Faizel Patel – 18/11/2020
Gift of the Givers Dr Imtiaz Sooliman says the drought situation in the Eastern Cape has reached critical levels leaving many people in the province in desperate need of aid.
Sooliman was speaking to Radio Islam on Tuesday about the current situation in South Africa including the deteriorating economy, the resurgence of COVID-19 infections including Health Care Workers (HCW’s) who are stressed out, demotivated and depressed.
Sooliman says hunger, thirst and desperation has reached epidemic proportions.
“When you take the water crisis, it’s just compounding. More and more calls coming for water from more and more areas as more and more dams dry out. The feeding facility, some were still surviving with their reserve money. Now with six million jobs gone, people in the Eastern Cape are dependent on money coming from somebody who’s working in Johannesburg, Cape Town or somewhere else, so many of them have lost their jobs.”
Sooliman painted a grim picture of how people were so hungry they were eating cats, dogs, tortoises and even frogs.
However, he says South Africa is a nation with an undying Ubuntu spirit, inhabited by caring, compassionate individuals taking decisions in their own capacity to makes the lives of the less fortunate easier to overcome strife.
“When you go with a food parcel you can see the gratitude on the people’s faces. We already delivered three hundred thousand food parcels nationwide, setting up more feeding centres in more areas. We are preparing right now to deliver another ten thousand food parcels and we keep on assisting as much as we can.”
With the grim situation in the country, executives at Implats has made R16 million urgently available to Gift of the Givers for the NGO’s Eastern Cape initiatives bringing Implats national COVID-19 contribution to Gift of the Givers to R22.4 million.
Listen to the interview with Dr. Imtiaz Sooliman
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