SA ‘not close to breaking point at all’ – Imtiaz Sooliman

You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here.

JEREMY MAGGS: Let’s be honest. There is much that needs fixing in this country. It’s the reason for this new podcast. Often in times of adversity a country turns to one person, an individual who they hope will be that fixer, someone who through sheer ability with a sprinkling of charisma, a positive ‘get things done’ attitude, integrity and, I guess, some good luck thrown in for good measure, will make things right. These people are hard to find and mostly are complicated and reluctant heroes.

Our next guest isn’t that person. When asked recently if he would run for president, he said this: ‘I’m not interested in politics. I have a spiritual responsibility’.

Welcome to the Moneyweb podcast Fix SA. My name is Jeremy Maggs. Our guests in coming weeks are going to be asked how we can make things better, how we improve matters, how in the shortest space of time we can become a competitive and successful nation.

Imtiaz Sooliman, who started and oversees the Gift of the Givers organisation, defines civil society and the humanitarian role it should play. Speaking at the Daily Maverick’s recent The Gathering conference, he said, and I quote: ‘South Africa is not falling apart, but this doesn’t mean we don’t have challenges and difficulties.’ He went on to say there’s nothing we can’t fix. We’ve proved that in everything we do in South Africa.

So how would Imtiaz Sooliman fix South Africa?

Imtiaz, a very warm welcome to this podcast. If we’re not broken, as you suggest, we seem to be pretty battered. How close to breaking point do you think we are?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: No, we’re not close to breaking point at all. If we take the lessons from the past and look at the resilience of all people, yes, there’s lots of hope. People are scared, afraid, uncertain. It has just been a plethora of events in the last few years that’s moulding that mindset, and the key to all this is to change the mindset.

If we go back to 2019, we got hit by heavy floods. At the same time, a cylone hit down in three different countries.

Then came Covid, which took a huge toll, not only economically. But it caused severe pressure on mental health [from] which many people haven’t recovered. And if you add the difficulties of that kind of crisis, it just makes the situation far worse than it actually looks.

Then came the civil unrest, which everybody thought was an insurrection. It really wasn’t an insurrection, it was opportunists trying to use people as fodder to try and cause some kind of disturbance – which never had the impact they wanted it to have.

And then finally came the floods of 2022, which reversed the negativity of 2021 because those who were looted then, during the floods, it brought about a new social cohesion in the province itself.

[Then] came the [increasing] fuel price, the rising interest rates, the corruption in government, the problems in political parties. People looked at all of that and became negative. Again, I come back to the first point. It’s about mindset change. In what desperate situation are we?

I explain in many of my talks that I’m a disaster tourist. I don’t do normal tourism. I go to countries where people in the same street, the same community, same village, same race, same religion, neighbours for years, tear each other apart. That pain and that [desire for] revenge takes 300 years or more to fix. And in fact we can never fix it.

To us the guiding light about the quality of our people and their resilience is 27 April 1994, when the whole world’s media focused on South Africa and all the [media] came here expecting violence, bloodshed and disorder. People filled their homes with food, kept their passports ready, kept all their valuable items ready, ready to leave the country. It was the most boring incident for the world media. Nothing happened. Everybody stood in patient queues – no friction, no disorder. And then nothing happened.

Everything happened. It set the template for the mindset of the people that we have in this country. Years of domination, detention without trial, loved ones missing, every kind of injustice – and they came out and said, we won’t be vengeful.

They didn’t say it in their words, they said in their actions. We won’t be vengeful, there’s no revenge, we’ll build a new society. And that is the standard which we have to go to – the fact that the country didn’t burn apart or tear apart. To me nothing else matters.

We survived 2008, the international financial collapse, we survived interest rates of 24%. We’ll survive much more. It’s about mindset change. The more I speak and the more talks I go to and the more people I meet, they are ready for mindset change, and there’s only one big requirement here: take ownership of the country. The country doesn’t belong to the government, it belongs to the people of South Africa, and we need to take ownership of it.

JEREMY MAGGS: Imtiaz Sooliman, you rightly say that so many South Africans are scared and afraid. I would also suggest to you that the optimism of 1994 [was] a long time ago. How then do we start to effect that mindset change that you are talking about for many people who are living lives of absolute anger and despair?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: One of the sessions I had was with somebody who said, ‘The light bulb just went on; we need to turn anger into action’. That’s exactly what we need. We’ve been for years relegating the responsibility of the country to the government. I repeat, the country doesn’t belong to the government, it belongs to us, and we need active citizenry to do things together. In the last few months I’ve seen that in a great way.

Let’s take the most recent example. We got called by the fire chief from Gqeberha saying: ‘There are huge problems with the fire. Our fire trucks can’t get to the fire. Our fire fighters are exhausted. They need nutrition and water and other backup supplies, but we are not going to manage.’ We get full cooperation.

And this is something important that the country needs to understand, that we need to do this together – government, corporates, the private sector – for one purpose only: to save the country and to save the dignity of our people; to save the dignity of our people and to save everything.

JEREMY MAGGS: You talk about the importance, Imtiaz, of active citizenry. Yet it seems to be so difficult for South Africans to coalesce, to come together and to work as one, pulling in the same direction. Why can’t we do that?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: We need that mindset change, and this is what it’s all about. Everywhere we’ve been we are seeing that starting to come to the surface.

People first need to know that when you have negative thoughts and your mind is paralysed, your body becomes paralysed. When you think nothing can be done. But when you change that narrative to say that everything can be done now – the country’s not burning, it’s not falling apart, we are far better off than many people in many other parts of the world – and if you use that as the basis, you suddenly see the light bulbs go on.

The next question is what can I do? How do I change this?

The change starts with yourself. Be positive. We need to understand that everybody in government is not corrupt. Every cop is not a bad guy. Every civil servant is not lazy.

So we have that basis, and a lot of people do agree with that – and it’s a fact. If we harness that and work together, which we’ve been doing, what we did with the fires in Gqeberha and other parts, Jagersfontein and other places, you’ll see there’s a willingness to bring about effective change among CEOs of companies.

Read: Jagersfontein tailings dam collapse is the ‘new Marikana’

Let’s go back to one or two important things that happened in 2020 when Covid came.

For the first time, CEOs of companies called. Not the CSI [corporate social investment] department. The CEOs.

[They] said: ‘Don’t worry about the 90% B-BBEE points, don’t worry about the vaccination certificate, don’t worry about publicity. Just tell me what we need to do to save the country and to save our people.’

Now that’s a huge mindset change. That’s a change bringing compassion into commercialisation.

In 2021, when the unrest came, who were the first guys who phoned? The guys whose shops were burnt, [those whose] manufacturing facilities were destroyed were the first guys to phone and say: ‘What can we do to effect change?’

The real cherry on the top for me was 11 April 2022, when the flood waters were rising eight metres in 45 minutes. I was expecting people to call for a helicopter, for a boat, for divers, for earth-moving equipment. None of the above. The only calls we received were from Corporate South Africa [at] 1:00am, asking: ‘How much do you need and what do you need?’

When you have that kind of commitment, it’s about saving the country.

There’s a willingness to save the country, and we all need to buy into the narrative.

JEREMY MAGGS: Are you absolutely convinced that there is a willing majority, then, who want to work together to change and fix things – or is it just simply pockets of companies and individuals who feel they have to do it?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: No, no. It’s not about tokenism, it’s about realism, it’s about saving the country. I keep emphasising this. It’s about saving the country. I was the guest speaker at Agriculture SA and they all said we need to change the way we operate and the way we do things, and we need to incorporate people and pass [on] skills and teach them.

The first step is realisation. The second step is to effect that realisation into practical action. Everything doesn’t happen overnight, but as long as the process starts, it happens.

The corporates are incredible. In the old days they would tell you, all right, we need the B-BBEE points. ‘We are going to go and help one preschool, give something here, something there’ – nothing really concrete, nothing decisive. Now they get back to you and say: ‘You tell us. What will make the change? How much must we invest? What must we do? How can we make a difference? Can we bring our teams and the CEOs to be part of the process? Can we come and see?’

That was largely driven by Covid because many of them said: ‘It’s only now after all these years of money and affluence and richness we understood the pain of poor people, because we saw what happened to our own employees. We need this change.’ It’s the same thing they told me with the floods in 2022 – that ‘We are staying awake at night to give you money because we’ve learned from the pain of Covid’.

The last point is, for us, our corporate citizens. We are in the fortunate position of having queues of corporates wanting to know how they can work with us. We actually have to give them a number, to say, ‘We can’t talk to you today, we’ll talk to you in 10 days’ time’. And they [will] wait.

For the first time ever in December we were flooded with requests of ‘What do we do next?’

JEREMY MAGGS: You said to me at the beginning of our conversation, Imtiaz Sooliman, that we are not at breaking point, and I accept that. But you will concede that the clock is ticking louder, that we are running out of time to, in your words, save the country.

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: There’s absolutely no doubt. That’s why there’s an urgency to do what we are doing. Because, let me stress again, hunger won’t cause [the downfall of] the country. People have been dying [in the] Eastern Cape for 10, 15 years – or for decades. They’re dying there right now from hunger. Racism won’t destroy us. We’ve had it for years. Class differences won’t destroy us. We’ve had that for years.

What will destroy us is if people have no dignity left.

When you have no dignity and you are totally humiliated, when there’s nothing, everything’s lost and there’s nothing more to lose, there are no consequences for the amount of negative energy that can come out from people in that situation. We need to prevent negative energy and to change negative energy into positive energy, and there are steps in [how] you can do that. There’s a whole blueprint: basically giving people a quality of life.

Here it must be made very clear, because people are sceptical, that it’s the government’s responsibility. Yes, it’s the government’s responsibility, that’s right, it’s true.

You say ‘We pay taxes, we pay rates, we pay the fuel levy, we pay this debt and the other – but why is the government not delivering?’

The reality is seven million people’s taxes can’t look after 65 million people.

So whether it’s Australians, Germans, Canadians or Americans running this country, they all are going to have the same problem. They are going to tell me about state capture and wasting of funds, that’s true. But in spite of seven million people’s taxes, the tax base is too [small] for such a high unemployment rate, so [many] social challenges, the fuel price and inflation. It can’t manage.

And the government, we have to hold its hand at least for the next four years until it puts the systems in place and we can effect that change: improve the health system, the education system, the learners with educational needs, help them – there’s a lot of things; a whole group on its own.

JEREMY MAGGS: Do you believe that government is willing to have its hand held, though?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: Yes. Remember, in government itself, there are a lot of good people. There’s one problem, or two problems. One is the good people don’t all have the skills. They have the heart, the willingness to change. I’m in contact with them all the time. They call us all the time. People want to talk about how to make differences, what we need to change. The minister of police called me recently to speak to the SAPS in Cape Town. Other ministers engage us: ‘How do we fix the country? What do we do?’

And their biggest obstacles are their systems. Their systems are an absolute disaster. Nobody can effect urgent changes or [meet] urgent needs effectively because of the systems they have, and that’s one of the things I’ve been [saying] to them: Change your systems to make them more friendly, easy and accessible for effective action.

So to answer your question, yes, there’s willingness.

Let’s take another example right now. The guys that are most exhausted are the public healthcare workers in the medical field. We’ve lost 1 800 doctors who died from Covid. The nurses are exhausted, posts have been cut, registered posts been cut. The backup surgery, the catch-up surgery is huge. So it’s likely that for five to six years people will be frustrated. They’re heartbroken. And these are public servants. They belong to the public service.

They’re the same people to come up and say, we’ll work Saturday and Sunday, after hours. Give us the resources, give us the extra manpower; our people need help, we will do the catch-up surgery. And there are so many requests like that.

So there’s a willingness among civil servants and politicians, the good ones, to fix the country.

JEREMY MAGGS: You tell government it needs to change its systems. What do you mean by that?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: It declares a national disaster, and it takes nine months to act.

Government doesn’t understand three words – urgency, emergency and disaster are not in its vocabulary.

When it comes to a disaster situation, as one of the examples, a minister calls me in January and says, ‘Can you please help us with the floods in Mdantsane, East London? I’m embarrassed.’ Those are the words of the minister: ‘I’m embarrassed. I don’t know what to do. I can’t release budget [for the] people in need, and my systems prevent me from helping the people immediately. Can you help? Can you go there?’ I said, ‘Minister, we are already there, we are already helping out’.

Another minister engages me and says, ‘What do you think about disaster preparedness?’ I said: ‘It’s a disaster.’

And then she asked why. I said: ‘There’s no clear chain of command. Which department is involved? National, provincial, regional municipality, disaster management, canine, defence force? Who is it? You’ve got no clear chain of command. You have willing people, yes, you’ve got great personnel, the firefighters, the disaster guys. The guys are trained, willing to do what they have to do, but the systems prevent them from doing it effectively and rapidly.’ That’s one example.

JEREMY MAGGS: Imtiaz Sooliman, you’ve painted a vast canvas of problems in this country. What’s the biggest problem we face? What is keeping you awake at night?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: The thing that I’m most afraid of is people losing their dignity, and then we are going to have an upheaval. We are racing against time to deal with that – the hunger in the provinces, the medical care, the lack of opportunity for children, the learning disorders, the psychological impact in the country.

We don’t have enough psychologists and we are not training enough, fast enough.

And the youth. We need the unemployed youth to be given positive energy.

A call is made to corporate South Africa to absorb youth in all the various departments of your country, and give them a stipend. It doesn’t have to be a big salary; a stipend will help them take care of the families. We’ll eradicate hundreds of thousands of hungry people with that stipend. But, more than that, the stipend will bring self-esteem.

The opportunity to work will bring dignity. Dignity will bring positivity. And positivity will move negative energy into positive energy.

Every company can afford to take in several of these youths to give them that chance, because when they come to a job, you say: ‘What is your experience?’ They don’t have any experience. They don’t have a job.

JEREMY MAGGS: Where do you find the money for the stipend? Do you believe that it exists, both corporately and in the public sector?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: [We] don’t need it from the public sector. We need it from the corporates. The public sector is already overburdened. Seven million people’s taxes can’t deal with some 65 million people. It is impossible. [The public sector] can’t even pay doctors’ salaries. They can’t place interns. They’ve cut registrar posts. So the money is just not there.

The private sector is sitting with trillions of rands parked off, and we need to put that into service. It is that service that will change the country and bring the positivity and a lack of crime and everything.

JEREMY MAGGS: What then is your call to the private sector? Are you telling them they have to dig deeper?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: Well, it’s not so much about digging deeper. It’s a tax write-off. I’m not talking about R15 000 or R20 000. It’s going to be as simple as R2 000 to put people in. The companies show their profits, which run into millions of rands. Now, to take off one or two or three million extra from there, for which they will get a tax write-off because it’s a salary, and it’s about skills development … You’ve got to enhance the population. This will mean more money in the country, more positivity, more entrepreneurship.

The economy will grow, the tax base will grow. We are all going to benefit. Whatever happens in one small corner of South Africa affects the whole country.

So yes, there is already discussion. Let’s take for example franchise shops with 300 to 400 branches. Take one extra person in to give them the skills and the stipend and an apprenticeship. We can do that with so many chain stores. We’ll see the knock-on effect in all the families. It’s not impossible.

I’ve raised that issue again with several corporate companies and there’s a willingness to discuss that option.

JEREMY MAGGS: So how do you make sure, then, that – if that is one way of fixing South Africa – it works, that we stay the course, that it’s implemented and managed properly?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: You do several things at the same time, and you put up projects that are realistic, practical and can work. There’s a living example of that. So what’s the living thing? I’ll go back to what we do. People are in need in the country. They have no water. We drill boreholes. Corporate South Africa comes and says, we agree, put boreholes in hospitals, put [them] in the schools, put [them] in the communities.

Thanks to corporate South Africa, in the last two and a half years we’ve put in more than 500 boreholes, 45 alone in Gqeberha to help with Day Zero.

That’s a positive example where corporates come and say that we have affected the lives of thousands of people on a daily basis from one borehole. We are making a difference. From the same borehole it’s hygiene; it’s drinking water; take the medication; it’s water for agriculture, for plants and for crops.

The other one, the one that hasn’t been done yet – [is something] which has to be tested and which we are promoting. The health department has cut the posts of registrars. Now, if you cut registrar posts – registrars are those doctors who become specialists – it means we could have fewer specialists going forward. And it means we could have fewer trained students – going backwards, downwards – because junior ones are trained by the registrar. That affects the health system, brings again poor medical health, poor caring for the patients, no decisive interventions in terms of academic medicine. That’s a big problem for the country and you’re going to have more litigation and more people upset and more people dying.

So again I’ve been speaking to corporate South Africa. Let’s fund 500 registrars. Yes, it’s a government responsibility, that’s true, but there’s a budget crisis right now. This [call is] not for the sake of the government; we are doing it for the people of our country. [That’s] 500 registrars, R1.2 million each, which is not a lot for a corporate company, and let’s do it over four years – R1.2 million a year for four years – because it takes four years for a guy to qualify as a specialist.

But in those four years we say we are giving you enough registrars – which is only in the academic hospitals, in all the disciplines – and you’ve got four years. We’ll give it one call a week, not three calls a week, which means you’ve got more time to study and more time to teach, to pass skills [on] to the guys below you, because they’re going to be treating our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

And then once a month, as part of that support, you’re going to go to our rural hospitals. You’re going to transfer skills, you’re going to see patients. And when you’re qualified as a consultant, you’re going to spend four years in a public health facility to help the people. That’s another example.

JEREMY MAGGS: If I’m hearing you correctly, Imtiaz Sooliman, what I think you’re saying is that there is more and more work for the private sector. You’re saying to me that there is a willingness for the private sector to step in. By doing that, though, aren’t you simply rendering government absolutely irrelevant?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: No. This thing can’t be done without government. Government has its responsibility. They are paying for the hospitals, paying for the consumables, paying for the nurses, paying for the other doctors.

Where they are running short is where we come in, and we tell them at the same time – and of course your guys job in the media, and the public’s job, and the supporters of the different political parties – what are you doing? What affects money?

That question has been raised hundreds of times. We just create a panic situation in government already.

So we are saying, okay, we understand you guys, money disappeared. You give the contract to your grandfather, your girlfriend and your wife, and all those kinds of things happen. This has to stop.

Your job as government is to strengthen the oversight of parliament, the SIU [Special Investigating Unit], the Hawks – all the guys who kept a check on [the] books and how to make sure that money is effectively managed. We in the private sector, while holding your hand while you fix those systems, put people [with] ethics, spirituality, values in your system that will make sure that the country runs properly.

Because we need to do this together, we are giving you four years, not 400 years.

You’ve got four years to fix the system, to strengthen Sars and everything else required for the effective functioning of our country. We will hold your hand and we’ll pay the salaries of the doctors and the teachers that we’ve lost, and the special-needs teachers that we need, and the psychologists – and I’ll be here, there and everywhere. We fix potholes for ourselves.

JEREMY MAGGS: Of course your vision is predicated on government [actually] solving the problem. But many would argue that it is simply too entrenched, that government’s not going to effect the kind of positive change that you are looking for in the next four years.

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: Well, that’s their choice. They want to be in power. The public is watching. They’ve got one-and-a-half years [before] the election, and they have to speed up the process to see what happens between now and April 2024. If they don’t toe the line, if they don’t play the game, there’s every chance they can be replaced. Are they willing to risk that? This should be done not because it’s a risk of losing power, but [because] it’s the right thing to do.

At the same time, I’ve seen in different areas where government has played a phenomenal role. Let’s take Jagersfontein when the mine tailings dam collapsed. I’ve never seen social development staff so jacked up, so energised, so caring, counting all the people that were moving from their homes, organising them in this and being very, very effective.

JEREMY MAGGS: Effective because it was a high-profile emergency that had global coverage. My bet is that had it been something smaller that probably wouldn’t have happened. It’s because the eyes of the world were on them. They had no choice.

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: The KZN floods were much bigger, and the response was a total disaster. They were way behind time in the KZN floods, which was an order of a hundred times bigger than Jagersfontein – and they were just not organised.

It comes back to the same point. There are pockets of people in government throughout the country, in the different provinces, who want to make things happen. And as they’re happening there is more and more buy-in from different sectors in the government arena calling to say: ‘How do we work together and how do we change the system for the better?’ That’s going beyond civil servants, even to the politicians.

JEREMY MAGGS: Imtiaz Sooliman, I always ask the same question to every guest at the end of this podcast. It’s a very simple one as we look towards the future. When you are talking to your grandchildren or to your great-grandchildren in 20 years’ time, what are you going to tell them about the early 2020s in South Africa, and what is their role as the future generation in building the country, in holding the baton?

IMTIAZ SOOLIMAN: We had a great challenge. I’ll tell them we had great euphoria in 1994. Things went well. And in the process we dropped the ball and we lost the way. But our resilience and our determination as a country helped us.

Even right now all corporates are rethinking. After Covid, after the corruption issues, also after the floods, everybody’s having a rethink. And the fact that we have a rethink, that alone is positive. And the rethink is about how to build the country.

So it’s to tell my grandchildren that you always have to be innovative, and to remember one important principle and four important points. The one important principle [for] you, my grandchildren, is to make sure that you understand that, whoever does it, an atom’s weight of good shall seed. It doesn’t matter how big or how small, but you should do something.

And secondly, as part of your teaching, as your grandfather I’m telling you this:

Learn these four important principles: spirituality, morality, values and ethics.

Invite that into your soul and teach it to your children, your grandchildren, and your family.

If we do that we don’t need any policeman to monitor us. Our own soul and our own conscience will monitor us to do the right thing in the interest of the people of our country first. And in that process we will benefit.

JEREMY MAGGS: Imtiaz Sooliman says we need to take collective ownership of the country. And the solutions, he says, lie in South Africans standing together.

Imtiaz, thank you so much for joining us on the FixSA podcast here on Moneyweb.

I’m Jeremy Maggs, and thank you so much for listening.

For more FixSA podcasts click here.

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Fixing SA means having the confidence to do so – Christo Wiese
Fixing SA means far less talk and a lot more doing – Busisiwe Mavuso
Fixing SA begins with clear and decisive leadership – Sim Tshabalala