Hendrik

[Barry Bateman @barrybateman]

Whatever your view on the Akademia project, this is remarkable. The pictures are from March, May, August and October. They have a vision, a budget, a timeline and deadlines, and they are getting it done. Every cent is spent where it is allocated and accounted for.

[INFIL // EXFIL 🇿🇦 @InfilExfil]

Heritage Day was designed as an act of inclusion. A democratic president’s job on 24 September is to make that inclusion audible to ALL people of our nation, their own recipes, and their own grandparents’ names.

Since @CyrilRamaphosa turned his speech into an election campaign and can't be a responsible leader... allow me.

Shoutout to:

English-speaking South Africans, Jewish South Africans, Portuguese, Greek and other smaller communities whose churches, schools and enterprises are also part of the record.

Coloured communities whose identities, music, language and political struggle sit at the intersection of many ancestries.

Afrikaans as a language that grew on this soil, the literature, architecture and farming practices that came with it, and the fact that Afrikaner families also lost people in concentration camps and on commando.

The Indian communities who arrived as indentured labourers and built temples, mosques, spice routes and businesses that are now part of the national fabric.

The languages and oral traditions of the Nguni, Sotho-Tswana, Venda, Tsonga and other African nations.

➡️AND THE KHOISAN - first peoples whose rock art and knowledge systems pre-date every later arrival.

Let's hope the next president doesn't use Heritage Day to only talk about the legacy of destruction the ANC has left behind after Apartheid... a total compounding shit show.

Also, shout-out to everyone marching today in the streets who can't afford to celebrate Heritage Day, because the only history they remember is that of State Capture.

[יאיר לפיד - Yair Lapid @yairlapid]

UN Secretary-General António Guterres said: “I have never seen killing and destruction like Gaza in all my years as Secretary-General.”

According to even the most critical reports, Guterres, 70,000 people were killed in the war in Gaza, a large proportion of them Hamas terrorists.

During your years as Secretary-General: more than 600,000 people were massacred or starved to death in Ethiopia.

377,000 died in Yemen — that figure appears in reports issued by your own organization.

150,000 were killed in Sudan and 12 million were displaced.

Hundreds of thousands have been buried in Ukraine.

You didn’t see it? They died before your eyes. You simply looked the other way, because the Jews couldn’t be blamed.

[Megan S. @SimplyMegszcpt]

So Coloureds, Whites and Indians have to fight for the 20% remaining. Why can't it just go to deserving students who have excelled in those fields irrespective of race. 🇿🇦

[Cliff - That's All @PigSpotter]

Let that pass, and we will take our business abroad and even more unemployment will ensue in South Africa, more poverty, more starvation.

How stupid are you @CyrilRamaphosa to think the way to fix unemployment for blacks, is to take it from whites, instead of CREATING NEW JOBS?

[Afrikaner @AltAfrikaner]

This is Lizzie van Zyl. A Boer girl from South Africa. She died in a British concentration camp in South Africa. 1901. She was seven years old.

Not Nazi Germany. Britain. Forty years before Auschwitz.
26,000 Boer women and children died in these camps. Including roughly 18 000 Africans that were displaced after 40 000 Boer farms were burned, as they were a threat to the British supply line.

Most British today don't even know much about this.

History should be remembered, not relived. Learn from all of it. Not just the parts that suit narratives.

[Ryk Neethling @RykNeethling]

Shocking. Didn’t think it was possible for them to stoop any lower but here we are. Robbing a South African icon at her peak of her hard earned prize money. The whole Swimming SA executive needs to be replaced with administrators that understand what it takes to perform at the highest levels.

[Mark Kaplan @markkaplan20]

I want you to look at this chart and tell me what you see.

20 years. Seven diseases. Every single line is going up.

Alzheimer's up 260%. Parkinson's up 150%. Fatty liver up 125%. Diabetes doubled. Obesity up 42%. Cancer up 16%. Heart disease went down then came right back up.

Trillions of dollars. The most expensive healthcare system in human history. And not a single metabolic disease is improving.

Something is causing all of them. The same something. And nobody is stopping it.

🧵

[Aunty Debbie 🇿🇦 ♏ @debbiepieterse]

@ANCParliament When will Fikile Mbalula be tried for his Dubai trip and his wife for the Freestate alleged corruption?
Also when will Nomvula Makonyane be investigated? When will Paul Mashatile be tried?
You are racially motivated scum.

[Hendrik @hendrik7]

@curingdercums2 @RoryDuncan1966 @Starlink Vox have been selling that service for more than 10 years.

[Phumlani M. Majozi @PhumlaniMMajozi]

It always amazes me when our President speaks as if he only took power last Monday. Our key industries are in existential crisis because of him and his party. Will somebody please tell him that? #economy #politics #markets

[Giulietta Talevi @GTalevi]

So we wake to huge swathes of no power, our bins are still not empty and the city is a disgusting mess, some suburbs still don’t have water and we’ve all had to pay above inflation for our rate increases. Have I got it right?

[Conscious Caracal 🇿🇦 @ConCaracal]

Expropriation Act Court Case Day 3:

The President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa's legal team has started with their arguments in support of expropriation without compensation.

The President’s legal team argues that core Constitutional rights, such as the right to private property, should be subordinate to political aims, such as land redistribution.

There you have it. That's how far the President's commitment to private property rights goes: only as far as it does not stand in the ANC's way.

[Mteto Nyati @mteton]

In South Africa we have watched a quiet but relentless slide into lawlessness. Jumping traffic lights has become commonplace. Driving under the influence is often treated lightly. Pedestrians cross roads with little regard for the danger. Informal settlements spring up overnight on any open piece of land. Illegal electricity connections are no longer treated as serious offences - they are simply accepted as part of daily life. Informal traders claim pavements and intersections as their own. Prisoners somehow manage to keep smartphones. Driving without a licence is widespread.

One could go on forever. The point is simple: there has been a clear breakdown in law and order.

On the surface, the relaxation of rules is understandable. For decades, harsh and often humiliating laws targeted black South Africans in particular. So society swung from one extreme to the other, from rigid control to an “anything goes” environment.

In many ways this chaos is presented as freedom, the freedom that was denied to the majority for so long. We even open our borders to illegal immigration with the argument: “They took us in when we were running from the apartheid police.” A noble memory, but a problematic policy.

I once listened to a Minister of Correctional Services speaking about prisoners. The minister spoke much like a principal talking about learners, our collective duty to help them reach their full potential. The fact that some of these individuals were rapists, hardened killers and career criminals seemed to fade behind the focus on rehabilitation. We appear to have confused ordinary criminals with the political prisoners of the past. In our emphasis on ubuntu there is often little room left for the discipline that law and order require. It is as if, as a nation, we struggle to hold both compassion and consequences together.

This confused state is not progressive. It is setting us backwards. I know of no country that has ever become successful on a foundation of chaos. We urgently need to strike the right balance, one that honours our painful history without using it as a permanent excuse to abandon the very rules that keep a society from falling apart. #ProudlySA

[Leah Potgieter MP @LeahK28]

South African swimmers have now won 16 Commonwealth Games medals despite inadequate funding.

Federations are still waiting for grants already due while parents pay to send athletes abroad.

Yet Gayton McKenzie found R31m for his World Cup spectacle. You do the math...

[Benonwine @benonwine]

John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson feel like the last two adults left in the room.

For years they’ve been saying the quiet part out loud: free speech matters, humour is not a crime, and a society that cannot laugh at itself is already sick.

And for that simple, decent stance they have been dragged through the cancellation machine.

These are not angry ideologues.

They are two men who just wanted to make people laugh and tell the truth.
Instead they have been treated like heretics smeared, isolated, and told to sit down and shut up by people who once claimed to love satire.

The British humour they helped create the kind that was razor sharp, fearless, and never cruel for the sake of it has almost disappeared.

That humour didn’t just entertain us.
It made us stronger. It taught us not to take ourselves so seriously. It gave us thicker skin.

Now that skin is being deliberately stripped away, and the only ones still trying to protect it are the ones the culture keeps trying to cancel.
Cleese and Atkinson never asked to be heroes.

They just refused to pretend.
And in an age of mass pretending, that alone makes them extraordinary.

[Juliano Nikolas @CoachJulianNiko]

I was carrying 21kg I didn't need, a soft middle and a rounder face, and I had to get lean before fall hit. Here is how I did it, in 26 rules:

RULE 1. STOP RUNNING (your knees will thank you).

[Athol Trollip @AtholT]

This guy is so arrogant he doesn’t even realise that he is totally tone deaf and out of touch.

[Handre @Handre]

If you believe socialism works, why are you waiting? Redistribute your own wealth. Get a group of like-minded individuals and pool your wealth.

Create an online community where you all work and everyone pays their income into a pool which is evenly distributed.

What is stopping you from doing this and why are you insisting everyone in a jurisdiction participate before starting?

Someone give me the answers!

[Richard Wilkinson @wilkinsoncape]

I am very sorry to hear that RW Johnson has died.

His writing was deeply scarring, fearless, unforgettable. He had a rare gift for exposing malfeasance with clarity and wit.

He annoyed and outraged many of the worst people.

A truly great South African author.