Minister Lamoen, while you parrot your word salad about meeting the needs of citizens and cry about creditors, I’m sorry to again be the one to remind you of just how big the fuckup is that you created yourself: South Africa lost roughly R700 billion to corruption during the first 21 years of democracy following 1994. During the State Capture Era (2014–2019), the most severe, concentrated economic damage occurred during an era of systemic political corruption. During these disaster years South Africa lost a monumental R1.5 trillion in just five years between 2014 and 2019. Annual and State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) Drain saw an ongoing annual loss of R27 billion to R300 billion per year due to continuous tender manipulation and illicit financial leakage. Bailouts for Corrupt Entities: Taxpayers have had to foot an estimated R521 billion over a 15-year period just to keep mismanaged and heavily plundered State-Owned Enterprises functioning. While these figures overlap in timelines, they reflect how the accumulation easily exceeds R1.5 to R2 trillionin directly trackable losses, without counting the broader, unquantifiable damage to macroeconomic growth, infrastructure degradation, and lost foreign investment. You 🫵 and your comrades created this mess, not your creditors.