Which Political Party Feeds South Africa's Minds and Hearts?
- Lisulenkosi Khuzwayo
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
How a song, a burning university, and a DM turned my politics inside out
I didn’t cry over a speech.
I didn’t cry over a march.
I cried over graphs.
For years I had defended the DA as the “grown-up” option.
In Politics 101 debates, I played the calm one:
“They’re rational.”
“They protect institutions.”
“They’ll keep investor confidence.”
“They’re non-racial.”
I knew the vocabulary by heart: fiscal discipline, policy certainty, rule of law.
Speaking like that felt safe. It felt clever. It felt adult.
In a country permanently on edge, moderation became a costume I wore to move smoothly through rooms that already had enough.
One night in my UP dorm room, that costume tore.
1. The Room: Pink Screen, Burning Campus
It was late in res. The particular silence of a university night: distant laughter, a door closing down the corridor, a kettle hissing somewhere you can’t see.
I sat at my desk in Hatfield, laptop open, planning just to “read a bit” so I could argue better in class.
Instead of the usual noise — tweets, clips, performative outrage — I opened the PDFs:
DA policy documents,
EFF policy documents,
graphs on poverty, inequality, land, and education.
On my screen, side by side: DA vs EFF — stripped of slogans, reduced to numbers and proposals.
On my phone, Josef’s Does It Make You Feel Good? was playing.
Soft vocals, pink cover. A line glowing across the lock screen:
You know what I’ve been doing ain’t right…
Does it make you feel good when I try?
Does it make you feel good when I cry?
Somewhere between scrolls, it stopped being a love song.
It started sounding like a question about my politics.
While that chorus looped softly in the background, my timeline filled with a different kind of data: the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape.
Residences on fire.
Students breathing smoke.
Voices saying it felt like a concentration camp.
I was sitting in a quiet, safe residence at the University of Pretoria:
security at the gate,
working Wi-Fi,
clean lecture halls that don’t leak,
trimmed lawns, buildings lit.
Fort Hare was burning.
My campus was calm.
Then another number floated up from my memory — one I’d seen before but never felt:
Around 7% of South Africans ever reach tertiary education. In countries like the US, that figure rises above 50%.
Seven per cent.
I am inside that 7%.
A Black student in a historically well-resourced institution, in a country where most of my peers will never even see a campus except on a screen.
And I’d been using that position to defend moderation on behalf of those who already own almost everything.
Gratitude and shame sat together in the same chair.
That’s when the graphs started to hurt.
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2. When “Rational” Meets the Land
I kept reading, slower now, linking policy language to the actual skeleton of this country.
The land numbers came at me like a slap:
A Black majority of roughly 80% owns about 4% of the land.
A white minority of about 7% holds around 72% of agricultural land.
Eighty per cent of the people.
Four per cent of the land.
Seven per cent of the people.
Seventy-two per cent of the farms.
Add that to the education numbers:
7% inside tertiary gates,
93% outside, pressed against glass they’re told doesn’t exist.
Then place my life over that map:
I live and study in the safe, manicured zone.
Fort Hare students revise under smoke and broken infrastructure.
Millions of African children won’t even finish school, let alone touch a university corridor.
In that landscape, our favourite phrases started to sound different:
“We must be rational.” “We must maintain investor confidence.” “We mustn’t scare the markets.”
Rational for whom?
Stability for whom?
Reading the DA’s economic proposals with those numbers in mind, a pattern emerged. It was not neutral. It was a structured refusal:
refusal to meaningfully disturb land ownership,
refusal to redesign the geography of apartheid,
refusal to treat Black exclusion as the central wound rather than an unfortunate complication.
What they were really promising was this:
We will manage this system better. We will tighten the taps. We will stop theft. We will make the 10% economy more efficient.
What they would not promise was:
We will rebuild the economy so it finally belongs to the 80%.
Next to those documents, I read the EFF’s policy. Not as redemption, just as text:
land expropriation and genuine redistribution,
state-led industrialisation,
social and public housing near economic hubs,
wages and labour dignity,
confrontation with historic theft.
The country’s chorus is ready: “Radical.”
Dangerous. Unrealistic. Irresponsible.
But now set that word against the actual balance sheet:
80% on 4% of land,
7% holding most of the farms,
93% shut out of higher education,
…and the axis flips. What we’re calling “radical” starts to look like the bare minimum response to facts this grotesque.
The song in my background kept whispering:
You know this isn’t right.
Does it still make you feel good to stand where you’re standing?
For the first time, the answer in my chest was clear: No.
“Rational” began to feel less like wisdom and more like sedation — something administered to keep the patient calm while the original wound is never stitched.
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3. Aristotle in a South African Dorm Room
Somewhere between the graphs and the land stats, Aristotle pulled up a chair.
In his ethics, virtue is a mean between two extremes:
excess on one side,
deficiency on the other.
Courage lies between cowardice and recklessness.
We like to imagine South African politics the same way:
on one side, reckless “radicalism”;
on the other, cold conservatism;
in the middle, a wise, centrist “moderation.”
That night I realised: our middle is not the mean.
It’s deficiency with good manners.
On one extreme, there is denial:
protect property at any cost,
treat land as a technical afterthought,
chant reconciliation while ownership patterns stay almost untouched.
On the other extreme, there is chaos:
rage without institutions,
destruction without design,
revenge with no architecture.
Between those, the true Aristotelian mean would be something far more demanding:
name the theft clearly,
redistribute land and ownership decisively,
reverse spatial apartheid so the Black majority live near economic hubs, not in engineered exile,
build capable, disciplined institutions to manage this shift,
drive industrialisation that centres African lives,
do it with law, planning and long-term statecraft.
That is not soft politics. It is hard, technical, morally heavy.
And it is exactly the kind of politics South Africa likes to label “radical.”
Meanwhile, the politics that refuses to touch land, refuses to touch ownership, refuses to touch the economic skeleton of the criminal state of Apartheid gets dressed up as “moderate,” “sensible,” “grown-up.”
Once you adjust your moral scale, it becomes obvious:
The real excess is defending a status quo where 80% of the people live on crumbs of land and opportunity.
The real deficiency is doing almost nothing and calling it realism.
That’s when the tears came — not for one party over another, but for the size of the lie I had quietly swallowed about what counts as “reasonable.”
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4. The Aftershock: A DM With Kyle
The night ended, but it didn’t stay in that room.
Days later, a friend from my old school — Kyle, a white boy from Kearsney — replied to something I posted on Instagram.
“I’m very confused about what point you’re trying to get across. I just want to understand your perspective.”
So I tried to spell out the logic that had rearranged itself inside me.
I wrote:
“One cannot build on what one does not own.
One cannot build on what was never made for him to succeed in. One cannot build an economy that was designed to accommodate only 10% of the population.”
I told him what that meant in practice:
pre-1994 South Africa was a fully funded, fully serviced country for roughly 10% of its people — white citizens;
the remaining 90% existed in engineered scarcity, by design;
in 1994, we did not rebuild that design — we tried to stretch it.
We took a 10% economy and tried to pour it over 100% of the population without changing who owned the taps, the pipes, or the reservoir.
So what looks like “state failure” today is often the old blueprint working exactly as it was meant to: exclude.
He agreed, in principle, but then asked the familiar question:
“But how do you combat that? Laws like affirmative action and BBBEE were meant to do that but just helped the connected few. Isn’t the real issue corruption and poor implementation?”
I told him to research who sat in the room designing BEE and whose comfort it had to protect. He said it involved councils, unions, big organisations — that if it had been properly implemented, the results would be different.
My reply was blunt:
BEE did what it was allowed to do.
It created a small class of Black shareholders to sit at old tables.
It gave the world a story of “transformation.”
It did not fundamentally shift land or capital.
That’s not an accident. That’s design.
He pivoted back to the ANC:
“Apartheid created the inequality, I agree, but the ANC has had power for 30 years. They could have changed land laws, built housing, and fixed transport. If we’re still here, isn’t that their failure too?”
The aftershock of that dorm room answered for me:
“No, Kyle. You’re still thinking in symptoms, not first principles. Who owns the land and the means of production?Who controls capital and can threaten to move it the moment serious change is proposed?”
I gave him a picture:
Imagine a carton of milk designed to fill one cup. That was the apartheid economy — calibrated to fill one white cup.
Now you’re asked to pour that same carton into ten cups — the entire country — without changing the carton or the rules of who can buy more milk.
What happens?
A little foam in some cups,
almost nothing in most,
and the original cup fighting to stay full.
We call that “corruption,” “bad implementation,” “cadre deployment” — and those things are real — but beneath them is a simpler truth: you are trying to stretch a system that was never built for everyone.
He mentioned Section 25, commissions, and panels insisting land reform is possible under our constitution, if only implemented properly. I said: fair. And then asked:
Who still sits on most of the productive land?
Who gains if social housing remains far from where the economy actually lives?
Who owns the banks, the mines, the big firms?
Whose tax revolts and disinvestment threats hover in every serious policy conversation?
Until those questions are answered honestly, blaming only the ANC is like treating a fever while refusing to admit there is an infection.
At one point he asked:
“So what do you actually want? Do you want the government to own everything?”
I answered from where I now stood:
“I want the state to own the state. I want the state to rule the economy with a clear, disciplined industrial plan. I want the spatial design of the criminal state of Apartheid reversed — either by rebuilding where people are, or by bringing people closer to where the economy breathes. I want us to stop sprinkling opportunity onto a skeleton engineered for exclusion and then blaming the excluded for starving.”
He brought up Zimbabwe.
I sent a voice note and ended like this:
“You don’t have to convince me that you’re right, Mackay. The real test isn’t me. It’s the ten-year-olds growing up in hunger and economic exile. One day, they might arrive at your gate with questions. Your ideas must answer to them, not just to me.”
And in that moment I realised:
I was no longer debating for victory.
I was speaking from responsibility.
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5. What I Know Now
That night in my dorm — Joesef playing softly, Fort Hare burning on my screen, graphs glowing like x-rays of a broken spine — divided my political life into a before and an after.
Before:
I defended the DA as the adult in the room.
I wore the language of markets and institutions like a tailored suit.
I confused sounding rational with being just.
I quietly lowered my expectations to what white capital and global opinion would accept.
After:
I still see the ANC’s corruption and failures clearly. I refuse to romanticise incompetence.
But I also refuse to pretend the deeper architecture of the criminal state of Apartheid isn’t still holding the ceiling up.
I refuse to call it “moderate” when 80% of the people stand on 4% of the land.
I refuse to call it “pragmatic” when 7% own most of the farms and 93% will never set foot in a university lecture hall.
I refuse to treat “don’t scare the markets” as a higher commandment than “repair the theft that built them.”
I don’t worship parties anymore.
I audit them.
Who is willing to confront land, ownership, and spatial apartheid directly?
Who speaks in the scale of the crime, not just the scale of what is comfortable?
Who sees the 7% inside lecture halls and the 93% locked out as one national story, not two separate worlds?
The tears that night were not for the EFF, and not against the DA.
They were for:
the younger version of me who thought being calm and acceptable in white spaces was the same as being wise,
Fort Hare students studying through smoke while I tap my card at a clean, working turnstile,
the African children whose brilliance will live and die in places the economy was never designed to see.