The ANC's Gaslighting

Hunted, Haunted and Denied

South Africa is a broken place, and the African National Congress (ANC) is the one holding the pieces. Two things are true at the same time: they’ve failed everyone—black, white, farmers, children—and their lies have twisted us so much that we’re fighting each other instead of taking aim at them. What was once a country full of hope is now a shadow of poverty, crime, and shattered ubuntu. This is a loud warning for the West: watch what happens when the truth gets buried.

Why are we not allowed to state that you get opportunistic crime and then you get targeted crime like xenophobia? Is xenophobia also “just crime”? There is a distinction, and it can only be fully understood by lived experience. Telling a farmer that he isn’t a target when he spends his entire day locking down his farm and family is a joke. The reality is that these people get the calls and hear the attack arriving in their bedrooms. So let’s start with who’s hunted.

The attackers know full well they’re facing dogs, electric fences, guns, cameras, and patrols yet, frustratingly, much of the world still believe they would face all that and risk their lives for a cellphone and a few hundred rand. Farm attacks aren’t robberies; they’re meticulously planned targeted murders. Farmers, many of them Afrikaners, lock their doors tighter than Westerners have to every night not out of unsubstantiated fear, but from a survival instinct. They patrol their land, become their own first responders, fight back and, sadly, bury their dead.

Despite a few loud, ineffective, campaigns the assassinations don’t stop - proving the cold grip of targeted crime. KwaZulu-Natal in 2024 saw 17 political killings, such as that of Nhlakanipho Shangase, an eThekwini councillor gunned down over ANC tender fights and Loyiso Nkohla of the Western Cape, whose killing in Philippi in 2023 was tied gangs to politics.

“They’re after our kids!”

"My motherly instincts are telling me my daughter is still alive and in this area. We will find her, I will walk on foot to find her. I will look in every little shack, I'm going to do it by myself if I have to," said Kelly Smith, who is currently facing trial for her own alleged involvement in the disappearance of her daughter. Her words at the time struck a chord because they mirror the pain of communities under siege by organised criminal networks of human traffickers who prey on the vulnerable.

Everyone in the targeted communities has PTSD and the only attention that is paid to them comes from politicians' photo ops.

Beyond farms, rape stats hit 41,583 - over 100 a day - in 2023, with one in three women facing assault. Kids like Kelly Smith's daughter, Josllin, snatched by traffickers and foreigners torched aren’t random events; they’re chosen. These are executions, not accidents, showing intentionally picks victims while the ANC shrugs.

Why the ANC Shrugs

That’s where the gaslighting kicks in. The ANC calls all this a “crime problem” to hush up the clear overtones of class and racial warfare and dismiss the screams of the hunted. Thus, they've convinced the poor black South African that they must defend the party that keeps them poor and convinced the struggling white South African that any mention of their suffering is an act of racism. And they have convinced the privileged of white, black, and every shade between that if they are safe, then everyone else must be safe. It’s a trap which is splitting us apart.

In Cape Town, rich folks can sip their wine in safe estates, pretending the Cape Flats - where gangs hunt and kill people like animals - don’t exist. Yet commuters get robbed of their paycheques at knifepoint at train stations, foreigners get burned alive in hate filled attacks and women are targeted and raped.

And while we dodge bullets, the ANC waste billions on their own bellies and PR instead of investing in the lives in their care. Take the Eastern Cape, where Port Elizabeth became Gqeberha in 2021. The ANC claimed that “Changing the name of Port Elizabeth to Gqeberha will improve service delivery”. Millions went to new street signs, yet hospitals there are tombs of broken equipment with patients dying in hallways because the average person can’t get care.

They’ve blown R500 billion since 2009 on corruption, blaming apartheid while stealing development funds from kids’ nutrition and clinics. It’s not just waste; it’s wilfully choosing optics over oxygen and letting the hunted bleed.

The sheltered don’t see it. Too safe to grasp the danger, some whites even flaunt soccer matches with kids and pics with elderly parents to prove no targeting after a child is murdered or a couple tortured to death. Sick, right? With monopoly capital, the Louis Vuitton teen, “oppressed” yet privileged, scorns the squatter-camp white labeled a "racist." Estate whites, never near “arm blankes” or farmers, say all’s fine. Let them eat cake. The late-night DJ flaunting privilege hasn’t seen the Afrikaner camp, coloured gang turf, or the raped farmwife watching her husband die, yet insists no one’s targeted.

Civic Action

Afriforum has begged for years to name farm attacks and has been met with silence from the ANC. Desperate after endless murders, they went to the US, pre 2025 under Biden. If you’re angry your plight is ignored, ask: Who’s denying it?

The ANC wants us mad at those who ask, not them who loot.

When can we admit that many blacks are not disadvantaged while many whites are extremely disadvantaged and are indeed targeted? A simple-minded argument we hear all the time is: “that farmer killed his worker, so farmers aren’t targeted.” This fallacy is in an attempt to confuse and gaslight South Africans into silence over demographic problems which, in reality, aren’t just about race. It doesn't solve anything for Leah Jazz to proclaim how “easy” life is when your child is not targeted, but someone else’s child is targeted.

Decades of Violence and Burnt Out Narratives

Everyone’s got PTSD here. The ANC promised hope but delivered poverty, broken roads, blackouts, hunger, joblessness, a mountain of chaos topped with hopelessness and wealth for a precious few. People don’t know what to do, so they fight who they’re told. We’ve got race division, sure, but economic vulnerability now splits communities within races. The most privileged of all have job security regardless of race, safety regardless of location, and financial prosperity regardless of education.

Those are the ones telling everyone else that everything is fine, to not worry about race-based laws and that they are not at risk, while always reminding us that “Elon’s father owned an emerald mine.”

Ava in Africa

Musician | Worship Leader