Welcome to April 2026

They call it a Government of National Unity.

Which sounds less like a functional democracy and more like a mandatory corporate team-building retreat, where everyone actively resents each other but the facilitators are holding the catered lunch hostage.

We spent three decades waiting for structural transformation, and what we got was a coalition agreement formatted in default Calibri.

It’s April 2026.

And Nersa just announced we’re paying eighteen percent more for electricity.

Not because the grid has miraculously transformed into a utopian marvel of sustainable infrastructure.

No. Because a regulatory official in Pretoria had a "data input error."

A spreadsheet typo.

And now you have to choose between buying groceries or keeping the lights on just to clearly see the empty shelves in your fridge.

But it’s fine. Everything is working exactly as intended.

The official opposition (who are also the government now, which is a fun bit of semantic gymnastics) is writing very strongly worded press releases about it.

That will surely dismantle the inequality. A well-drafted PDF attachment.

It is so suffocatingly hot.

Durban is washing away, Johannesburg taps are coughing out dry air, and a Minister in a tailored suit is standing at a mahogany podium proudly announcing that the GDP grew by zero point four percent.

Zero point four percent.

Thank god. I’ll make sure to spread that marginal economic victory on my toast tomorrow morning.

If the toaster works.

Which it won't, because of the spreadsheet typo.

And the local elections are looming.

You can already smell the desperation in the air. It smells like freshly printed campaign t-shirts and recycled rhetoric.

The populists are screaming about suspending the constitution, the ethno-nationalists are doing whatever they do on a Tuesday, and the GNU is just sitting there, patting itself on the back for simply managing to exist.

I’m sitting in the dark, scrolling on a glowing rectangle.

My brain is moving at a thousand miles an hour, bouncing off the walls of my skull, but my body is anchored to a couch in a room that feels like a greenhouse.

I’m swiping past videos of literal climate collapse, followed immediately by an influencer selling cryptocurrency, followed by an article about the President losing the National Water Action Plan.

They lost the plan about water.

The foundational compound of carbon-based life, and it’s just misplaced in a filing cabinet somewhere in Cape Town.

We are living in a post-satire reality.

You can’t even make jokes about South Africa anymore because the punchline is just a utility bill and an empty dam.

We are compromising ourselves into a slow, polite, privatized apocalypse.

Hey Siri.

How do I dismantle a centralized power monopoly while maintaining my daily screen time average?

(Beat. Complete silence.)

Yeah. Me neither.