Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

Fixed or Not Fixed: Confessions of a Long-Suffering Voter.

On a WhatsApp clip, a laugh that was not a laugh, three caring souls, and the only rebellion left before 4 November.

A Political Voter Mess.
“A party that cannot sacrifice for the future will sacrifice the future instead”
Oh, I am such a mess. A political voter mess.
I find it hard to say: I will vote for the ANC. I have done all sorts of emotional and mental gymnastics, somersaults even, to convince my irrational Black middle class nervous system to vote once more, one last time, for the ANC of Tambo, of Mandela, of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. I am struggling. I had a long chat with my emotions, and my emotions left the room a long time ago, saying Andizi, in Fikile Mbalula’s  tone. I keep asking my brain to convince my heart that we should vote for the ANC once more. The heart is not taking the call and not even,  “I just got here, I just arrived”.

Forgive me. I started the therapy-writing before setting the scene. Let me set it.

A Burning Bush on WhatsApp Status.
There is a video of Tata uGwede Mantashe doing the rounds on WhatsApp Status and across social media. I cannot tell you where or when it was shot and I was hoping its AI generated.  I can only tell you what I watched, several times, and for once I paid attention. He (Tata Gwede Mantashe)  is campaigning for the ANC ahead of the November local government elections. He arrives at a poor woman’s house, dressed warm, in what looks like an expensive ANC branded  Chinese poncho and premium sneakers. Outside, the infrastructure has collapsed: leaking pipes, raw sewage, the stink of it. To get inside, he has to jump over the incompetence. Literally step over it.
Inside is a tiny RDP house, not far from being a shack. And here is the sad part. He tells her that what is happening outside is bad, but she must still vote for the ANC. In the words I heard: fixed or not fixed, bad or not bad, the sewage, the leaking pipes, vote for the ANC.
Translated into plain language: the poverty, the inequality, thr corruption, the dignity running down the street outside your door, none of it should change your vote.

What happened to our ANC elders? What happened to shame? What happened to the freedom fighter who no longer fights for freedom?

Nietzsche’s madman announced that God is dead, and that we have killed him. He said it as a lament, not a celebration. I find myself asking the same question of my movement. Is the ANC dead? Did Gwede and company kill it, and did we, the faithful ANC voters, help them, and murder the country while we were at it? Some days Luthuli House feels like a playhouse of demons, and we are in the lowest circle of the ANC’s own Inferno.

Uyaziva? The Woman Who Repeated Him.
Watch her face. She repeats his words back to him, twice, maybe three times. Fixed or not fixed. Fixed or not fixed. Politely. With a smile.
That repetition is not agreement. It is a question, wearing the clothes of good manners: Uthini? Uyaziva ukuba uthini? Awuguli, Tata uGwede? What are you saying? Can you hear yourself? Are you well?.  He confirmed it anyway, without reading her face or her emotions. Yes, fixed or not fixed, vote ANC. His soul, gone with the wind. Had it been Cape Town, and had she been one of those blunt old Xhosa men with no filter, she would have said to him, as one old man to another:
“Hayi mfondini, Gwede, uthetha ikk ngoku. Ayikho le nto uyithethayo. Sihlala ekakeni apha, wena uzothetha ikk yakho apha, suba yikk yexhego. Utheni ngoku? Hayi, ungazowawusha apha! Phuma endlini yam nalo ANC yakho. YIKHA!”

But she was not a rude old man. She was a polite old woman in her own small house. So she giggled and laughed. Even at a funeral there is a giggle. Sometimes laughter is all you have left, when tears and anger refuses to visit you.

Why Did They Laugh?
And the people around them laughed too. What was funny? Why not cry instead? Why no anger? When you see the lack of delivery, the incompetence, the daylight corruption, why not even act angry?
Mazisi Kunene’s Shaka, in Emperor Shaka the Great, carries a warning I paraphrase from memory: those who feast on the grounds of others are often forced into gestures of friendship, into giggles and laughter they do not desire. If you eat at another man’s table, you laugh at his jokes. The behavioural science agrees with the old poet. Laughter is not only about humour; it signals status. Work by Christopher Oveis, Dacher Keltner and colleagues shows that people of lower status in an exchange laugh in a more submissive, appeasing way, to soothe the powerful and protect themselves. Keltner’s teasing studies point the same way: the high-status person makes the joke; the low-status person laughs along. Politeness theory adds a third layer: laughter can save face for everyone in a moment that is humiliating for everyone.
Then there is what Jean-François Bayart called la politique du ventre, the politics of the belly. When your grant, your RDP house, your tender, your councillor’s favour flows from the man standing in your doorway, you laugh. You need to stay in his good books. The laugh is rent.
Sometimes laughter is all that is left when tears and anger refuse to visit you.

Where Is the Shame?
I have written before about the difference between intloni and isazela: shame needs an audience, conscience does not. In this clip, there was an audience, there was an Apple 17 smartphone camera, and still no shame. Not even the borrowed kind. And who allowed this to be recorded and posted? Who is the ANC’s media, communications and publicity person? Yes, thank you, now we know. But someone is not doing their job. When a campaign cannot tell that this is a scene to hide, it has lost the ability to tell right from wrong. To be fair, and fairness matters even when one is angry, Tata uGwede has defended his campaign style elsewhere. When a separate clip in Freedom Park, Johannesburg showed him asking a resident who gives her grandchildren their child support grant, critics called it vote-buying. He answered on Newzroom Afrika that there was no vote buying, that the ANC is “servicing society”, and that “the freedom of choice is open to everybody.” In Makhanda in September, The Herald reported him repeatedly asking supporters to forgive the party for falling short on delivery. So the pattern is on the record: remember what we gave you; forgive what we did not fix; vote for us anyway. Fixed or not fixed.

The Song the Algorithm Chose
It did not help that the moment the clip ended, the algorithm played me Lauryn Hill: “I Find It Hard to Say (Rebel)”, from MTV Unplugged No. 2.0. She wrote it after the 1999 police killing of Amadou Diallo, a young Guinean immigrant shot by New York police. It is a song about refusing to pretend that everything is alright. About seeing through false pretences, and about people in power who treat our lives as cheap and disposable, while history repeats and the people sleep, too comfortable to face it.l Our senior ANC leaders, Tata uGwede included, behave as though our lives are cheap and easy to waste. Lauryn Hill’s answer was in the title: Rebel.

I Asked Three Caring Souls To Help Me Make Sense Of This.
When I could no longer make sense of it alone, I consulted three social activists. People who love human development, who are communal, who have done the work.  Here is what they said, lightly edited and unnamed.
The first:
“The first thing for me is the audacity. It’s outstanding. To classify the lack of service delivery as ‘bad’, then step over it and say, fixed or not fixed, vote for the ANC regardless. The audacity is so outrageous it’s borderline disrespect. It’s saying: I’d never allow this to be done to me, it’s inhumane, but I’ll do it to you anyway, repeatedly. It’s hurtful, because service delivery is ultimately about people’s dignity and quality of life. This isn’t a question of political ideology anymore. It’s about governance, accountability, and a lack of humanity.”
The second:
“That she repeats after him more than once is inconsequential to him, because he’s not at all appalled by the dire situation. Sheer arrogance and entitlement. She repeats because she wants to know, uyaziva? Are you listening to yourself? Are you okay? Really, are you okay? Awuguli? All she could do was laugh. Sometimes that’s all you can do when tears and anger refuse to visit you. They did not even stand up to the tyranny of their own souls. He and they are lost.”
The third:
“Shuuuu, mine runs deep. All of the above. There is no comparison in suffering. Defeated. When you start feeling like you’re colluding with the rotten system… it almost broke my spirit. I paddled, huffed and puffed, for simple measures to curb unnecessary maternal and neonatal deaths. We sat in provincial and national meetings kube muncu izinqa, and mothers and babies continue to die nanamhlanje in our hospitals. I concluded: they don’t care. Instead, they frustrate the foot soldiers. So I left before I broke….Sad. The ones who suffer most are our people, the unsuspecting public. If you think justice and SAPS are corrupt, wait until someone does a Madlanga on health. Okubuhlungu. It’s the one area where even if you recover the money, you can’t recover human lives. The circle is vicious. Every collapse, every rot, is felt most by the same demographic. Buphi ubuntu esiziqhenya ngabo?…I love my country dearly, but I despise the leadership. Basic needs should never be bartered for votes. I used to say: I can live with being ill-treated by someone who doesn’t look like me, but when it’s our own… jherrr, it feels like your uncle stole the food and school-fees money without flinching. Don’t judge me: the last time I voted was probably 15 years ago. After following Madlanga, I thought perhaps… this year. I still feel defeated, and it’s a mountain no one person can move alone. Kodwa siyafisa ukwenza kancono, abantu bakithi baphile.”

The numbers deserve to stand on the record. The Department of Health’s own Saving Mothers 2020–2022 report found that 57.4% of maternal deaths in that period were potentially preventable. The in-facility maternal mortality ratio was 109.7 per 100,000 live births in 2022, far from the SDG target of 70 by 2030. In plain language: most of the mothers we lose, we did not have to lose. And her hope for a “Madlanga for health” is, for now, exactly that: a hope. The Madlanga Commission’s mandate is criminality and political interference in the criminal justice system, and its final report is now only due in January 2027, after we have voted. Health has its own wounds on the record: Babita Deokaran, shot dead in 2021 after flagging suspicious payments at Tembisa Hospital. No commission will give her back.

The Diagnosis I Had Already Written.
In When Citizens Become Their Own Government: The Trouble with SA, I leaned on Chinua Achebe’s 1983 diagnosis: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” Four decades later, substitute any African capital for Lagos and the diagnosis still holds. I wrote that in South Africa we are slowly becoming our own government. When citizens become Home Affairs, immigration officers, border patrol, law enforcement, judge and jury, do not be surprised when Abahambe becomes the norm. Do not be surprised when the social fabric tears. Before that, in We Are Led and Governed by Damaged People, I argued that South Africa does not have a governance and competence crisis; it has a personality crisis. I used the Dark Tetrad, the research cluster of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy and everyday sadism described by Delroy Paulhus and colleagues, as a lens on power. Let me repeat the caveat I gave in Diagnosis by Group Chat: these are subclinical traits measured in populations, not diagnoses I can hand out from a WhatsApp clip. The lens is mine. The behaviour is on camera.

So here is my metaphor, and I own it as metaphor: from 1994 to 2010 the ANC was the gift of the givers, the Blesser we like,  post year 2011 to now, the wheels fell off,  the ANC has become an abuser who keeps gaslighting us. It is not that bad. Remember what I did for you. Forgive me. You cannot leave; where would you go? Long ago it became a self-serving narcissist that confuses our loyalty with its entitlement.

The Muscle That Wasted Away.
The ANC I need is one that defers gratification on purpose. Deliberately. Proactively. It gives up the now so the country can have a later. That kind of sacrifice is not a mood. It is maturity, and it is work.
The ANC I have has failed to free itself from the tyranny of its own appetites. It has become a one-year-old again: it wants, it grabs, it cries when told to wait, it throws tantrums. Or worse, it is the adult version of that child, the pathology of prolonged immaturity, a grown body still run by an infant’s clock. It can no longer give up today for the country’s tomorrow. Sacrifice is a muscle. Use it and it grows. Stop using it and it wastes. The ANC’s muscle memory for sacrifice went into atrophy long ago. It is now past atrophy and into sarcopenia, the slow wasting where the muscle is not resting. It is disappearing.

This matters beyond morality. A party that sacrifices well earns a reputation as a store of future value. Voters lend it their patience because it has repaid patience before. The ANC’s reputation today is the opposite: hedonic, gluttonous short-termism. It eats the seed and asks us to praise the harvest. The corruption is no longer a scandal. It is an inheritance, passed down at the dinner table like a family religion, a conduct disorder with its own hymns. The proper pattern of sacrifice for any political party is simple. Offer your very best. Do the best you can, and be seen to. Do not live in the delusion that you can offer less, step over the sewage, and still say fixed or not fixed, vote for us.

Perhaps I should not blame them. After all, we were told the ANC will rule until Jesus comes. Jesus has not come. The man who said it left first. Worse than the immaturity is what it has become. The Zondo Commission laid out, volume by volume, how the state was captured and hollowed. The Madlanga Commission is hearing testimony of a criminal justice system bent from the inside. Before either, the Moerane Commission in KwaZulu-Natal heard that many political killings there were tied to contests for councillor positions inside the ANC itself. The word I keep reaching for is fratricide. Cain and Abel. Literal in some places, and figurative everywhere, in the factional warfare that devours comrades before it ever reaches the opposition. And the brother it is most willing to sacrifice is the voter: Black society, handed more inequality, more poverty and more corruption, without apology.

I repeat, A party that cannot sacrifice for the future will sacrifice the future instead.

Rebel. With the Ballot.
In the end, all I can say is: rebel. Not violently. Not illegally. No riots. Rebel with the ballot. If there is one thing I know as a behavioural and social  scientist who spent 28 years studying consumers, it is this: the consumer is not stupid. The voter is not stupid. Nor is she a doormat. She is simply long-suffering. The woman in that RDP house knew exactly what she was hearing. That is why she asked him,  twice, with a smile, whether he could hear himself.

The Fixed-or-Not-Fixed Ballot Test.
Before 4 November, whoever you are leaning toward, ask:
1. Fixed or not fixed? Does this party judge itself by what it fixed, or by what it once gave?
2. Who is in the doorway? Is the candidate asking for your vote, or reminding you of your debt?
3. Whose laugh is it? Would you say what you really think to their face, or would you laugh?
4.Where is the shame? When they fail, do they show remorse, or turn it into comedy?
5. What would change my mind? If no failure would change your vote, you are not a voter. You are a fan.

In 1967, Oginga Odinga titled his autobiography Not Yet Uhuru: independence had arrived, but freedom had not reached the people. 

The song “Not Yet Uhuru” was written and composed by Caiphus Semenya and Letta Mbulu, and famously performed and released by South African jazz singer Letta Mbulu in 1992.

Thirty-two years after 1994, the woman in that small house, stepping over sewage to reach her own front door, is still waiting for hers.

My name, Mzamo, means try. So I will keep trying to make sense of this, and I will try to vote with my head and my heart in the same room.

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A person is a person through other people, which means a leader is a leader only through the people he or  she  serves, not the people he or she steps over.

Choose well. Choose wisely.
Not yet Uhuru.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts- Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.

PS. The views expressed are my own. The clip described circulated on WhatsApp Status and social media; quotations from it are my transcription. Other statements attributed to Mr Mantashe are as reported by The Citizen, Newzroom Afrika and The Herald (September 2026).