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- A Stuijt
- Retired South African medical journalist, ex-Sunday Times of Johannesburg.
SA government failed - Institute for Security Studies
20:19 | 
Posted by
A Stuijt |
“All people shall have the right to live where they choose, be decently housed, and to bring up their families in comfort and security.” (Article 9 of the Freedom Charter adopted by the African National Congress of the People at Kliptown on 26 June 1955.)
And this is Kliptown today: click here:
SA STATE FAILS TO PROTECT AFRIKANER MINORITY
Dec 5 2008 -- The Afriforum civil rights movement is preparing a constitutional law suit against the South African government over its failure to protect all its citizens from the soaring violent crime epidemic:
To support their claim, Afriforum head Kallie Kriel, left, presented a study by senior researcher Dr Johan Burger (right) from the SA Institute for Security Studies at a seminar in Pretoria this week, in which the institute's top security expert warned, based on extensive research, that the country's government has failed totally in its Constitutional duties to protect its citizens.
Dec 4 2008 ISS report: the State's response to violent crime, farm attacks etc:
http://www.afriforum.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/iss-report-the-states-response-to-crime.pdf
It is warfare out there say besieged Afrikaners of Pretoria
- http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262970
PICTURES OF MURDER VICTIMS 2008:
http://cid-b6b44a5376348175.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/CrimeBustersofSouthAfrica/Afrikaner%20genocide%20pictures%202008?wa=wsignin1.0&sa=163283872
Yet the right to protection by the State of minorities are firmly entrenched in the Constitution - video:
"The SA government has failed completely in its duty to implement any kind of effective strategy to protect the security of all its citizens,' said Dr Burger when presenting the study this week at a seminar in Pretoria.
Failure to protect rural families:
Another finding by the ISS: 'the government has totally failed in its solemn promise to create effective, alternative security structures before dismantling the rural commandos which so effectively protected all the citizens in the countryside. These commandos were unilaterally scrapped by ex-Pres. Thabo Mbeki and plunged all the rural areas into unprecedented high levels of violence-driven murder, rape and robbery attacks, especially targetting Afrikaner families. Some 3,020 Afrikaner rural dwellers were murdered in this violence since 1994.
The Afrikaner civil rights movement has now instructed its legal team to sue the SA government in the Constitutional court over this dismal failure to protect the country's citizens. Also see: http://www.da.org.za/?p=1102
- Kriel: “The ISS-research provides a scientific basis on which this country's government can now be called to account for its dismal failure to combat crime, and especially the violence-driven crime this country has been plunged to.'
Their legal team, comprised of advocates Wim Trengove and Kate Hofmeyer, have been asked to include the ISS' research findings when preparing the law suit.
"This government must be held publicly accountable for its failures. When they are called upon to do so in a (judiciary) public forum, it would also encourage the government to more urgently address the rapid deterioration of the crime situation. This sense of urgency now is sorely lacking, as can be seen in the current government's very weak attempts to set up structures with which to combat the crime epidemic,' Kriel said. "This situation can still be reversed but it needs a determined, firm leadership,' he noted.
http://www.afriforum.co.za/?p=1963
One-million+ diaspora S.Africans may get to vote after all:
And speaking of constitutional rights -- the SA Centre for Constitutional Rights, which was recently launched by the F W de Klerk foundation, has also been encouraged by this week's comment from the country's independent electorial commission head Brigalia Bam that she would 'positively examine' the disenfranchisements of the estimated 1-million or so South African who have to work abroad.
Dr Bam of the IEC informed the opposition Democratic Alliance's leader Helen Zille this week that she would 'positively examine' all the requests and petitions that South Africans living overseas be allowed to vote in next year’s general elections. http://constitutionallyspeaking.co.za/?p=727
Corruption and failed municipal service delivery in SA after 1994 -
APARTHEID-ERA STATISTICS: CRIME, POPULATION GROWTH, DEATH RATES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1DQO2JPpa8
POST-APARTHEID STATISTICS: CRIME, POPULATION GROWTH, DEATH RATES:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SOURCES:
http://www.da.org.za/?p=1028
http://sagenocidemonitor.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/one-third-of-3m-white-afrikaners-destitute-in-land-of-their-birth/
South African newspaper stops using 'xenophobic' language
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/263007
Spectres of hunger, cholera start haunting S. Africa
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262981
It is warfare out there say besieged Afrikaners of Pretoria
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262970
S.African mom takes 5 bullets, saves her child
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262909
Africa is criminalising HIV-AIDS sufferers with new laws
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262880
10 million people in S.African industrial heartland threatened by polluted river
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262786
Young whites emigrate, young blacks die of TB-AIDS in S.Africa
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262718
S.Africa faces collapse, chaos because of filthy waterways - scientist warns
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262639
http://www.afriforum.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/iss-report-the-states-response-to-crime.pdf
AFRIKANER GENOCIDE - PICTURES OF MURDER VICTIMS 2008:
http://cid-b6b44a5376348175.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/CrimeBustersofSouthAfrica/Afrikaner%20genocide%20pictures%202008?wa=wsignin1.0&sa=163283872
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Declare a national emergency over water-pollution crisis!
Dec 5 2008 - PRETORIA. The country's largest commercial farmers' union, its top bankers and economists yesterday all urged acting-president Kgalema Motlanthe to urgently address the country's dangerously polluted water resources -- or he would face an unprecedented humanitarian and economic crisis.
The parliamentary joint working group meeting with the commercial community and the acting president was called after the country's top water-research expert, Dr Anthony Turton of the CSIR, warned last week that South Africa was facing very rapid socio-economic collapse due to the heavily polluted South African fresh-water resources. The country's (very limited) fresh water supplies now were so heavily polluted with human excrement and waste from some 80,000 overcrowded squatter camps, chemical waste from industries and mines that South Africa's very low rainfall was unable to wash it clean any longer.
This was mainly due to the near-total collapse of the 181 of the country's 232 municipal waste-water purification plants, all sited along the countrys network of rivers and dams. Municipal purification plants pour thousands of tons of human and chemical waste directly into the country's fresh-water streams asnd rivers. Taxpayers countrywide complain of falling ill from drinking the municipal water. And all this is mainly due to the fact that more than 9,000 municipal posts have fallen vacant after some 80% of the country's qualified engineers emigrated since 1994 -- these 'paler-skinned' South African citizens lost their jobs due to the ANC government's black-economic empowerment laws. Turton, initially suspended from the state-run Council for Science and Industrial Research for telling the truth in his report, has since resigned.
He warns in his document that due to the fact that South Africa gets so little rainfall, as does all of southern Africa; and also now is rapidly polluting with faeces and chemicals all of its scarce water-resources - the 'dilution factor' wshing pollutants from the water with the country's less than 450mm annual rainfall, no longer exists. The chemical and faecal waste levels have simply become far too high in SA open-water supplies to still get cleaned up by any annual rains. Even crocodiles - creatures with the oldest and best immune systems on the planet -- are now dying of this population, by eating fishes who are dying from it in the Crocodile river at the Kruger National Wildlife Park.Read report here and here:
Only today, the Afrikaans-language daily Beeld reported that thousands of dead fishes and otters are now being scooped from the fecal-polluted Vaal River. The stench is overwhelming, residents report. The Vereeniging municipality contracted the team after an urgent Johannesburg High Court order instructed an immediate clean-up because it posed a serious threat to public health. Contractors are now working 24 hours a day to remove the dead fishes and even otters. The contractor says there seems to be no end to the number of dead fishes they scoop from the river. Judge Alex Freund of the Johannesburg High Court also ordered the municipality to immediately repair its entire Rietspruit water-purification system and to stop dumping its raw sewage into the Vaal River.The court order was requested by the Save the Vaal Environmnt campaign. http://www.save.org.za/ Its chairman advocate Lötter Wepener said 'the sewerage simply flows into the water-purification plant from one entry point and flows out again untreated at the other side, right into the river.' Judge Freund agreed that the human waste posed a major threat to public health as it could cause deadly infections such as cholera and scarlet fever. The parasites found in untreated sewage also cause cryptosporidium en giardia infections.
The Vaal river is the only fresh-water source for the entire Gauteng population, including greater Johannesburg and Pretoria, as well as all the major population centres around Vereeniging, Parys, Vredeport, Bloemhof, Douglas. Senior water-resource advisor Peter Lothar Hoge of Rand Water Company also submitted a sworn statement to the court describing how the untreated sewage causes a dangerous reduction of oxygen in the water which causes the current die-offs of all its aquatic life. The contractors who are removing the thousands of dead creatures says they are also getting dead otter families among the fish corpses. http://www.news24.com/Beeld/Suid-Afrika/0,,3-975_2438204,00.html
Declare national emergency, farmers urge president:
Yesterday, the country's largest commercial farmers' union urged acting-president Kgalema Motlanthe to declare a national emergency over the water crisis. Its chairman, Ben Marais, who represents about 13,000 Afrikaans-speaking farmers in the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TLU) warned that emergency measures were needed to assure that consumers' health would not be endangered from crops being contaminated by the country's heavily-polluted water. The farmers had already launched their own plans to purify their fresh-water before irrigation - but the municipal purification plants needed to be repaired urgently, and the 9,000 open engineering posts filled with qualified engineers, they warned.
- The TLU presented a comprehensive plan for cleaning up and protecting the country's water-resources to the president at yesterday's parliamentary joint working group which met to address the water crisis.
- The country's commercial farmers also warned in an earlier report to the president that there are just not enough of them left to produce enough food for the entire population - and that this will plunge South Africa into an unprecedented famine.
"At our recent annual congress, speaker after speaker raised the tenuous situation of South Africa’s commercial farming sector, the deterioration and pollution of South Africa’s water supply, the alarming loss of topsoil, the desertification of South Africa’s already meager arable land and the loss of farms and farmers as a result of the government’s discredited land redistribution policy.
At a time when food and the environment are the top concerns of the world body, what situation does agriculture find itself in after nearly 15 years of ANC rule?
The most important role of the president is to feed the people...
"The most important role of the president is to feed the people – food is the absolute basic need, and without the knowledge, expertise and dedication of South Africa’s commercial farming sector, no future president will survive. "This may sound drastic, but then hunger is drastic and food riots and shortages can and do bring down governments.
- "Thus, a halt must be immediately made to the government’s ill-fated land redistribution program. (Read here for results of this programme:)
"This benefits no one, and even those whom the government believed would vote for it if they received productive farms are already disillusioned with the plan and will not support a government which cannot feed them.
Farmers can't get loans for next season's crop:
Politicians, bankers and economists all bombarded the president with identical dire warnings -- with the mildest statement from one banker, who noted that 'South Africa was entering a very difficult economical era."
- Marais pointed out that with the world's trust in the SA economy evaporating very rapidly now, the farmers also will face more difficulty in finding production loans, or even getting bank overdrafts to put in next season's crop. He also called on farmers to husband their finances carefully: "Farmers now need to reduce their debt, or even pay their debts in full and to continue farming without debts.'
International clean-water standards must be maintained:
Marais asked the acting president to 'ensure that SA's health standards will not be compromised' by the dangerous water conditions. "Compliance with international standards must be activated in good time to ensure that foreign trade is not hampered,' he said.
Water affairs minister becomes militant about 'theft of water'
Meanwhile the country's Water affairs minister Lindiwe Hendricks (the lady with the angry face, far left) has decided to go to war with the commercial business who buy river water for their enterprises. She blames farmers and businesses for the atrocious condition of the country's rivers and streams. Left. She has become very militant about it, personally travelling around in her blue-light motorcade to issue summonses to businesses and farmers for 'stealing water from the rivers' - even when they have all the necessary permits. The Afrikaans-language Volksblad journalist Frans Coetzee reported from Douglas in the Northern Cape two weeks ago that Hendricks was ' furious ' when she saw how six small local diamond-mine concessioneers had, according to the water affairs minister, been 'illegally sucking water from the Vaal River.' The journalist writes that the ANC-minister clearly took this alleged water-theft as a personal affront. She was described as being 'horrified, angry and dismayed' during her flash-inspection of six diamond-diggings and with ordered the regional head of the water affairs department Louis Snyder, far right on this picture, to read the riot act to Pico Diamonds company's manager Philip Pikwane (second-right).
- "This mine is making a neat profit because they are also not paying taxes, besides stealing water. This is intolerable,' the minister said - ordering all mining to stop within two days.
Last week Hendricks also targetted a farm in Limpopo where a farmer was 'stealing' water by creating an earthen dam where he first purified the water from the (dangerously-polluted) Crocodile river before irrigating his crops. She said nothing about the pollution, which is killing of the river's aquatic life including its world-famous crocodiles. The minister was irate only about the farmer 'stealing river water' and ordered front-end loaders brought in to destroy the impromptu purification dam. And last Friday, she inspected four other mines in the Northern Cape and ordered them all closed down. However while Hendricks is blaming private businesses for all of the country's water-woes, the underlying pollution problems raised by Dr Turton are not being addressed. Instead, he was fired for speaking up. http://www.news24.com/Die_Volksblad/Nuus/0,,5-83_2432593,00.html
MYSTERIOUS PARASITES IN DRINKING WATER....
Taxpayers countrywide are complaining bitterly about their water quality these days. And people are even beginning to die from it. For example -- South Africa's most famous beaches along the Indian Ocean, stretching from Port Elizabeth in the south all the way to northern KZN and including Durban, have recently lost their international 'clean-water' certificates issued by international tourism experts -- because the water and the beaches had simply become far too filthy. And several international wine experts also commented that 'South African wines had become very smelly...'
These are ominous signs, but even more ominous were the little beasties the residents in the Indian-ocean seaside hamlet of Sunrise-on-Sea near East London discovered in October. There were thousands of “mysterious parasites” swimming around in their drinking water and people were falling ill from them. Residents said the problem had by then already been around for nearly seven weeks and complained that the municipal sewerage plant was to blame. Resident Marlene van Brakel said they were increasingly worried that they might have drunk the water containing the parasites long before these were discovered. She said they had contacted various Buffalo City departments and Amatola Water officials but nobody seemed to care the least bit. “It’s definitely a health risk and a number of people had been to the doctor with stomach problems and running tummies,” she said.Van Brakel said her family started to boil the water since spotting the creatures in the water.
Municipal officials unqualified - only tested for E.coli...
She added that municipal officials had claimed that they had been 'testing the water - which the offcials said came out negative.' Residents were told that they 'could continue drinking the water'. She warned however that the officials carrying out these tests were unqualified and that they only tested for micro-organisms, but not for any parasites.
“The water is not drinkable, apparently they tested it for E.coli but they never tested it for the worms, so how can they say this water is drinkable?” she asked. Residents said they were upset with the municipality’s lack of response to the water problem. Describing their situation as “disgusting and a health hazard”, another resident, Belinda Torr, said she stopped drinking the water. She had made arrangement with a local farmer to provide her with water.
Buffalo City Municipality spindoctor Samkelo Ngwenya denies all this, claiming in the usual ANC-speak that 'the municipality had been taking necessary precautions by conducting laboratory tests in the area on a regular basis." They 'found no harmful bacteria' . He said nothing about all those little beasties residents find swimming around in their drinking water, however. He claims they will 'investigate to find out where they came from...'
CROCODILES HAVE THE BEST IMMUNE SYSTEMS IN THE WORLD - but DIE FROM SA'S FILTHY WATER...
The residents of Sunrise-on-Sea are very correct to worry. The human's resistance to filthy drinking water is very low. And there are warning signals are all around in South Africa that the country's very few rivers, streams and even the ground water now becomes dangerously polluted.
On Sept 9 2008 the top investigative journalist Louise Flanagan of The Star newspaper reported that in fact, the water treatment plants across the country are being so badly run that the Water Research Commission has now even had to draw up a basic, cartoon-like manual to teach operators how to make their water safer. A countrywide survey among 181 small water-treatment plants in all but two provinces found an alarming situation, namely that all these plants were being run by people with very low educational standards -- some could barely read, hence the plan for the cartoon-manual -- and no engineering skills.
Some Eastern Cape water 'purification' plants -- including the one at Sunrise-on-Sea with its mysterious parasite-infestation -- indeed are so bad that about hundreds of babies's deaths in a 'diarrhoea outbreak' last summer were blamed on the dangerous water quality... with doctors and nurses warning that many babies were sickening and dying at the Sterkspruit and Barkly East hospitals-- from totally preventable water-borne infections...
80% of all the country's engineers have already fled for jobs abroad...
The near-total lack of engineering skills at the hundreds of South African municipalities countrywide has now become so acute with 80% of the engineers already having left the country, that many thousands of tons raw sewerage and chemical waste now are simply being released into the ocean and the country's surface water... and even polluting the underground water-table...
So dangerously-polluted have South Africa's fresh-water resources become that even the hardy crocodiles in the Limpopo and Olifants-rivers are dying from a unique disease, caused by the creatures' eating dying fishes which are in turn dying of this pollution.... Crocodiles, the most ancient creatures on earth, have survived this long because they also have the best immune systems in the world. South Africa's people are in deep trouble if even the crocodiles can't survive the water pollution any more...
Olifants River the most polluted river in the Kruger National Park:
The Kruger scientists are 'closely monitoring the crocodile-dieoffs,' they said: "We are in unknown territory and we certainly don't have the answers as to why these crocodiles seem to be dying, so we need to look at the problem closely and find a solution," said the Kruger's Mr Danie Pienaar... "The Olifants River is the most polluted of all the rivers in the Kruger and the system now has further strain from the polluted Massingir Dam that has pushed back into the Olifants Gorge, causing sediments to be deposited."
In the past few months, rangers and scientists in the Kruger National Park find hundreds of dead crocodiles mainly in the eastern parts of the Olifants- and Letaba Rivers. Post mortems reveal that the deaths were caused by a condition called pansteatitis. This condition is caused by the depletion of anti-oxidants in the bodies of these animals. This depletion results in the hardening of the crocodile’s fat reserves into a rubber-like mass, which is unavailable for normal metabolism. It is also extremely painful and the poor animal loses mobility.
It was found earlier in the Loskop Dam, in the Olifants River near Bronkhorstspruit that a mass-die off of fishes was caused by a blue-green algae bloom from water pollution. The crocodiles in turn feasted on these masses of dead fish, including the rotten fish with rancid fat and then suddenly started dying by the dozens shortly thereafter. http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/kruger-crocodiles725.html
- * Five years ago U.S. scientists isolated "crocodillin," a peptide in crocodile blood that has powerful antibacterial properties. Peptides, molecules formed from the linking of various amino acids, can be effective as antibiotics by penetrating and hence, destroying, the cell membranes of bacteria. So if crocodiles start dying from pollution, humans must start worrying - it's like that canary miners used to carry to warn them against dangerous gases which could kill them....http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0816-croc_hiv.html
SOUTH AFRICANS MUST CLEAN THEIR OWN DRINKING WATER NOW...
With South Africans reporting countrywide that they are also increasingly suffering from a vast variety of stomach and intestinal ailments due to the dangerous quality of their municipal drinking water - help is on the horizon from tiny little Denmark, however... Carrying around one's own individual water-purifyer might be the only way to prevent South African humanity from going the way of the dodo from their filthy drinking water. A Danish businessman/engineer, Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, developed the Life Straw Water Purifier, left, which is an individual drinking straw bout the size of a drinking glass...
it contains a filter which even filters out cholera fibrio and most certainly all the water-parasites. In fact it's so effective for communities suffering from dangerous water-conditions at household level that the Jimmy Carter Charity Center in the USA has already distributed 23-million of them to third-world communities to prevent water-borne infections in individuals. Too bad they can't develop one for the crocodiles of South Africa... The blue reusable metal pipe used by the child photographed above has a fabric textile screen filter and allows people to drink directly from contaminated water. It costs about $4 (R43) each and has a total purification volume of 700 litres before it needs a new filter. (Each human being needs to drink at least five litres a day to survive.) Vestergaard Frandsen also has a larger, stationary LifeStraw Family version that will provide clean drinking water for up to 18 months for families. Made of polystyrene, the 31cm long, 2.9cm diametre, 150g tube, which looks like a flute and can be hung around the neck, uses filters to kill or remove 99.9 percent of waterborne bacteria and 98.7 percent of waterborne viruses according to laboratory testing. It requires no electricity nor spare parts during its year-long lifetime - you merely have to suck up the water yourself... It contains a halogenated resin that kills bacteria and viruses on contact.
Contact: http://www.lifestraw.com/
http://www.info.gov.za/gazette/acts/2003/a53-03.pdf
ALSO SEE: SOUTH AFRICAN WATER - FILTHY SMELLY GARBAGE DUMPS
http://deathofdurban.blogspot.com
http://blat.co.za/KeynoteAddressCSIR2008.pdf
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262639
http://www.news24.com/Beeld/Suid-Afrika/0,,3-975_2434440,00.html
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262786
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262639
http://greatsalandscandal.blogspot.com/
http://www.info.gov.za/gazette/acts/2003/a53-03.pdf
http://www.tlu.co.za/images/stories/bulletins/ib081104%20message%20to%20next%20president.docTurton resignation: http://www.news24.com/Beeld/Suid-Afrika/0,,3-975_2434440,00.html
Water affairs minister Lindiwe Hendricks personal campaign against 'water-stealing farmers and businessmen':
http://www.news24.com/Die_Volksblad/Nuus/0,,5-83_2432593,00.html