South African voters must be the kinkiest masochists on the planet, besides Trump’s die-hard MAGA faithful.
I can’t think of any other people on earth who voluntarily subject themselves to the kind of disrespect and abuse these two groups are willing to guzzle down.
There really appears to be a group of them who derive some kind of twisted pleasure from that special brand of contempt you can only get from those supposed to be public servants.
You know the type. You see them around every election season, glued to their televisions like victims of a state-sponsored hypnotist, transfixed by breaking news updates every time someone launches another manifesto. They’re willing to sit there through hours of sloganeering and speeches from geriatrics in party-branded golf shirts.
They wait patiently, dutifully, sitting in the heat like beaten dogs, waiting for the exact moment a president they’ve heard promise them a job every five years since roughly the Mbeki administration steps up to the microphone to do it all over again.
READ: Looming elections mean change is within our grasp
And just like your regular kinksters, they have their own handkerchief (or in this case T-shirt) code, to let everyone know exactly what their specific brand of kink is.
You have the misguided liberals, the quasi-socialist freedom fighters, the ethno-nationalist family party, the political numbers gang, and whatever the hell the ANC is nowadays, all flying their colours, all willing to bleed for their leaders, just champing at the bit for their chance to get up close with their favourite masters.
“Yes, daddy! Insult my intelligence! Tell me how you’re gonna spit on an entire people’s needs for the next five years!”
To understand masochism as a lived South African condition, you don’t need a postgraduate degree in clinical psychology. You just need a data bundle, a working TV, and a functioning memory, the last of which, unfortunately, appears to get purged from the majority’s brains every few years.
If the general populace are the submissives, the ANC have established themselves as the ultimate wannabe dominatrixes.
They’ve mastered the art of actively harming society while expecting us to not only accept it, but even thank them for it.
Last weekend, they finally rolled out onto the 2026 local government election campaign trail, promising, without a flicker of shame or irony, ten thousand new jobs to take the edge off an unemployment rate currently sitting north of 33%.
Ten thousand jobs.
READ: ANC election promise: 10 000 jobs to help ease 33% unemployment rate
Against an official, narrowly defined unemployment pool of eight million people, or closer to ten million once you tally those who’ve simply given up and crawled out of the statistics altogether, ten thousand posts isn’t a policy position. It’s the job creation equivalent of a rounding error. It’s a fireman standing outside a skyscraper blaze with a bucket of water balloons. The ANC would have you believe it’s something to get excited about.
“Yeah, daddy! Treat us like a bunch of mindless pawns!”
Worse yet, if this promise feels grotesquely familiar, it’s because you’ve been fed a variation of it every five years since the Madiba days.
In 1994, the campaign posters promised “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” and “A better life for all”.
The pledge then was for between two million and five million new full-time positions, alongside training for two and a half million more. By 1999, the promise mutated into a pledge to halve unemployment within a decade.
That didn’t happen.
By 2004, Thabo Mbeki was celebrating a landslide election victory while promising another million jobs in five years and a halving of poverty by 2014.
READ: Activists accuse Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma of ‘derailing’ TRC justice as they lose court battle
This target was actually met, but with a few caveats.
Though the “million jobs” number was met on paper, the unemployment rate barely moved. This is because the workforce simultaneously saw a massive spike. At the same time, poverty reduction stalled and then reversed.
The Mbeki Foundation attributed this reversal partly to the 2008 global financial crisis and partly to him being unceremoniously fired and replaced first by Kgalema Motlanthe and then by He-who-shall-not-be-held-accountable-for-anything-ever.
Roll on through 2009, 2014, and 2019, when the manifesto promised 275 000 real jobs a year. This promise coincided with global data crowning South Africa’s youth as the most aggressively unemployed young people on planet Earth.
That’s that South African exceptionalism. Exceptionally unemployed, that is.
By 2024, the promised metric was subtly downgraded from “jobs” to “work opportunities”.
This was their way of telling us that they think we’re too dumb to realise the difference between full-time, decent jobs and part-time gigs to earn just enough to feed your family for a week.
And now, in 2026, with the party’s municipal vote bleeding out from 64.82% in 2006 down to 45.59% in 2021 and falling, the grand total they expect you to celebrate is ten thousand.
It’s almost refreshing in its sheer, unvarnished cynicism.
It is an admission that those big round numbers of the past were always a fever dream cooked up to keep the voting cattle placated.
I guess we could call it progress. They’re still lying to you, but at least now their lies are less unrealistic.
And then, like a bitter aftertaste you can’t wash out of your mouth, they gave us another pledge of “tougher municipal oversight”.
READ: ANC election promise: Tougher municipal oversight, if voters trust them again
New inspectors. New accountability structures. New promises that this time the water will flow, the lights will stay on, and municipal budgets won’t magically transform into luxury German sedans.
I could almost hear Ramaphosa transform into the meme:
“Believe us, bro. I swear, bro. We know we screwed up those six other times, but this time we’re gonna get it right, bro.”
Meanwhile, municipalities owe Eskom tens of billions. In Northwest, the real unemployment rate exceeds fifty-six percent. Service delivery protests have become such a mundane feature of daily life that newsrooms don’t even bother covering them unless an entire municipal building is reduced to ash.
And through all of it, the graft has been extraordinary in both scale and creativity. Eskom, Nkandla, VBS, OR Tambo Hospital…
But they promise it will be different this time. Just believe them. In a couple of years, the inevitable disappointment is going to hurt so good!
Look, I understand the desire for hope.
But this isn’t cynicism for the sake of feeling clever. It’s just a bit of basic pattern recognition.
Patterns some noticed over a century ago.
Anarchist socialist thinkers have been warning us about the dangers of concentrating power in the hands of a ruling political class. It inevitably creates a self-preserving caste that exists solely to govern in its own self-interest while dressing the arrangement up in the language of service.
Emma Goldman argued that the state exists to preserve its authority first and the welfare of the governed a distant second.
Bakunin noted that revolutionary authority calcifies into a new elite that reproduces the exact domination it claimed to overthrow. Chomsky described the exact machinery by which authority manufactures consent.
And Murray Bookchin proposed that real accountability can only exist at the direct community scale.
This means direct action, participatory democracy, mutual aid, worker-owned cooperatives and other forms of praxis rather than outsourcing our agency to a bunch of self-serving smooth-talkers who only appear once every five years, promising gifts they have no plan on even trying to deliver.
Ten thousand jobs. Tighter municipal oversight. We know the tune by heart.
The masochists will tune in anyway, dressed in their colour-coded gimp suits, desperate for that dopamine rush that comes with taking as much abuse as their masters can dish out for the next five years.
- The ANC promised 10,000 new jobs in the 2026 local government election campaign to address South Africa's unemployment rate, which is above 33%.
- Since 1994, the ANC has repeatedly promised significant job creation, including millions of jobs and halving unemployment, but these targets have largely not been met.
- The promised job creation numbers have progressively decreased, with a shift from "jobs" to "work opportunities" by 2024.
- South African municipalities face severe financial problems, owing Eskom tens of billions, and the real unemployment rate in some areas like Northwest exceeds 56%.
- The ANC has also pledged tougher municipal oversight and new accountability structures, despite persistent issues like graft scandals and poor service delivery.
I can’t think of any other people on earth who voluntarily subject themselves to the kind of disrespect and abuse these two groups are willing to guzzle down.
You know the type. You see them around every election season, glued to their televisions like victims of a state-sponsored hypnotist, transfixed by breaking news updates every time someone launches another manifesto.
READ:
You have the misguided liberals, the quasi-socialist freedom fighters, the ethno-nationalist family party, the political numbers gang, and whatever the hell the ANC is nowadays, all flying their colours, all willing to bleed for their leaders, just champing at the bit for their chance to get up close with their favourite masters.
“Yes, daddy! Insult my intelligence! Tell me how you’re gonna spit on an entire people’s needs for the next five years!”
To understand masochism as a lived
If the general populace are the submissives, the ANC have established themselves as the ultimate wannabe dominatrixes.
Last weekend, they finally rolled out onto the 2026 local government election campaign trail, promising, without a flicker of shame or irony, ten thousand new jobs to take the edge off an unemployment rate currently sitting north of 33%.
Ten thousand jobs.
READ: ANC election promise: 10 000 jobs to help ease 33% unemployment rate
Against an official, narrowly defined unemployment pool of eight million people, or closer to ten million once you tally those who’ve simply given up and crawled out of the statistics altogether, ten thousand posts isn’t a policy position. It’s the job creation equivalent of a rounding error. It’s a fireman standing outside a skyscraper blaze with a bucket of water balloons.
“Yeah, daddy! Treat us like a bunch of mindless pawns!”
Worse yet, if this promise feels grotesquely familiar, it’s because you’ve been fed a variation of it every five years since the Madiba days.
In 1994, the campaign posters promised "Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!" and “A better life for all”.
By 2004,
READ: Activists accuse
Roll on through 2009, 2014, and 2019, when the manifesto promised 275 000 real jobs a year.
By 2024, the promised metric was subtly downgraded from "jobs" to "work opportunities”.
It’s almost refreshing in its sheer, unvarnished cynicism.
It is an admission that those big round numbers of the past were always a fever dream cooked up to keep the voting cattle placated.
I guess we could call it progress.
READ: ANC election promise: Tougher municipal oversight, if voters trust them again
New inspectors. New accountability structures. New promises that this time the water will flow, the lights will stay on, and municipal budgets won’t magically transform into luxury German sedans.
I could almost hear Ramaphosa transform into the meme:
“Believe us, bro. I swear, bro. We know we screwed up those six other times, but this time we’re gonna get it right, bro.”
Meanwhile, municipalities owe Eskom tens of billions. In
But they promise it will be different this time. Just believe them. In a couple of years, the inevitable disappointment is going to hurt so good!
Look, I understand the desire for hope.
But this isn't cynicism for the sake of feeling clever. It's just a bit of basic pattern recognition.
Patterns some noticed over a century ago.
Anarchist socialist thinkers have been warning us about the dangers of concentrating power in the hands of a ruling political class. It inevitably creates a self-preserving caste that exists solely to govern in its own self-interest while dressing the arrangement up in the language of service.
Emma Goldman argued that the state exists to preserve its authority first and the welfare of the governed a distant second.
Bakunin noted that revolutionary authority calcifies into a new elite that reproduces the exact domination it claimed to overthrow. Chomsky described the exact machinery by which authority manufactures consent.
Ten thousand jobs. Tighter municipal oversight. We know the tune by heart.
