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What's The Issue?

What's The Issue?

Author: Tomas Yoko
Date: 2015-09-11
Three Trillion Trees and we are going through them at a rate of knots that would put our grandfathers to shame. Deforestation seems to be our favourite hobby as a species, our hunger for destruction insatiable, gobbling up around ten billion trees a year. Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa opened the fourteenth World Forestry Congress in Durban this week.

Population growth will not help this problem and the figures for teenage pregnancy in South Africa skyrocketing to ninety nine thousand a year, some two hundred and seventy something pregnancies a day, will only hinder. How are those statistics? And I quote a local newspaper "Few things better illustrate the moral and intellectual vacuity of this country's political leadership. And the purulent heap of vomit, hypocrisy and lies that is the National Democratic Revolution." That's a bit harsh.

Over the last fifty years the world's population growth has been leaning towards an exponential nature, outstripping predictions and heading for a figure of nine billion people by the year 2050. One good way to keep the population down is to have a war, and that seems like what we are hell bent on achieving. Even the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey added his voice to the call for military action against IS.

With humanity being shown exactly how ugly we are, the washed up lifeless corpse of young children exposed the extent of our ridiculousness. It is a shame on humanity whichever way you look at it. A travesty in truth, no overstatement needed. Shame on humanity, whether the Arab nations have taken in refugees or not, this single aspect of the disgusting war in Syria and the middle East reflects very badly on us as a species.

But to make it even more disgusting is news that reached my ears of a request from Washington to the Greek Foreign Ministry to refuse airspace to Russian humanitarian aircraft trying to fly into war torn Syria. They actually asked, and the Greeks, being the eternal diplomats they are, and knowing where their baklava was going to be coming from, refused to close their airspace to Russian humanitarian aid. Is this the world we are living in? I'm spilling my post toasties all down my shirtfront. I can't believe we are like this. I'm appalled.

Besides the shambles of a president accused of governing the country using land as bait to prop up a political agenda, ask the Transvaal Agricultural Union of SA, Louis Meintjies, he warns against the governments rural development and land reform policies saying it will take a thousand years to process all the claims they have at the rate they're going.

What that does is impact on farmers directly, threatening food security and sending food prices towards the sky. In effect it threatens every one of us. Our survival as a self-governing nation could be the mere play dough in a political agenda.

Speaking of political agendas, I applauded the news of the Iraqi women who murdered an Islamic State commander who had forced her into sex slavery. No one knows what has become of her, but the reports of scores of women being executed for refusing to "marry" IS militants, allows me to celebrate his demise. My conscience will have to deal with that.