IS ASPEN’S “CORONA DRUG” SOUTH AFRICAN?

Today I saw a tweet by African Fact Zone celebrating Aspen Pharmacare’s discovery of Dexamethasone which won the corona virus trials. The tweet punted Aspen as a South African company that created Dexamethasone or Decadron as a cure for corona, which I found quite misleading.

First of all, Decadron has been in existence since the 1960s and Aspen holds a license to produce it but it is not the inventor of the drug and the drug was definitely not created to fight corona. However, my argument seeks to focus more on establishing whether Aspen is even South African to make sense of this sudden effort to associate a pharmaceutical corona panacea to Africa.

Aspen Is Not South African.

Aspen is as South African as Cecil John Rhode’s De Beers or Gold fields which were British owned mining companies that were exploiting black labor and resources in South Africa. Put in a different way, Aspen is as South African as Coca Cola South Africa or Microsoft South Africa.

The reason being the company is white owned, it amassed its unjust enrichment from the racially debased crime against humanity of apartheid and its profits today still flow predominantly to white people and westerners. It’s management consists of seven white directors and three black tokens in a country where 92% of the population is black.

This means Aspen does not represent the demographics of the country and clearly it is not sensitive to the values of non-racialism or transformation, rendering it a charter company that is just attempting to meet the minimum regulatory requirements of Black Economic Empowerment to continue its racially biased looting.

Now for those of us who are awake to neo-colonialism, you are aware that modern day colonialism in Africa is being advanced by European descendants running western corporations, mining companies, investment banks and financial institutions that still exploit our labor, resources, markets, pension funds, state contracts, central banks, debt and destruction of African competitors for profit.

Europeans Are Not Africans.

You would also know that European descendants in Africa are not Africans but they are descendants of Europeans continuing their ancestors’ mandate of looting and exploiting Africa to maintain white supremacy.

It’s for this purpose that many of these European citizens hold duel citizenship while purporting to be Africans. For those who don’t have duel citizenship, once they tip over the apple cart in an African colony, they are quickly assimilated into other colonies [South Africa, Australia and the United States] or they migrate back to Europe, externalizing all the loot they accumulated as we saw with white Zimbabweans externalizing and being assimilated into the new South Africa after Zimbabwe’s land reform.

This is a major reason why most of their companies in South Africa or Africa are holding cash and have been investing less in African industrialization since the end of colonialism.

Lately, we have also seen a trend of companies like SASOL, Glencore, BAT, Dimension Data, Liberty, Investec, Old Mutual, SAB and Anglo America moving wealth that was generated from exploiting black labor and resources during apartheid, to western equity markets by changing their primary listing. But even then, let’s not forget that the JSE (Johannesburg Stock Exchange) itself, which is controlled by JP Morgan, Goldman Sacks, Investec, PSG, Vanguard and our pension funds that are controlled by white fund managers, can hardly be considered as South African.

A lot of these companies also have their Intellectual Property Rights and brands registered in Europe and not Africa where they sell the products, illustrating where the companies’ treasure is held.

Who Owns A Company.

Ultimately companies do not belong to the slaves who labor for them but they belong to the people who ultimately benefit from the value created from the exploitation of the labor and resources. It’s for this reason that PIC [Public Investment Cooperation] might consist largely of R2.1tril of black pensions, but, because those funds are used to fund white companies and fund managers, while blacks are denied access, black pensions are just another resource that is being exploited to profit the colonizer.

Zimbabweans learnt the hard way how Europeans are not Africans when $1.7bil flew out of their stock market [which was the second biggest in Africa], in one day in 1997 to crash the dollar just because government had compensated black liberation fighters [with a measly US$4500 each] for fighting a 17yr war to liberate oppressed Zimbabweans.

So who owns Aspen shares? From a cursory glance, the majority of the shares look like they are owned by privately owned white South African based investment firms and insurance companies.

It’s when you take a closer look at the institutional shareholders that you notice that US owned VANGUARD Group, holds shares in all the investment companies invested in Aspen. They also hold shares in all the banks in the country, the shareholders in those banks and they even hold shares in the stock exchange [JSE] in which Aspen is listed. Only then do you appreciate who really owns Aspen and maybe even the South African economy.

Who Or What Is Vanguard?

Vanguard Group is the second biggest of the world’s largest shadow banks or vulture funds. It’s privately owned and controls assets in excess of $5tril.

Vulture funds or shadow banks such as Vanguard are usually privately owned investment and equity management firms in the United States, sitting on vast amounts of capital [in excess of $20tril] that they use to buy stakes in the global economy.

These funds are privately owned to obscure their owners and stop their funds and business models from being open to public scrutiny. That’s why most people have never heard of any of these companies or funds.

Looking at just the top four vulture funds in the world, they include Black Rock, State Street, Fidelity and Vanguard, which control over $13tril in funds that are invested into investment companies, banks, cooperations and stock markets in almost every country on earth.

These institutions are the vehicles through which US capital controls national companies, resources, markets, labor and by deduction governments through equity markets, in the same way the Rothschild, Rockefeller and Morgan families have controlled countries through debt for the past 400yrs.

No one knows the shareholders behind these vulture funds, however, by seeing how they dominate the world, it’s pretty obvious who the people behind them are.

Combines.

These fund managers are shrewd, disguising their control as Vanguard has done in South Africa through a small shareholding in Aspen, but what most don’t see is they also have shares in all the other financial institutions, shareholders and even the stock exchange in which Aspen is listed.

Accompanying that, they also have shareholding and cross directorships in all the banks, the companies managing the public pensions [PIC], insurance funds, the law firms crafting legislation, consultancy firms driving government policy and courts in the nation. In other words, Vanguard controls South Africa’s financial industry with a web of links to the entire political, legislative and economic system.

This structure of total vertical and horizontal integration of capital into an economy is referred to as a COMBINE by Kwame Nkrumah in his book Neo-Colonialism.

In this book written 60yrs ago, Nkrumah spelt out how the same few capitalist families mentioned above and their proxies have had cross shareholding and directorships in the most powerful companies in the world to form combines of capitalist monopoly and cartels that control nations.

It’s through this model that the US colonized Japan, Germany, South Korea, the Asian Tigers and is now penetrating China through its massive $80tril largesse of investment capital.

Black people must learn corporatocracy, the new colonialism to understand how to transform African economies because South Africa remains in the coils of colonialism due to the ignorance of its politicians. This transformation begins with Africans knowing that Aspen is not African and chances are a drug is coming from the South African colony gateway to ensure African vaccination is driven from South Africa.

PS who are African Fact Zone and African Fact Check and who funds them?

By Rutendo Bereza Matinyarare of ZUAUWS.