maxwellbuddah

Chakra, Happiness, Success, Mind.

[UNICEF @UNICEF]

Yes, those photos you’ve seen are real.

More than 18 years ago, a baby named Lamine Yamal and his mom Sheila met Lionel Messi at a UNICEF fundraising photoshoot.

Today, their achievements on the pitch inspire millions. Off the pitch, both Messi and Lamine Yamal use their voices and platforms as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassadors to support and advocate for children around the world.

The goal? That every child survives, thrives, and fulfils their potential.

We are proud to have them on our team.

Credit: Joan Monfort

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

South Africa is the most economically unequal country in the world because it was deliberately designed to be so.

While other highly unequal nations arrived there through capitalism or just plain corruption, South Africa arrived there because inequality was the literal law of the land for generations.

Pick a year, any year of South African history and evidence that the natives of the land were to be deliberately kept poor is right there in palin sight.
After all, the Xhosa Frontier Wars broke out in 1779 after decades of systematic land and wealth dispossession.

Even when you look over six decades before the country known as South Africa was formalised, and a century before Apartheid-era townships were codified, the formal policy of setting aside “locations” for Black people had already began.

In 1846, British colonist Theophilus Shepstone was tasked with managing thousands of Natives who were returning to lands they had historically occupied before the British violently invaded the region.

Rather than integrating them, Shepstone established several rural “Native locations” in the least fertile land available to ensure they would be available as cheap labour for farms and colonial industries.

Similarly, in the decades following 1886, when gold was discovered in what is today Gauteng, the entire colony’s immense wealth came from the mining sector powered by cheap, state-controlled electricity and heavily exploited, low-wage migrant labour.

Because this Mineral-Energy Complex built an economic system controlled by an elite few and because the economy was heavily geared toward resource extraction rather than broad-based manufacturing, it never developed the large, stable blue-collar middle class that lifted up countries in Europe, America or East Asia.

You could also skip to 1913, when the South African government decreed that the Black majority, which made up 80% of the population, could legally own just 7% of the land.

This overnight act destroyed Black farming and wiped out generational wealth. So, unlike in most other countries where inequality is a result of capitalism, in South Africa it was a state-enforced intentional destruction of a population’s asset base.

Over a century after the Locations were introduced, the Group Areas Act of 1950 locked Black families into townships and rural homelands, far from economic hubs. Today, transport costs consume 30–40% of a low-income worker’s salary vs. <10% for affluent suburbs, while property values in historically White areas have appreciated exponentially. The physical distance from opportunity is a daily tax on time and money that compounds generational poverty.

You could also zoom in on 1953, when the Bantu Education Act deliberately stripped math, science, and technical training from Black school curricula. The explicit, stated goal of the government at the time was to train Black citizens to be nothing more than manual labourers. Once again, the poor education given to Natives was not an inadvertent side effect of poor planning or execution.

As luck would have it, when 1994 rolled around, Western nations were shifting away from heavy labour industry and toward service economies. South Africa imitated this model and then found itself with an oversupply of blue-collar workers, products of Bantu Education.

Even though Bantu Education was repealed, public schools are still largely funded by local property taxes and since wealthier, historically White, suburbs raise vastly more per child than townships, the quality gap in maths and science persists. A child in Sandton receives 2–3x the per-learner funding of a child in Soweto.

Meanwhile, after 1994, wages for tech, banking, and executive roles skyrocketed, while wages for manual labour stagnated or vanished entirely. It goes without saying that the wage gap expanded rapidly during the very years democracy was meant to close it.

At the same time, during the transition to democracy, political administration was handed to the Native majority, but existing property rights were legally protected, which meant that while the laws became equal overnight, the capital, real estate, stocks, and business ownership stayed exactly where they were.

And because wealth compounds via interest and investments much faster than wages grow, the starting line of the new democracy was so skewed that the markets naturally made the rich richer, regardless of the change in political leadership.

Today, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s top 100 companies are still ~87% White-owned in terms of executive control and beneficial equity. Transformation policies, which, by the way were designed by the White elite, have created a small Black elite, but the aggregate wealth distribution remains frozen because ownership concentration drives inequality. After a all, wealth begets wealth via dividends and buybacks, while wages, even well-paid ones, cannot catch up to capital’s compound growth.

Anyway, the point is that South Africa’s historical economic inequality was by design and when we say it continues to be actively maintained to this day, this is not a conspiracy theory. It may seem that way because the design’s final trick makes the outcomes look like “the economy” doing what it does, so the original sin of dispossession fades from view.

[SMWX Clips @_SMWX]

“I get a call from a senior government official and he says that man is the President’s funder, so I mustn’t touch him…”

Prof Malegapuru Makgoba on political interference at Eskom during his tenure.

[Sir Lebona Cabonena @LCabonena]

The ANC blocked water from the taps and delivered water via JoJo's.

This is the ANC in Mpumalanga, this JoJo cost R10 million.

They're celebrating the fact that people will water from JoJo tank instead of taps.

[Tirii @tirii_f1]

F1 broadcasting always shows us at slow speeds to see the sponsors coz wtf are those speed

[Geronimo Morgans @GeronimoMorgans]

When an 18 year old Erling Haaland scored 9 goals in one game.

The scariest thing is he could’ve scored 20, and this was a serious competition too. Mental.

[Langeni @Langeni__]

💔💔💔

[Zimasa “Gcaga” Vabaza @mooshtaffa]

THE BUY/BUILD, BORROW, DIE FRAMEWORK ❗️

[X;🇿🇦🇨🇩🇸🇸🇵🇸🇨🇺 @justxmxo]

Remember when she banned cigarettes during covid19 and the only cigarettes available in the market was supplied by these guys illegally?

Good times.

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

When the Nigerian economy fell into hard times in the early 1980s, the government issued a “Quit order” expelling undocumented immigrants.

In the video below, Nigeria’s president, “Minister” Shehu Shagari fielded questions about the scale and the death of people during the mass exodus.

Interestingly, there was not much improvement in Nigeria’s economy after the order was carried out.

According to Dr Hashim Gibrill of Clark Atlanta University, “The economic impact was acute, notably in sectors like hospitality and construction, where many skilled workers were lost”.

Many foreign manual labourers and skilled tradesmen vanished overnight, stalling building projects, while small businesses, hotels, and agricultural sectors lost a massive pool of cheap, reliable labour.

At the same time, the policy failed to save the government economically as the economy continued to freefall. On 31 December, 1983, less than a year after the expulsion order, military Major General Muhammadu Buhari overthrew the government in a military coup, citing a completely ruined economy.

Ultimately, historians agree that the 1983 expulsion was a severe humanitarian tragedy that caused massive regional disruption and provided absolutely zero economic relief to Nigeria.

Now, to be fair, it makes total intuitive sense on the surface for people to believe that expelling migrants will improve their economic situation. That is precisely why political leaders throughout history have used this tactic because it relies on logic that feels like common sense, even though economic reality repeatedly proves it wrong.

This is because from a purely intuitive standpoint, people tend to look at the economy as a zero-sum game, with jobs, housing, and government resources as a fixed pie. It sense that if there are 100 jobs and 20 immigrants occupy some of them, expelling those immigrants means 20 citizens get those jobs.

Similarly, when unemployment and inequality are high, finding complex macroeconomic solutions takes years. But blaming a visible, distinct group of outsiders offers an instant, simple explanation for a complex mess, which makes it attractive to a frustrated public.

But the thing is that in any economy, jobs are not a fixed pie, and when you suddenly remove millions of consumers from a country, as Nigeria did in 1983, the demand for bread, clothes, transport, and rent plummets. Businesses lose customers, revenues drop, and many end up retrenching more workers.

Again, it’s common sense to assume a citizen will just step into an undocumented worker’s shoes. But in reality, citizens often refuse to work the same low-wage, backbreaking labour like seasonal agriculture. South African farmers routinely report struggling to recruit and retain local South African workers for these short-term, backbreaking harvesting seasons as farm work is highly intensive, temporary, and often located in remote areas.

South African citizens, who have constitutional rights, families to support locally, and expectations of fair labor standards, rightfully refuse to work for these illegal, sub-poverty wages.

So, this is less about citizens being “lazy” and more about the distortion of the labour market because undocumented workers lack legal protections, unscrupulous employers exploit them by paying well below the legal minimum wage and ignoring labour laws.

Still, if those undocumented workers disappear overnight, many exploitative small businesses and farms face sudden operational collapse rather than a seamless transition to local labour.

Needless to say, for South Africa, a sudden exit of regional labour, much like Nigeria experienced in 1983, would not solve South Africa’s unemployment catastrophe. Instead, it would instead cause immediate labour shortages in agriculture, spike food prices and shrink the overall size of the economic pie available to everyone.

[Paul Saladino, MD @paulsaladinomd]

Erling Haaland is taking the world by storm.

He drinks raw milk and eats beef liver and heart.

He doesn’t fear the sun. He gets sunlight in the morning and limits blue light at night.

In this video, I’m reviewing his diet…

[Rilwan @Real1_balogun]

Look at the lethality, composure and single-mindedness with which he attacked that ball. He’d have seen that space seconds before. He was waiting for that cross. Building anticipation.

Elite attacking is hard. Defending against elite attackers is tough.

Gabriel wanted to react but Haaland is quick. He’s sharp. You cannot sleep or snooze.

[Larissa @laridiniz]

Não dói nem um pouco. O Neymar nasceu com o tipo de talento que 1 pessoa em 1 bilhão nasce, e escolheu desperdiçar isso em whisky, poker e mulher. Nunca se comprometeu com nada, nunca se responsabilizou por nada.

Viveu metade da carreira lesionado porque tem o preparo físico e a resistência de um bebum, fez questão de vender a própria imagem mais por polêmica extracampo que por esforço no campo e, quando percebeu que não conseguiria nada com isso, aparelhou o Santos e a CBF.

Além de tudo é mimado, desrespeitoso e tem 0 fairplay. Um delinquente que sequestrou nossa camisa por mais de 1 década e alimentou uma péssima cultura no nosso futebol. Finalmente acabou.

[Property and Cars kings @CarandProperty]

History has no blank pages.

[Sizwe SikaMusi @SizweLo]

It’s not a coincidence that the more capitalist a country becomes the less people want to get married.

This is because capital markets make more money the more single people there.

Think about it. Single people generate massive economic activity. A single person requires their own fridge, their own TV, their own subscription services, and their own roof, whereas a married couple pools resources and creates economies of scale in a single home.

The fact that two adults living separately consume more housing, furniture, appliances, insurance, internet subscriptions, and utilities than one couple sharing those goods makes a huge difference in a capitalist economy.

Capitalism thrives on individualism, which is why advertising and consumer culture continually emphasise “personal branding” and “self-care”. Marriage and family, by contrast, require radical compromise and the pooling of resources.

Now, because capitalist culture prioritises the individual consumer, family commitment becomes less and less appealing as advertisements consistently emphasise “personal freedom” and associate this with having fewer family obligations. Everyone is told to “Live life on your terms”, “Do you”, “You deserve it”.

So, rather than building an identity through a family, individuals are encouraged to construct it through careers, fitness, fashion, travel, technology, and various “experiences”.

Because of this, long-term commitments like marriage feel like constraints to people who are accustomed to the idea that there are infinite possibilities out there, which in turn makes marriage feel like settling for less and forfeiting better alternatives.

With this mindset, the ideal participant in a capitalist economy is a “free” individual who continually defines themselves through consumption and whose self-worth is measured by how much they can keep spending and consuming.

Some may argue that this epidemic of singlehood is just a natural progression of civilisation, a sign of the times, and that capitalists are not conspiring to undermine marriage to boost their bottom lines.

But the thing is that, if capitalists did NOT actively fight to create more consumers by encouraging people to remain single, then they would be leaving money on the table and would not be maximising profit and shareholder value. This is the opposite of capitalism. So, it’s very naive to believe they’re not actively pursuing this strategy of keeping people single.

Also, it’s notable that popular culture, which is just capitalism, strongly glamourises solo- and co-parenting because this keeps current individual consumers while birthing new ones. A win-win.

Marketing campaigns explicitly promote single lifestyles and identities because they’re commercially valuable. They don’t have to meet in a room to discuss how to discourage marriage or family formation, they just know what they’re doing.

My argument here is not that capitalists are ideologically opposed to marriage because they want to depress you and steal your soul or something, but that they know that single people are better for profits.

If marriage made more money than singlehood, they’d promote marriage; and then the feminists and Andrew Tate fanboys would be wailing about how “the matrix” is using marriage to enslave them.

So, just in case it’s still not clear, capitalists are not anti-marriage. They’re pro-profit. If stable marriages and large families maximised shareholder returns, they would celebrate them as relentlessly as they currently celebrate individual lifestyles.
But because individual consumers purchase more goods and services per capita than families, firms have a financial incentive to normalise lifestyles that produce more independent consumers.

[𝕾𝖎𝖗 𝕮𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖘 @eagleseyeinc]

get a haircut every 2 weeks to stay sharp, wait 5 secs before answering the phone to control the rhythm, always arrive 15 mins early, stay away from free lunches, never talk about people who aren't in the room and when anger rises, wait 10 mins before reacting. these habits may look rigid but they're the hidden discipline of the elite.