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Daily Maverick
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Spare us from Big Men with big wallets, bigger lies and biggest egos
Ah, Chief Dwasaho. I was not going to write this letter today. I have exhausted my mental strength with human beings, the lies, deception, broken promises, rape, murder, genocide, missiles, bombs, drones, crime, corruption and obfuscation. There is not even a single statistic to confuse those with secondary education. While contemplating lying in bed and telling my editor I was unwell, I chanced upon the last letter from the founding Editor-in-Chief of this publication, Branko Brkic, who retired in 2024 after 15 years of service. Somehow, his resilience and sense of purpose made me rise from my slumber. I went to my family and told them I was despondent. With concern in her voice, my wife asked about what. I replied: 'Everything.' Thus, my leader, there is nothing intellectual about this week's letter, no links, no pleas for anything and no academic reflections, just despair and despondency. My readers should know that I aim to entertain as I inform. Not this week. The faces of despair I cannot unsee the images of Palestinian children's bodies I saw this week. Their faces already covered after meeting their fate at the hands of Israeli bombs, because Israel has a 'right to defend itself'. I saw aid seekers running frantically after the bombing rain, and yet when they spoke to journalists, there was no defiance in their faces. In their voices, there was no thirst for revenge, only despair. I witnessed a newsreader from the Iranian State broadcaster on Al Jazeera reading the news live while sirens wailed in advance of a missile attack; it all went black – no area is safe, not a media house, church, mosque, hospital, school, road or building. Just breathing alone is an invitation for untold suffering at the hands of Big Men with Bigger Lies, Biggest Egos and even the Thickest Wallets. At the receiving end are women and children, who have yet to start a single war in the history of Menkind – without humanity, but evil masked as the defence of sovereignty. Sadly, the children who watched the videos of Ukrainian women and children being bombed this week, like those of Gaza and Iran, are tomorrow's suicide bombers. The children who will survive the mayhem, which Al Jazeera calls by its first name, genocide, are tomorrow's members of Hamas, Isis, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, the Lord's Resistance Army, among others. Arms or bread? But who arms these so-called extremist groups? Where do they acquire the mortars, the bombs, the deadly rifles, uniforms and the satellite phones? Who profits from the continuous flow of weapons into Israel, Gaza, Syria, the Sahel, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and beyond? How on Earth does a rebel group in Eastern DRC, such as M23, have the resources, the mortar bombs, to fight for decades on end while children starve and women perish? Who benefits from the minerals smuggled out, and who guarantees the weapons keep coming in? These are the questions that never get answered, as the cycle of violence creates only more despair. Men in occupied Gaza told Al Jazeera this week that 'all we want is flour to feed our children'. Flour to feed your children when you no longer have a house, a town, a friend or a neighbour, and you're stateless. I do not wish to overwhelm sensitive readers with the numbers of those killed in occupied Gaza and the West Bank since 1948. In Syria, Chechnya, Iran, Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, Lebanon, Kosovo, Crimea and Donbas, as well as Kuwait, blood has flowed. The West's weaponry is always deployed, and bodies (what bodies? Body parts) were not even buried; they perished in the rubble. Tomorrow, it will be us. And no one will be left to defend us. The fate of rebels and the cost of proxy wars My leader, for how long are men, yes, men, going to feed their egos using taxpayers' money and substituting evidence with bogeymen like 'Iraq' with 'weapons of mass destruction'. The next minute, it's Iran with 'atomic bombs'. Not so long ago it was in Libya where the UN was used as a ruse for regime change. A man with an ego, according to my daughter, the size of Russia, who had been propped up for years by the West, outlived his usefulness. He was killed like a dog on live television. Proxy governments and puppet regimes fare no better. Their end is written in tears, betrayal and exile. Yet, while these games of power play out, women and children never know peace. Big Men with swollen bellies and even bigger egos crisscross the globe, claiming to end wars but only deepening the wounds. They demand 'unconditional surrender' from those under fire, or worse, urge besieged nations to cede territory to aggressors in exchange for foreign powers expropriating their minerals under the guise of protection. What word describes these Big Men? Extortionists? Bloody thieves. Heartless murderers, heavily disguised as human beings, their hands dripping with the blood of children and women from Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, there's always Gaza, and who knows who is next? Not to mention the giants of Africa's independence struggle: Patrice Lumumba (Congo) and Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso), all assassinated, and Samora Machel of Mozambique, allegedly dying innocently in an air crash on our soil. How convenient? But the list of African leaders assassinated since independence is longer and more tragic. Félix-Roland Moumié (Cameroon), Sylvanus Olympio (Togo), Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique), Amílcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau), Marien Ngouabi (Congo-Brazzaville), Anwar Sadat (Egypt), Melchior Ndadaye (Burundi), Juvénal Habyarimana (Rwanda) Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara (Niger)… the list is endless. The assassinations delayed Africa's freedom and plunged the continent into endless civil wars. Coincidence? Today, despair is all that remains, if not puppets. The machinery of suffering Sadly, it is those with melanin-rich skin who bear the brunt of modern warfare, even though we can hardly assemble a hand grenade, let alone manufacture the weapons that rain down upon us. Our former colonisers control the global armaments industry, producing everything from atomic bombs to mortar shells, and now, the latest horrors: kamikaze drones – loitering munitions designed to explode on impact, acting as the weapon itself – and reusable combat or surveillance drones, which drop bombs or fire missiles before returning to base. The world's leading arms exporters, nations that once carved up Africa and Asia, continue to profit from the endless cycle of violence, flooding conflict zones with weapons while preaching peace from raised podiums. Yet, my leader, for every so-called 'success' in these remote wars, a drone operator or pilot sits in a distant room, pressing a button that ends 100 lives here, a dozen there and 300 somewhere else. Somehow, in between the killing, they pause, give each other high-fives, and their countries honour them with medals dripping with blood. Careers are built and the orgy of rape, murder and mayhem continues. I wonder what these men tell their children when the end comes. Do they speak of honour, dignity and duty to country, or do they whisper of nightmares, regret and blood-soaked hands? Who will answer for the suffering of women and children in Lebanon, Gaza, Iran, Mozambique, Kenya, Nigeria and the next place marked for destruction? The world's top five arms exporters by value The five largest arms exporters in the world by value between 2020 and 2024 are the US, France, Russia, China and Germany. The US leads by a wide margin, accounting for 43% of global arms exports, followed by France (9.6%), Russia (7.8%), China (5.9%) and Germany (5.6%). Except for Germany, the world's leading exporters of deadly weaponry that kill and maim people mostly with melanin-rich skin, crude oil reserves and critical group minerals, so happened by accident of 'history' to own nuclear weapons. Coincidence? Till next week, my man – send me nowhere near Big Men with Biggest Lies, Egos and Thickest Wallets. DM
Daily Maverick
14-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Maverick
After the Bell: Casting off — my last Bell at Daily Maverick
My most enduring, most heartfelt thanks goes to the readers of this column who have been fabulously thoughtful, reactive, instructive and supportive of some views which at times have strayed, I'm proud to say, into the hyperbolic. This is the last time I will be writing this column; I've decided to devote most of my efforts to CurrencyNews, which has been going for six months now and has been well accepted by the market. Given the parlous state of the media in South Africa, I think it would be a terrible pity if a new news website, which has actually left the harbour and is still floating, were to falter. So I'm encouraged to devote myself to the dinghy of South African journalism, where I might make a larger difference than on the good ship Daily Maverick, which is now well under sail. I'm also charmed by the idea of being one of the founder members of CurrencyNews after being one of the first employees of Daily Maverick all those years ago, although the many journalists who were here at the start – some of whom still work at this publication – will doubtless remind me that I have been a little faithless and worked elsewhere at various stages, too. It would be remiss of me to leave without paying tribute to my colleagues, but honestly, they are too numerous to name here, so allow me to confine myself to just the people who helped with this column. First among equals, thanks to Maverick founder and for many years its editor-in-chief, Branko Brkic, whose adamant conviction that the sky is really now totally going to fall, never prevented him from being a pleasure and joy to work with. Branko's famously pessimistic outlook has conflicted with my rather happy one, and I honestly think the score on that front is about equal. Winter is coming, or has it come and gone? Whatever. Specifically regarding this column, Branko not only loved the idea of an afternoon business note when I suggested it five years ago, but also later endorsed the idea that the note should be published as a stand-alone story too. The original idea was that I would write a short summary of what happened on the market that day and publish it 'After the Bell' every weekday, as an introduction to our evening business newsletter. What he didn't realise, and indeed what I didn't realise, is that I'm incapable of writing something so short, and the column got to take up more and more of my time as it developed into a kind of casual viewpoint, with some quick research and an irreverent demeanour. Honestly, I think only Daily Maverick would or could tolerate something as amorphous as this column has been. But somewhat irritatingly, it has proved enduringly popular with the roughly 30,000 readers who have opened the column most weekdays for the past five years, so I got saddled with the wonderful discipline of writing at a speed and a frequency that has honestly been an absolute joy and, at times, a definitive pain in arse. At one point, I managed to convince my fabulous colleagues Ray Mahlaka, Georgina Crouth and Ed Stoddard to shoulder some of the burden – but they subsequently cast off in their own dinghies, leaving me high and dry. But I remain grateful for their help, nevertheless. The interesting thing about After the Bell is that for many years it was not edited – I just wrote it and sent it, which is frankly terrible journalistic practice. Branko's point of view at the time was, well, people will blame you for the mistakes because it's a named column, rather than Daily Maverick, so go to it. After a time, production editor Krash King just couldn't stand it any more, and took on the thankless burden of trying to reduce the huge number of spelling, grammatical and factual errors. I am, of course, eternally grateful to him and all the other editors of these columns over the years, some of whom remain very close. Thanks are also due to new Business Maverick editor Neesa Moodley, who has, for the past six months, shepherded the newsletter to readers. But my most enduring, most heartfelt thanks goes to the readers of the column who have been fabulously thoughtful, reactive, instructive and supportive of some views which at times have strayed, I'm proud to say, into the hyperbolic. I've often been corrected, which I have honestly appreciated. And in all these years, I've only been informed that I'm comparable to a certain bodily orifice once. But I have had truly wonderful support and encouragement. My favourite was a 72-year-old nun, who wrote to say she understands very little about business, but she does read and enjoy my column, looking forward to it with, nogal, a little frisson every afternoon. It's a relief to know that I may have at least one person I can call on at the pearly gates. I'm delighted to say the column will continue under the pen of Stephen Grootes, and honestly, I wish him the absolute best. It's been a real privilege to be present in so many people's minds for so long.
