What a Clooney soundbite and a Valhalla Park childhood have to say about rule by the worst.
George Clooney, September 2, 2026, during a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, in a recent interview, said it plainly: “I think we have a kakistocracy right now, but that’s okay, we’ll get through it.” I heard something else entirely. Growing up in Valhalla Park, Kaapstad, my ear caught “kak” and the rest of the word simply dissolved. For a second I wondered how a Hollywood actor had picked up our Afrikaans word for shit. Because kak, where I’m from, sits right up there with “fuck”, “shit”, flexible, load-bearing, and doing several jobs at once.
A Quick Digression, Because It’s Worth It_Kaapse Expression & Meaning 101
Prat kak: To talk absolute nonsense or lie outright. “Don’t talk kak, you did not win the lottery.”
Kak en betaal:“Shit and pay”, begrudgingly accepting a bad situation and paying up anyway.
Snor kak: To look for trouble or instigate drama.
Kak af: To go through a highly stressful, exhausting, or difficult time.
Kak house (huis): A total mess or chaotic situation.
Clooney, of course, did not mean any of that. He meant kakistocracy, government by the worst.
What a Kakistocracy Actually Is?
The word fuses two Greek roots: kákistos (κάκιστος), “the worst,” and krátos (κράτος), “rule” or “power.” It first appears in English as early as 1636, though it took Thomas Love Peacock’s 1829 novel The Misfortunes of Elphin to put it into wider circulation. It has since had a very good couple of decades. A kakistocracy is a government run by the least qualified or most unscrupulous people available, and it isn’t confined to any one system, democracies, monarchies, and dictatorships all qualify if the people running them are bad enough at it. The usual markers: unqualified appointees in key posts, loyalty valued over competence, and a habit of sliding into kleptocracy, government by thieves, once the incompetence has cleared the room of anyone who might object. “Worst” is doing a lot of work in that definition, and it is inherently subjective, it depends on where you sit politically. So before I agree with Clooney, or with anyone applying the word to an African government, maybe exclude Rwanda, Seychelles, Mauritius, the question worth sitting with is this one:
If they are so unqualified and incompetent, how are they smart enough to amass billions and keep winning?.
If they are incompetent, how are they able to have over $500,000, hidden under a sofa and own a private game ranch?
The Incompetence Paradox.
Here is the uncomfortable answer: administrative incompetence is not a failure of the system. It is often a requirement for corruption.
When the power grid fails, the taps run dry, roads stay unpaved, and hospitals collapse, we call it incompetence, we assume the people in charge are trying and failing. That assumption misses the actual objective.
Chaos is profitable. A well-run department needs transparent procurement, strict auditing, and digital oversight, all of which make it very hard to steal from.
The tenderpreneur ecosystem. Push out the qualified, ethical bureaucrats and you create a vacuum. Fill it with loyalists who don’t know how to run a water system, but know exactly which shell company should win the tender.
The strategic own goal. They are not scoring own goals, because the state was never their team. In their own accounting, they are winning. The loss is absorbed entirely by the public.
A politician can be a genuine failure at governing and, at the very same time, a genius at rent-seeking and wealth extraction. Those are not contradictory skill sets, they are complementary ones.
Who “Incompetent” Actually Protects?
Believing our leaders are simply unqualified isn’t a neutral reading of events. It is a shield, and it protects the people it describes.
Incompetence reads as pity; malice reads as theft. A minister who fails to deliver textbooks because he is “incompetent” gets mocked. A minister who diverts that budget into a private estate gets prosecuted, in theory. The first framing is far safer for the person in office.
It lowers the bar. Once citizens accept that leaders are simply incapable, expectations drop with them. We stop expecting world-class service and start applauding the bare minimum, a kind of national kak en betaal, collectively shrugging and paying anyway.
The useful idiot. Appointing a visibly unqualified loyalist to a powerful post isn’t always a mistake. An incompetent appointee is easy to control, grateful enough to stay loyal, and absorbs public anger that would otherwise reach the people above them.
Kakistocracy, Kleptocracy, or Plutocracy?
Your instinct, that this is less about “the worst citizens ruling” and more about zero accountability and zero servant leadership, points at a real distinction. Here is how the three terms actually differ:
Kakistocracy: Rule by the worst or least qualified citizens. Decisions are made poorly; systems collapse out of pure ignorance and lack of skill.
Kleptocracy: Rule by thieves. The primary objective of holding public office is to steal state funds and resources.
Plutocracy: Rule by the wealthy. State policies are explicitly designed to make the rich richer and keep the poor poorer.
The Verdict: A Manufactured Kakistocracy.
Many African states and, depending on where you stand politically, plenty of Western ones too, run a hybrid model. It starts as a kleptocracy: the desire to steal comes first. To steal without getting caught, the thieves have to dismantle the justice system and the civil service, firing the experts and hiring the loyal. That deliberately produces a kakistocracy.
The Verdict.
Yes, we are in a kakistocracy, but it is a manufactured one. The incompetence at the level of public service delivery is real. The wealth extraction underneath it is a highly sophisticated, perfectly executed enterprise.
Clooney’s “Worst” Is Subjective. Until It Isn’t.
You’re right that Clooney’s read on the American presidency depends entirely on where you’re standing. In a polarised democracy, the left looks at a right-wing populist and sees a kakistocrat: no foreign policy experience, no institutional respect. The right looks at a career left-wing bureaucrat and sees exactly the same thing from the other direction: never run a business, wrecked the economy, printed money into oblivion. But in much of the world, “worst” stops being a matter of taste.
When a government’s choices produce preventable starvation, rolling blackouts, inflation that eats life savings, and police turned against the citizens who pay for them, ideology has nothing left to argue about. At that point it satisfies both definitions at once: an absolute kakistocracy, and, in the word my Valhalla Park ear reached for first, completely kak.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito.
Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings.
Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table..
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