Zuma escapes harm, MK Party coy on car crash details:
Former President Jacob Zuma found himself in the spotlight once again as reports emerged of his involvement in a car accident on Thursday night.
Umkhonto we Sizwe Party’s leader and his bodyguards have reportedly suffered no injuries while the exact location of the incident remains unknown.
MK spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndlela confirmed to the Mail & Guardian that there was an incident but offered little clarity, stating, “I can say yes, there was an accident. The details, therefore, are sketchy, I cannot get into detail regarding that for now”.
As speculation swirls around the circumstances of the accident, Ndlela emphasised the need to maintain security protocols, hinting at potential sensitivities surrounding the incident.
Meanwhile, the party’s election head Musa Mkhize cried foul, claiming Zuma was deliberately targeted.
“What happened last night I must say that unfortunately, we have been waiting for it to happen and it has happened because the president was warned that he will be lying in hospital, we don’t know what more is still coming,” he told the SABC.
The lack of concrete information about the accident has been muddled further by conflicting reports from the KwaZulu-Natal South African Police Service.
KZN SAPS spokesperson Colonel Robert Netshiunda told the M&G that reports had reached him about the accident but he had no further details. Efforts to contact SAPS’s national spokesperson were unsuccessful.
This incident arrives amid recent remarks by the secretary of the ANC in KwaZulu-Natal, Bheki Mtolo, who suggested that Zuma’s age might hinder his participation in the upcoming general elections. Mtolo asserted that Zuma might be hospitalised due to his advanced age, casting doubt on his ability to engage in the political arena actively.
On Thursday, the Electoral Commission of South Africa sustained a separate objection against Zuma running as a candidate in the May 29 national election due to his criminal record. Unless the decision is successfully appealed, the 81-year-old will be barred from contesting a seat in parliament.
The vulnerable experience of childbirth during war:
About 180 mothers are giving birth every day in war-torn Gaza. Out of the 36 hospitals in the city, only 12 are partially functional, with reduced access to medical supplies, limiting options for pregnant women.
When the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) published the above report on 4 November, I had given birth a few days before in a private ward, in a top-class facility in South Africa.
The pregnancy and the birth of my daughter were not easy. At 35 weeks, I felt a warm fluid trickling down my leg, followed by a sharp pain in my abdomen. I was rushed to hospital, admitted for two days and diagnosed with premature rupture of the membranes surrounding my baby.
Some of the water she was living in had seeped out and, if this persisted, I would need to deliver her prematurely, otherwise she would suffocate.
I prayed.
I asked God to keep my daughter safe and preserve my life.
Could the women in Gaza pray for the same? Would God spare their lives and their children’s lives the way he had mercy upon my own life and that of my child?
Doctors have linked conflict to an increase in miscarriages, congenital abnormalities, stillbirths, pre-term labour and maternal mortality.
I thought about this while I was pregnant, praying the women in Gaza would get to meet their newborns.
The gynaecologist put me on bed rest because my pregnancy was now considered high risk and I was seeing my doctor every four days.
The fear that overcame me was incredible. As a first-time pregnant woman, I did not know what was happening half of the time but at least I could count on being able to go to the doctor and hospital whenever I needed to.
Since 7 October, women in Gaza have not been able to say the same.
I prayed for them.
During my bed rest, I sat day in and day out, consuming and internalising what was happening in Gaza.
At one point, my husband had to confiscate my electronic devices because he feared I was putting myself in distress. But how could I not? These women were in the very same situation that I was in.
Some needed medical attention and doctors because they, too, were high-risk patients. But hospitals in Gaza were targeted.
On 17 October, there was an explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza which resulted in the death of 471 people and the injury of 342.
Almost a month later, The World Health Organisation reported that at least 521 people, including 16 medical workers, had been killed in 137 “attacks on healthcare” in Gaza on 12?November.
I prayed for them.
I gave birth a few weeks later, at 38 weeks, because this time it was my baby that was in distress. The hospital staff, the nurses and doctors were all efficient. I had no fear there would be interference when I was giving birth.
The gynaecologist, anaesthetist and paediatrician were standing at the ready, dedicated to me.
I prayed for the women in Gaza.
I gave birth to a 3.7kg daughter and I knew God is good. Childbirth is a sacred and vulnerable experience and God was good to me. He allowed me to meet my precious baby girl. I praise him more every day for that.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, women are having to give birth in shelters, in their homes, in the streets amid rubble and in overwhelmed healthcare facilities, where sanitation is worsening, and the risk of infection and medical complications is on the rise, Unicef reports.
In January, Al Jazeera published a “Know Their Names” project, identifying some of the thousands of children who had been killed. The project listed 4?216 Palestinians, from infants to 17-year-olds. It showed that 75% of those named had not reached teenagehood, more than half were under the age of 10, and nearly 500 were younger than two years old.
When I read that article, my baby girl was two months old. We were still not sleeping because she was not sleeping. She suffered from reflux and this made her cry. Milk would come out her nose as she slept. She would wake up unable to breathe.
We were on high alert. The tension was palpable. I questioned a lot of things during that time and one of them was whether God was good. Why would he make my baby suffer?
But whose babies and children should suffer?
The image of Hector Pieterson haunts South Africans to this day — a 12-year-old boy shot by apartheid police because he took part in the protests against Afrikaans, the language of instruction in schools.
Hector was someone’s child and he did not reach adulthood. Children die in times of conflict. It should not be so but it is.
Whether God is good or not is something I often toggle between.
But I will bring up my baby girl to see the goodness of God when it presents itself, because with her being here, I have seen it.
Black industrialists programme needs an overhaul:
Reflecting on the Black Industrialists and Exporters Conference, hosted by the department of trade, industry and competition this week, one is left with mixed feelings. Although the aspirations of the programme are noble, not enough is being done to push the boundaries and realise the full potential of the black industrialists programme.
One of the fundamental flaws limiting this programme’s success is the lack of a clear and well-articulated definition of what a black industrialist is.
Nineteenth-century author Lewis Carroll’s adage that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there, rings true here. There is a growing sense of the term “black industrialist” being a catch-all phrase to blanket everyone from those who have built empires from the ground up, hold controlling equity stakes and demonstrate deep operational expertise in their respective businesses, to anyone with a loan or grant from the Industrial Development Corporation, National Empowerment Fund or the department and holding notional equity stakes in companies.
This is not to suggest that the notion of black industrialist should be used as a gatekeeper with regard to who can and who can’t be referred to by the term. However, there are some obvious risks to the approach that is currently being adopted, hence some perceived limitations of the programme.
The first, and perhaps a subordinate issue, is that blanketing all and sundry as black industrialists does not give the emerging and upstart entrants anything to aspire to, simply because the concept is neither understood nor properly defined. At the same time, the flippant use of the term dilutes the weight of the notion of a black industrialist for those who have a proven track record and have created and developed multi-generational assets of significant scale.
The second, and more prevalent matter, is that it becomes increasingly elusive to tangibly measure where the progress and success of black industrialists is happening. One comes to this second conclusion based on the fact that despite 30 years of democracy, and the fact that it has been 20 years since the implementation of the broad-based black economic empowerment legislation and nine years since the launch of the black industrialists policy, the country cannot attest to having a black-owned commercial bank, telecommunications company or oil major firm.
There are a handful of law firms, consulting houses and auditing firms that are black owned and controlled, however these are few and far between, while the mainstream firms in these sectors cannot be seen as being in the hands of black people.
While it is the stated intention of the government to develop a class of black industrialists, who will diversify the historical pattern of ownership of industries, making them representative of the country’s broader demographic, and to create fertile ground for these industrialists to build something of generational value, a few areas can be highlighted where the state is missing a fundamental opportunity to attain this aspiration.
The telecommunications spectrum auction and licensing round of 2022, is one such area where the state missed an opportunity to sow the seeds for the development of a black-owned company of formidable stature. Much of the capacity was taken up by the established telecommunication companies, entrenching their dominance — and this will probably happen again in the next round, set to be held this year.
The public procurement bill is another area that could be leveraged by the state, given its R1 trillion annual spend, to run a massive industrialisation programme targeted at setting up and developing black industrialists. However, not only has the process of legislating the bill taken an inordinate amount of time, prior versions of it did not explicitly gear it to drive the black industrialist’s agenda.
Common to both of these examples is that these are public instruments, and areas in which the government has considerable influence, but it is seemingly unable to match the black industrialists’ stated aspirations with the very tools in its kit.
It is my assessment that the first factor contributing to limiting the impact of the government’s stated intention to develop a class of black industrialists is the lack of a clear and well-articulated vision of what the black industrialists programme seeks to achieve.
Second, an ancillary but fundamental factor is the lack of a definition of what a black industrialist actually is. This is where the government needs to go back to the drawing board, because articulating this will guide in which direction policy will go and, by extension, the resources that need to be mobilised to achieve the goal.
As a start, my submission is that the definition of a black industrialist should entail two critical aspects. First, a company that is both majority black owned, with effective beneficial value accruing to the owners. Second, there must be demonstrable operational involvement by the industrialist in all aspects of the business, not limited to boardroom positions.
On the part of the government, when defining its vision for black industrialists, it is important to note that many instruments to achieve the aspiration of developing a black industrialist class of noteworthy scale are in the direct control of the state, however, political will to achieve this is the ultimate overlay, if any such programme is going to enjoy success.
Elais Monage is the president of the Black Business Council.
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