, were presented in Durban on Monday, and will be used for planning and implementation at a provincial level.
This was the first time in the history of the survey, which is conducted every three years, that the researchers had “drilled down the data to the lowest level possible”, said Zuma.
Overall, the number of people who are virally suppressed had been improving in the province and South Africa, and while 88% of those aged 0 to 14 years old in KwaZulu-Natal were virally suppressed (possibly because their mothers were on treatment during pregnancy), the 15 to 24-year-old age group was least likely to be virally suppressed.
“So we have our work cut out to put more effort into young people. We have to educate them about HIV, get them linked to care, and work with parents, because the issue of stigma is still a challenge,” Zuma said.
“We have to empower the parents to assist and disclose their HIV status to their children and assist the parents [with how to] assist a child that is now living with HIV. That is our responsibility as members of society and healthcare workers.”
The virus continued to disproportionately affect those living in rural areas, where prevalence rates reached 20%, he said.
Antiretroviral treatment (ART) coverage in KwaZulu-Natal rose to 87.3% in 2022 from 71.2% in 2017. But ART uptake among adolescents and young adults remained significantly lower, with only 62.8% of those aged 15 to 24 receiving treatment.
This age group was also least likely to know their HIV status, Zuma said. Males, in particular, lagged behind in testing and treatment, with only 58.8% of young men on ART.
Among females of the same age group, 19.8% had never tested, while 25.5% of males had never tested.
By district, eThekwini and King Cetshwayo had the lowest ART coverage, at 83.4% and 85.5%, respectively. Zuma said there was a need for targeted interventions, particularly in urban areas, where treatment uptake continued to fall short.
UNAIDS targets
The survey also assessed KwaZulu-Natal’s progress toward the UN programme on HIV/Aids (Unaids) 95-95-95 target, which aims for 95% of people living with HIV to know their status, 95% of those diagnosed to be on ART, and 95% of those on treatment to achieve viral suppression.
KwaZulu-Natal was largely on track, said Zuma, with 94% aware of their status, 93.4% on treatment and 95.3% virally suppressed. But significant gaps remained, again among adolescents and youths, with only 73.9% of those aged 15 to 24 aware of their status.
The survey also revealed concerning trends in sexual behaviour.
Condom use with the most recent sexual partner dropped from 44.9% in 2017 to 32.8% in 2022.
In contrast, self-reported male circumcision — which has been shown to reduce HIV transmission — increased to 54.6% in 2022 from 38.3% five years earlier.
KwaZulu-Natal has the highest rate of medical circumcision in the country, at 87.6%.
Despite the improvements in treatment coverage and male circumcision, the survey showed the urgent need for targeted interventions.
“Young people, particularly adolescent girls and young women, are still at significant risk,” said Zuma. “There is also a pressing need to address gaps in the treatment cascade, especially in urban areas where many are not receiving the care they need.”
The key recommendations from the survey emphasised the need for targeted interventions to address age-specific HIV challenges, particularly for adolescent girls and young women who face higher HIV risks.
Prevention efforts should be intensified for these groups, alongside a long-term care strategy for an ageing population living with HIV. Tailored interventions were also recommended to address gaps in the clinical care cascade, focusing on the specific districts, localities and subpopulations which were most affected.
The survey also calls for enhanced public awareness and demand for medical male circumcision among those aged 15 and older. In addition, it highlighted the importance of increasing the uptake of HIV prevention measures, including regular testing, condom use and pre-exposure prophylaxis.
These efforts were critical to meeting the 2030 targets for reducing HIV as a public health threat.
The council is continuing its provincial dialogue roadshow to disseminate the results, with events scheduled in the Free State, Western Cape and Northern Cape.
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