Love is an everyday thing
It is now, it is sweet, it is true
It is a fountain of all senses
A tranquil delightful stream
Love is eternal in its youth
Flawless exuberance of youth
Its words are all soulful, nation
It is now, it is sweet, it is true
It makes one bold in their hunting
It comes, with your heap’s canvass
Love’s mixed footsteps flaunting
It leaves one winched in an elation
The heart beat geared to eruption
Its destined spectrum called trance
Our hot body drooling to its trounce
A tangled dance in its royal feet
It is red wrapped in a white sheet
Love is an everyday thing
It is now, it is sweet, it is true

by Linda Sakazi Thwala

THE POLITICS OF POWER – THE UNITED STATES VERSUS THE WORLD

The dwindling of the world’s economy has been extensively attributed to the United States’ failure to distinguish, political and social commonality with the Arab/Muslim nationalities, internationally – especially Islamic extremists. Foreign political fallibility, particularly pertaining to Oil reefs, and to the United States’ Foreign Aid policies, cannot be solely pointed towards one state, country, or political party; as all fiscal or non-fiscal foreign policies are negotiated as cross national bipartisan negotiations. However, the United States Military advantage has created allegiances and allies far more reaching, combined with their international Economic Aid, and Foreign Aid policies.

The power that the United States of America wields in the Military and Macroeconomic arena, places them at an advantage in terms of Economic prosperity, and playing liberator to politically, economically trenched nations, with the dollar being the second strongest currency in the world. Therefore, in enables the country to gain territorial progression in lesser militarized regions, globally.

The chess boards of political advantage, however powerful they may be set towards the United States’ gains, do not advocate the world to be idle and docile around the table of discourse and implementation of Foreign Economic Aid, and Foreign Trade Policies.

African and Arab leaders who become tyrants against their own population, often together with the oppressed masses, reproach the USA’s economic aid activities and their Foreign Policies, when everything else fails in their respective states. What the populous does not identify with, before the finger is pointed, is the nitty-gritty surrounding the policies that were set during all foreign aid policy discourse, thus aim at deficiently inverting the failure of their leaders, on the very hand that brings peace and harmony in their territory.

If truth be told, the world doesn’t really know Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s renege against the United States of America. The Bush to Bush (George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, father and son) administrations were coiled in negotiations with Bin Laden family, the Oil reefs of Saudi Arabia were centralized as being the main cause to Osama’s rebelliousness, ultimately his militia terror attacks towards the USA. What really happened between Osama and the Bush family after his military training in the United States? Yes, the Republicans or the ‘Grand Old Party’ (GOP) were involved, as many Oil trade policies were administered by them during these family affiliated presidential incumbency. However, foreign conflicts are widely opposed by GOP.

The current uprising in Egypt is unanimously blamed not at the tyrant leader, Mubarak’ s failure to acknowledge his country’s Economic shortcomings, and the widening gap between the poorest of the poor and the privileged rich in that country, but at the United States and GOP in particular. Why is Mubarak still in office after three decades?

The United States will always be a scapegoat, whether Independents, Democrats or Republicans. Why don’t we Africans and Arab nations, acknowledge that our leaders’ agreements and signatures to discourse and implementation on Foreign Policies is clouded with intent of filling their own greedy sacks, and not improving the lives of the masses. Mark these words: ‘The Muslim Brotherhood, will be blaming President Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrats, if and when they do take the reins from Mubarak.’

WORD TO A NEW ECONOMIC REVOLT REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

SOUTH AFRICA: The course to a sustainable Economic Growth-Path

Developing the right economic Growth-Path for South Africa’s volatile Economy will prove a significantly taxing task, given the past’s pre-Democratic policies of Separate Development and Free-For-All attitude that come post-1996.

A strategic approach to formatting the correct formula to a sustainable Economic Growth-Path that will create jobs for the currently unemployed; measurably creating a sustaining employment economic development opportunities for posterity, is what South African bureaucrats are searching for.

With ante-investment partners that supported the banality of Westernize development-economic-policies to Africa, experiencing an economic submergence due to an economic global crunch. The prospects of world leaders to lessening the deficit between socially thriving economic hubs and lower impoverished class within their respective countries, was thwarted by market trading hikes stemming from unreasonable global Oil-Fuel-Hikes over the past decade, filtering austerely to industrial, trade and investment sectors worldwide.

This brought about worldwide austerity, with a great number of lower class and some middle-class families unable to sustain themselves from daily, monthly expenditure with their meager disposable income – hence, the recent Austerity Protests in England, Greece, China, and the well publicized chaotic economic revolt in Egypt, where anti-Mubarak protesters want the incumbent President booted out.

The Growth-Path is aimed at creating sustainable employment and aid in developing essential township infrastructure and speedup service delivery across Municipal structures. South Africa’s incumbent leadership, in keeping with the current successful economic growth trends, has to dilute regional boundaries that were formations of Separate Development in the past, and decrease economic volatility by implementing a reasonable fixed price-trade-agreement policies to most imports, to eliminate losses, price rigging, and maintaining concurrent pricing in all respectable trades, and food pricing – value differences must be distinct, however not exploiting ordinary plebs. With a fixed Electricity Rates services across the board, in all Municipalities in our country and bring competition in the Power Generating Plants industry – we cannot allow Eskom monopolize the Power Generating Industry and suffocate electricity consumers by hiking its rates, inconveniently plunging families, communities and businesses into darkness.

A developmental approach to diluting regional boundaries is to allow Macroeconomic hubs to flourish, with the removal of Recruitment Agencies. It is governments social responsibility to instruct the corporate sector to recruit, train and deploy workers within their own capacity, utilizing their own ‘Human Resource Departments’, as it was done in the past. By so doing, all these salary share pillaging Recruitment Agencies will be abolished, allowing a worker to earn the salary that was initially allocated to them – not a salary allocated by the Recruitment Agency. This will increase skills training and allow workers to balance the ratio of expenditure and lifetime savings. The situation at this moment, is hand-to-mouth for many families.

In the townships, micro-businesses i.e. vendors, with fake goods have to be close down and allow proper aspirant business owners to bring it accredited goods to the township consumer that cannot ferry themselves to town.

Our Housing policy needs to be scrutinized considerably and lowered to an affordable price for all South African. A house, as it is known appreciates in value, thus it is deemed as a good asset for investment, however how can one invest on something that is monetary unattainable, even if you were to save to attain it. Real Estate prices are appalling. This coupled by monthly Property Tax – in hindsight Property tax is the same as renting your own house, from the government, whilst paying a bond on that same house.

WORD TO A NEW ECONOMIC GROWTH PATH REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

THE STIGMA OF BEING AN ABUSER

It is a monastic attitude to attach a label on any individual that rebels against a system of abuse; in any abusive form. It is a universal ideological stand point that an abuser is made – no woman or man, wakes up and decide that today, I am going to be an abuser.

A fundamental question to ask is: ‘Why does an individual become an abuser?’ It is a pragmatic concept of fighting fire with fire. When an individual lives in a secluded environment and is constantly being bombarded with impromptu verbal abuse about things that do not concern them, or things that do not have any bearing on their livelihood; it creates verbal altercation which ends up with someone getting slapped or gravely beaten up.

What a Verbal Abuser doesn’t comprehend, is that when you shout at a another person without explaining or communicating your concerns in a proper grown up way, they create a mental confusion to the recipient of that verbal attack. In the cloud of that confusion nothing the Abuser says is coherent because of the way it is communicated, alternately renders a similar reaction from the shouted-at-recipient or abused.

In most cases, women are Verbal Abusers to their spouses and at times to their siblings. Some women want their way out of a relationship hence succumb to verbal abuse as an instructive or defense mechanism, to ‘this is what I want and I am going to get it, as I want it’; or as frustration to what life is dishing up for them, ‘I am not content with you, so I am going to shout at you to make you leave me or make you change’.

No one wants the stigma of being an abuser, however when an individual goes into a home environment, they want to lay back, do an introspection and retrospection about their life, what’s to come in their life, and how to approach certain situations. No one wants to go into their homely environment and be verbally attacked or shouted at about things that they cannot change.

When I am a sensible, quiet man and my woman comes and shouts at me, my initial reaction would be: ‘What is going on? What does she want? Why are you shouting?’ And if that shouting continues I am inadvertently going to get angry at ‘what are you shout at me for?’ I will take my hat and walk away, however if my woman sees that picture of walking away as some form of weakness; constantly wants a reaction from me as man, night after night, week after week: ‘I am shouting at you! What? You not man enough to stop me?’ The mouth is mightier than the hand.

The stigma of abuser will fall on me as a man because, by societies standards I am physically stronger than my weakling woman that shouts to stir up trouble – then cites abuse as justification to what happened in the relationship. My man is an abuser, not me, him! The hand is mightier than the mouth.

Conclusively, an abuser is a victim of another abuser. Relationships are based upon reciprocal attitudes. When you treat me with respect, I will in turn reciprocate that respect to you. Taking my hat and walking away in the heat of an argument, is an ideal honorable thing to do when you are verbally harassed. However when you continuously give me fire, I will undoubtedly overtime return that fire with a more vicious intent. Why? Because, I am also a sensual human being that feels, and that doesn’t want to be verbally, emotionally harassed.

Abusers are made, therefore when an individual wants to instigate a violent reaction towards another individual, they do that as a cry out for help. They do not know better than perpetuating the same abuse that was reciprocated to them.

WORD TO A NEW RESPECTFUL RECIPROCAL REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

THE ETHEREAL IN THE SELF

The self is eternal, therefore manifests its self in a dream state, or what Neuro-scientific observers term as, the “subconscious mind”; which in every probable terms is the intuitive self. Dreams are an integral element of the intuitive self, attributed at shaping a big part in our lives, and do contribute to the buoyancy and lethargy of how one views their subsistence and reality in life. Dreams are the physics of our existence.

Dreams are manifested in two forms: firstly ‘Prophetic Dreams’, when the self transverse conversations and visions of the unknown to its subject or temple that the eternal self inherits, to an individual’s physique and psychological process, implanting a futuristic event into their living being.

This previous form of self manifestation benefits the inheritor in their conscious or awake state, as they are able to reflect on what their authentic self is communing to them, and what it expects from its incumbent form of its inherent purpose of being. The actions needed to quell unwanted eventualities that may hinder the incumbent’s ambitions in life. At times older forms of the Self are highlighted within these ethereal dreams, unknowingly to the incumbent that their older form is rekindling its self with its latest appearance via the subconscious, recurring at times as nightmares or psychological infestations of a previous lifetime, that most likely culminated in a disastrous manner, or yearning for something or someone.

Secondly, dreams manifest themselves as ‘Mental Process Dreams’, which are entrenched by a constant pestering event in your life or a consistent thought process about a thing or something, troubling or not so troubling, that lingers over your livelihood. These types of dreams often become recurring stressful dreadful nightmares that are linked to the Self; when your decisions in life do not coincide with the inherent aims of the Self. As the result, the conscious and the subconscious gnaw away at the imbalance between the spiritual and physique.

‘Mental Process Dreams’ are attributed to numerous psychological traumas (e.g. rape, verbal and physical abuse) base on the fact that individual’s experiences are not inherent, and what they witness daily cannot be selected to avoid what may trigger such deviations. Deviations that are suffused by the pool of trauma witnessed by an individual, thus trickle into the subconscious or intuitive self – where the lethargic part of dreams is borne.

It is through the ethereal of dreams that superstitions about life are constituted; where madness and sanity is undoubtedly distinctly defined. It is where dreams are manipulated to create the eerie diabolical, voodoo ideologies about natural and extraordinary happenings within our environment.

‘Prophetic Dreams’ bear more meaning than ‘Mental Process Dreams’ – consequently, are the ones that are symbolical and enigmatic in form, at times loquaciously expressed, needing an explanation and proper decoding. Failure to decode such dreams leads to a bigger physical and mental confusion, because the attachment and emphasis that people place to such dreams is humongous, as it forms a part of peoples’ spiritual, religious connotations and convictions – their hopes, dreams and aspirations.

The Self eternal is the light and buoyancy of ‘Prophetic Dreams’ and helps in forging a balance between the abundance of self-growth, content-love, and the realistic expectations that are evident in our environment. These ‘Prophetic Dreams’ are an integral element of the intuitive self, self-love, self-consistency, self-expediency, self-worth, acting-love, and transcending love. A greater component to your Happiness.

WORD TO A NEW DREAM STATE REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

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THE SELF ETERNAL - HAPPINESS

In this neo-spiritual generation, to tap into your inner eternal self, is a quite tasking spiritual practice, due to the type of environment that we live in and the common dependency that individuals place on worldly stuff. The bustling dynamics of today’s society, place more emphasis on looking outwardly rather than focus on the well-being of one’s spiritual self and its prosperity in the eternal realms – the inner Self.

Tapping into the inner Self, through a soothing daily routine of listening to the inner voice, remits one with the ability to self-awareness and self-fulfillment; meaning the ability for one to reach a spiritual assertion, where they are able to converse with their own light, enabling one to make sound, channeling and enhancing choices for their livelihood in a content, growth filled process.

This process of tuning and channeling your inner light as an axis that pivots your thoughts and your actions, enables an individual to reach the hub that will procreate self-confidents, thus give support for ones pursuit, attaining and maintaining reasonable, content growth, with understandable maturity and transcending love.

The Self has multitudes of positive light, radiating inner happiness in everything that one does to get by in life with positive energy and positive thoughts. The intuitive Self or Inner Positive Self has the strength and spiritual impression to enable an individual to apply self-resilience, self-sacrifice and self-reliance to everything that has pessimism or optimism in the choices that one makes. This multitude of positive light affirms Self- Love: The importance of loving yourself and the advancement of the inner light to the outer bodily actions that forge and form your existence.

An absolute approach to finding the right love is to rip your-self of earthly possessions and find a way to assert your individual innate self into your ‘realistic-self’ or ‘authentic-self’. And this holistic approach involves the self eternal happiness that is always readily available to ground you, as an individual during the flight of a turbulent emotional, mental and physical storm.

Your thinking and outlook affects your quality of life; also your failure to tap into your inner light affects your perceptive objective in ways that you can ever imagine. The multitudes of positive light needed to uplift you, dwindles when you cannot understand and appreciate your Self, and learn to adjust your own light in agreement with your three essentials.

The self eternal has content-love in abundance; tapping into it reassures one of self-love, self-consistency, self-expediency, self-worth, acting-love, transcending love and the pursuit of outwardly happiness. Self eternal happiness eliminates suicidal thoughts by helping a troubled individual fight the temptations of darkness from within and let the inner, intuitive light shine through the right actions and choices. It is only in our sacred secrete space, when we reflect on our journey and hopes in life, that we experience real growth and inner happiness.

At the end of the day, happiness starts with you as an individual. No one can fulfill you or make you happy unless you find that happiness first. When you radiate that happiness towards people around you, they also find happiness. Let us move towards the forever light, content-love and self-fulfilling happiness.

WORD TO A NEW INNER HAPPINESS REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

THE NEED TO HEAL IN SELF

It is a realistic principle that a human individual condition needs others to survive, and exalt the joys of life by every means, ways practicable and imaginable. In healing ourselves, a commonality in how we perceive certain realistic nuances, and in upholding a united front in our pursuit, attaining and maintain reasonable, content growth, through maturity and transcendent in love. And through the understanding that in all traumatic and tragic missteps in our easy and difficult strolls in life, we stoke up different experiences and realities that pulls each one of us away from the commonality goal of a united front, distinctively setting each individual apart from the other individual – emotional needs and wants.

Before applying healing processes, an individual needs to acknowledge what has been dented; which specific area needs attention and healing; whether Emotional, Mental or Physical. One has to be willing to heal or be healed, after a dented area is recognized and after accepting their emotional deficiency or shortcomings.

Injury caused by others, or self inflicted is injury to the Self. As a result, injury to the Self fragments the psychological makeup of any individual, which at times defrauds one of their physical existence. When an individual is hurting, healing seems a daunting task because, emotional scars darken ones inner Self and ones subsistence in its entirety.

Emotional deficiency, is your emotional deprivation formed by the inability to deal with traumatic occurrences or lacking support and inner strength to deal with emotionally and mentally overpowering situations. In healing we need support from others through their physical presence and conversations; however in healing an individual is their own ultimate enemy – as noted, through a state of self-denial and self-loathing.

To initialize healing processes we first need to heal in Self. Trauma of any kind, is cause for one to loathe their inner Self, themselves, others and despise their own surroundings, which makes it extremely difficult for one to see light at the end of the tunnel. To heal in Self, others may offer verbal inferences on how one should take steps towards mending their own emotional and mental deficiencies, the end result being uttered suggestions through uplifting conversations. No one can take an individual to a place of healing, unless that individual is willing to walk that road to a healing place. To mend the Self starts with restoring ones inner elusive nuances, and resolves, by the same individual that is suffering.

In every individual there is an inner voice that drives your core. The inner voice is the center of your temple and who you are deeply. It is the inner voice that needs to be transcended from what is known as darkness to a better alternative known as light. The dark side of the voice reflects negatively in everything and everyone; then there is the light side of the voice, which reflects everything that is positive and drives your intuitive Self – where healing must begin.

The intuitive Self or Inner Positive Self has the strength to enable an individual to apply self-resilience in every calamitous trauma that they come across. True healing starts with attentively listening to your authentic intuitive voice, Self; to enable you to gain inner strength and radiate that positive energy towards an environment or individual that has faltered your emotions, and physic.

A psychological retrospection and introspection of an individual through counseling sessions, can help digress steps of an individual journeying towards a dark rough verge, preventing a probable fall to their premature, hopeless, self-loathing, self-denying death. The intuitive Self begins with listening to the inner voice, thus taking the right choices that one comes across to, meaning listening to the positive and not the negative to permit the right holistic path to healing – emotionally, mentally and physically.

WORD TO A NEW PROCESS OF HEALING REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

NELSON MANDELA'S CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF

“In real life we deal, not with gods, but with ordinary humans like ourselves: men and women who are full of contradictions, who are stable and fickle, strong and weak, famous and infamous.” NELSON MANDELA

OBJECTS OF RIDICULE

To go through life haven’t had somebody who loves and cherish the ground you walk on, somebody that loves you for who you are, somebody that reciprocate your acting-love in a way that makes you feel and know that you are appreciated. Some individuals are fortune to find such love and relationships that carter to them such emotional maturity; however what happens to an individual that is viewed as an object of ridicule in every relationship that they venture into.

When does an individual know that they are an object of ridicule in their relationships? It does not matter what anyone says or do – in any relationship, you are an object of ridicule when your friend (s), spouse or relative (s) expects you to always supply them with what they want without ever thinking about your needs and how you feel when they demand things from you. You are an object of ridicule, when you constantly have to nag people around you and in your life to appreciate you and distinguish you as an equal in how you perceive life. You are an object of ridicule, when your opinion does not matter to the people you perceive as equals and respect in love and in any work environment. You are an object of ridicule when you always have to compromise, when no one is willing to meet your compromise halfway.

When your partner sees you as object of bodily and oral abuse, an object that is vocally lambasted, emotionally bastardized, psychologically raped from its inner self and outer façade. You are not only an object ridicule but, an insignificant person to them and everyone in your social standing that allows such violent nature take unsolicited control over your existence. You are an object of ridicule when emotional, mental and physical social vagabonds think and treat you as an object that is subjected to rape, incest, sodomy, and spiritual-bodily-torture.

Recently, young children in Pretoria were allegedly used as objects of sexual ridicule, when they were reported as being abused in an repulsive pornographic manner, by adults that were supposedly expected to nurture, protect and guard them as children.

When any individual, for all else that matters, sees you as a good for nothing human object, except as an object of psychopathic orgasmic pleasure, similar to the porn videos that are popular with sex addicts around the world, or are expected to an ATM machine whenever you enter into any conversation with your ‘friend’ (s), or family members; then you are not in relationships that will give you emotional sustainability, and growth that is needed to bring you inner and outer fulfillment in your life.

You are an object of ridicule when you are beaten, overused and misused, without being shown any gratitude for who you are and what you are to those you appreciate and fraternize with. A man that picks up rubbish, is as important as the man that writes the law of the land and as important as the man that implements, delegates that same law. A woman that bares you children is more important and more opulent as the diamond and gold you place in her finger.

There comes a point in your relationships, when and where you have to stand your ground as an individual and demand to be respected and loved as much as you give respect and give love – demand to reciprocate emotionally and physically what is ricochet towards you.

No woman, no man are objects of ridicule to any individuals that walks, breathes, and lives as they do. Eliminating destructive tendencies that ridicules other people should be every person’s ultimate goal to aid in ministering a path of self-sacrifice, self-love and transcending-love. Transcending love that is love and light, emanating from within - growth that knows that you can only maintain who you truly are without destroying the world around you or treating others as objects of ridicule.

WORD TO A NEW HUMANE OBJECTIVE REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

RESILIENCE WITHIN THE SELF

An individual’s resilience within their own Self begins within themselves. Emotional negligence does cannot be exclusively be attributed to your parents, or to people that brought you up. Mental and emotional breakdown can be traced to an individual’s inability to comprehend and acknowledge the events or emotional situation that led to their emotional trauma, and the role they had to play for them to be in that situation.

It is undeniable that Psychopathic Tendencies are taught over a period of constant abuse, and emotional negligence by people that an individual perceived as their guardians, or loved ones – where an individual is constantly assailed with negative psychological and physical abuse. A child has no control over what happens to their livelihood and their living environment.

Psychopathic tendencies are malevolently entrenched during the fragile years of infancy and teenage years. When irresponsible adults impose their immoral, filthy habits upon youngsters, that do not have an inkling on how or what life entails. It is during these fragile years that a future abuser or pedophile is magnetism by the forces of abuse, dictating what they will be to society in the future; however during the teenage years, peer-pressure does play a fundamental psychological role in shaping a young person’s mental and behavioral aptitude and approach towards others and towards life.

An abuser kills the little resilience that a youngster has by constantly showing them the dark side of life, through remittent psychological disillusionment that was taught to them by other abusers. Through peer-pressure, youngsters want to be recognized and accepted by the fellow peers, therefore go out of their own moral belief to try and please their friends, hence conform to how their friends perceive life to be. It is through peer-pressure that youngster become abusers of drugs, and show signs of promiscuity, which does lead to a premature infection related death.

Life is immersed with positive things that can build a youngster to be an self-accountable, self-dependable, respectable and self-restraint individual within their community. It is through accountable, dependable, respectable individuals that youngsters learn to be a moral fabric to society. On the other hand, life is full of individuals that think that treating others badly is a normal thing to do. Life is a pendulum between goodness and wickedness.

To teach Self-resilience in youngster, adults need to know the limitations between good parenting and bad parenting. Adults need to know when to institute Tough-Love that is loving and not destructive Tough-Love. Adults need to know their own self-restraint and their own self-resilience. To eliminate unwanted emotional, mental and physical social environmental impacts, such as rape, verbal abuse, alienation, and physical abuse in any form – that do contribute to weakening ones spirit. That help in shaping a youngster’s perception, thus their personality. Adults/Guardians have to be uncompromising nurturing individuals to self-resilience to their children and for their children.

Self-resilience begins with you as an individual, however that resilience needs to be taught from a young age – meaning, physical and psychological nurture and protection for a youngster from infancy through to their teenage years. Self Destructive and Self Positive Criticism also contributes to Self-resilience. And builds Self-restraint for an individual through their adult years. Self-restraint needed to eliminate abusive tendencies.

WORD TO A NEW SELF-RESILIENT REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

A CREATIVE NATIVE

In the bleak mist of confusion
This man toils in constant action
As uncanning ripples of life affect
Like the womb that borne with fact
Impregnated with the realistic mission
A speed with a purpose in passion
Seeking liberation in education
A lyrical verse that flows in ocean

Better recognize!
A creative native
That strides with motive

Forfeiting the riches of pretense
In faces of brethren with lost tense
An ideal aspiration shinning a promise
As beauty does to a man's heart amiss
Mankind's woes felt in the veins of homage
When the treads of experience a tale of age
In the oracle that promises insight
Within the ignoble actions left on site

You better recognize!
A creative native
That strides with motive

This creative native will walk with pride
In the minds of honor, conviction will ride
Ride on to infinite inhibitions of breath
As the kiss of wealth rotates mother earth
A native that beholds a persona of own
In the breeze of privileged time’s loan

Do you recognize?
A creative native
That strides with motive

This creative native will voice
An accrued finale of traveled choice
A ululation of gifted veins in grace
In ancestry that celebrates color in race
Word to this Creative Native!

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

TRANSCENDING SELF - WHEN IS TOUGH-LOVE NEEDED?

Instituting tough-love is a difficult parenting tool that is essential at times to enable your child/children to prepare themselves for the tough, enjoyable, cruel place that is life. A child needs tough-love because of the obstacles of peer-pressure that they will have to overcome during their teen years; and the choices that they will have to make to determine their growth and contentment in their will have to reach in their adult years. Parents can at times become too compulsive in instilling moral values, which they themselves find hard to practice, therefore filter values of hypocrisy towards their children to append in their destructive immature immoral ways. When is tough-love needed?

When implementing tough-love as a parent, it is important that you have your own moral foundation intact. It does not help implementing something that you, yourself does not believe in. Playing double-standards with your own life and the lives of other people, particularly your child/children can and will produce dreadful consequences. Discipline is not just plain and simple discipline.

There are two constituting types of tough-love: The first is referred to as ‘loving tough-love’ and the second is referred to as ‘destructive tough-love’. Loving Tough-Love is the type of a parental disciplinary mechanism that enables your child to reflect at their surroundings, home environment and their parents’ behavioral pattern, attitude towards life and how they treat others; meaning friends, neighbours or strangers and their next of kin. When implement tough-love as a parent your words must be in queue with your actions, to enable your child to learn from you. Tough-love means, knowing that your child has flawed and knowing when to reprimand their errs in the right time and place, appropriately within character building means.

Loving Tough-Love understands that their child’s characters is different from theirs or others children, thus tries to view things from the eyes of their children. It does not help shouting at your child/children when they do something wrong - all they will know is that problems are solved by playing the shouting game, which will most likely lead to violent means. Be the acting-love, talk to your child and understand what they want and why they want it, show them the ways of acquiring without destroying others and themselves, because you should provide all they need until they are matured enough to take care of themselves. Loving Tough-Love understands the way of the world – it is informed.

Destructing Tough-Love is the type of love where parents do or act totally, morally incorrectly and expects their children to not emulate their destructive ways. Destructive Tough-love expects a child/children to bring themselves up without any parent acting-love and essential nurturing support. Destructive Tough-Love does not monitor what the child is doing, how they do it, when they do it, with whom they do it with, at what cost they do it in. Destructive Tough-Love disciplines violently without any meaningful conversations with its child/children. Destructive Tough-Love always blames the child and kills their inner Self. Ultimately, Destructive Tough-Love, destroys your child’s self-esteem, self-worth, self-consistency, self-love and their transcending growth. Destructive Tough-Love does not understand the ways of the world – it is ignorant.

There is no guide in being the perfect parent, everyone does morally err, as a result no one is perfect in this world. At times parents themselves are children that were not given ‘Loving Tough-Love’, therefore have no expertise in implementing that type of love to their own children. Playing the game of tough-love becomes a dangerous affair to both child and parent.

It does not help implementing something that you, yourself does not believe in. As parents we need to teach our children to be morally viable, by doing morally viable things right in front of them. This aids in the proficiency of being the right parent and implementing the right type of Tough-Love needed to bestow character building, Growth and Transcending-love to your children.

WORD TO A NEW TOUGH-LOVING ENVIRONMENT REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala

SOUTH AFRICA’S FLAWED PROMISES OF O.B.E

South Africa’s flawed promises of Outcome Based Education (O.B.E) and its Outcome based Assessment (O.B.A), which is soon to be eradicated, that was implemented a decade ago, in the year 2000, after several years apartheid education policies were abolished and the new political dispensation with the birth of South Africa’s Democracy and the Constitution was formed.

The Mandela and Mbeki era heralded a review on our system of education and how educators imposed new education standards and its impact in the classroom, as oppose to apartheid, segregationist Bantu education policies and classroom principles; blamed for not producing enough free-educated-thinkers within the system. However over the years, it proved to be a flawed education system of learning both in implementation and acquiring learners with an excellent learning tool.

Outcome Based Education and Outcome Based Assessment was introduce to change the learners’ school environment, awareness to what is being taught and teacher’s assessment proficiency, respectively. The then new, teacher to learner interaction, under the Revised National Curriculum Statement (RNCS) together with the Department of Education, aimed to enhance individual learner techniques with specialized attention given to; Critical outcomes, Specific Outcomes, Assessment criteria, Range statement and Performance criteria, from each learner. B. Malan in a review conducted in 1997 said that “one of the aims why O.B.E was introduced in South Africa was to create opportunities for life-long learning to all South Africans. At the ultimate end of the learning process, the child must be able to do something to demonstrate that he/she has learned something.”

The philosophy of O.B.E is base on that “All learners can learn and succeed, but not on the same day, in the same way”. This technique was to encourage the learner’s authentic external behavior, their social reconstructive or transformation skills, critical thinking skills and pragmatic knowledge. With the learner taking charge of their own education, with the teacher mainly playing a role as a facilitator, and Education Department providing Provincial and National, quarterly and final examination papers. Aimed at doing away with the forceful devastating learning segregationist style of teaching, which commanded students that they had to know their learning material now and know it well.

The failure of the system of Outcome Based Education and Outcome Based Assessment, according to Mr. Noko Ramoroka’s extensively documented assessment dissertation of Outcome Based Education, conducted in 2005, for the Department of Curriculum Studies Faculty of Education, University of Pretoria; is attributed to firstly by, the educator’s, teacher’s or facilitator’s indecisiveness and lack of knowledge at implementing the Outcome Base Curriculum to the learners, due to various teaching methods to cater for different learning methods or styles and avoid boring lessons, therefore enabling individual learner attention. Secondly, to its contribution to the National drop of good literacy levels amongst youngsters during the phase of Outcome Base Education, thus aiding to cultivating a generation of young people who cannot read or write or calculate properly. Thirdly, its failure to increase National Matriculation result levels and failure to produce expected University standard students entrance.

According to the Department of Education’s Facilitator Manual in 2002, suggestions were made that educators should make clear, what will be assessed by the end of the learning process and plan how assessment will happen. The education department and facilitator were expected to determine the educator pupil ratio (number of pupils in the classroom), the impact that it has on O.B.E implementation by teachers; To determine whether the way in which learners are seated allows learners participation and whether a conclusive learning space is created; To determine whether educators follow different teaching strategies and have changed from direct instruction to a facilitative role; To determine how educators assess learners’ work and whether they follow multiple strategies when they assess learners work; to determine whether educators still dominate in the teaching-learning situation; To determine whether educators use relevant resources to help learner to achieve outcomes; To determine whether there is evidence that the educator accommodates O.B.E premises and principles in the classroom practices.

Outcomes Based Education incorporated South Africa’s National Qualification Frameworks (NQF), which has three broad bands of education: General education and Training, Further Education and Training, and Higher Education and Training.

It has been extensively documented that since 2007, South Africa has in the range of about 12 million students, more than 360,000 teachers and 28,000 schools. School-goers are expected to attend school for at least 13 years with the “exceptions of grade 0, 10, 11 and 12”. Traditional universities offer degrees that are more theoretically-oriented (University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria, University of the Witwatersrand). Universities of Technology on the other hand offer degrees in technical fields that involve various practical applications (Central University of Technology, Cape Peninsula University of Technology).

During the tenure of Professor Kader Asmal as Minister of Education, Curriculum 2005 was already in its helms. Professor Asmal’s greatest challenges was to oversee the merging in of O.B.E into both GET (General Education and Training) and FET (Further Education and Training) systems of learning for further education starting from grade 10. A listening in campaign, to hear the views of society, was one of the resources that the Minister of Education utilized to strengthen the course to Outcomes Based Education or Curriculum 2005. A different curriculum in subjects such as mathematics, physical science, life science, technology and communication were approved and circuited Nationally.

Some rural areas of our country are still littered by a shortage of teachers, classrooms, in some cases a whole school, text books, proper sanitation and a desperately needed transportation system to ferry distant based pupils to and from school daily. These concerns have for years contributed to many rural school-goers dropping out, and some succumbing to a destined dry life in their remote villages.

Recently, government and the education ministry was bombarded with teacher salary increment demands, which led to union affiliated teachers, and none union affiliated teachers, from all provinces of our country downing pens, pencils and chalk to strike on their grievances. Some teachers called for an improvement in the implementation of education system, and the challenging conditions that teachers are faced with daily, including disobedient children in their classrooms.

The system of O.B.E has failed South African school-goers, their teachers, their parents and the South African Government and Department of Education. Products of Outcome Based Education are not only appalling at syntax, constructing well formulated sentences, they cannot solve complex mathematical problems and have proved to be unemployable in the job market. Most parents blame this shortcoming of this system of education to technology, at how youngsters use abbreviated messages not only outside the classroom, but also in their classroom written work and forgetting the culture of reading and writing.

The education system needs improvement in implementation, and drastic changes over the coming years and many educators have reiterated the need for such a change – others argue that oversees the education system of the Republic of South Africa. If the system is to be changed and how effective the proposed system will be, remains to be seen.

WORD TO A NEW SYSTEM OF EDUCATION REVOLUTION

By Linda Sakazi Thwala