8 March 2026
Sunday, the 8th March 2026, The Young Communist League of South Africa (Ufasimba) has noted, with profound disappointment but without the slightest surprise, the deplorable remarks of the Minister of Finance, Comrade Enoch Godongwana, in which he saw it fit to mock the unemployed, ridicule those who march in defence of their dignity, and confess with breathtaking casualness that his entire history of opposing neoliberalism was nothing more than performance art lubricated by Heineken.
The Young Communist League of the South African Communist Party regards these remarks not only as merely a careless or snarky remark. These remarks are a political confession and a master class on class betrayal rolled into one, and with this background established the YCLSA will not let these remarks go unchallenged.
With his recent distasteful remarks the Minister has done the progressive movement an unintended favour. In a single moment of unguarded arrogance, he confirmed what many have long suspected but could never openly advance. He told us, in his own words, that when he sat among revolutionaries and attacked the architects of neoliberal policy, people like Trevor Manuel, he did so not out of conviction but out of the luxury of having no responsibility. His own words were plain and damning. He said he would go into meetings, “attack them and attack them,” and then go home. He would crack open a Heineken and say to himself, “Hey, we’re shy,” because coming out of that meeting, he was just going to go home and “make that noise.” That was his phrase. Not build the movement. Not sharpen the programme. Not prepare the working class for productivity. Make noise. By his own admission, the Minister regarded his years of radicalism as posturing noise, a theatre performed between drinks, as a hobby sustained by the knowledge that soon he will also be secured in the comfort of knowing he would never be held to account for any of it. This is the blatant confession of political fraud and working class agent provocateur.
The Minister admitted, in front of the whole country, that his radicalism was a costume, it was never his character. And the working class of this country is owed an apology of historic proportions for every meeting he contaminated with insincere outrage while real comrades bled, were detained, and sacrificed everything for the cause. Those comrades were not performing. They meant every word. They paid with their bodies and their freedom. And this man sat among them, playacting.
He was drinking Heineken while others were drinking teargas. He was making noise while others were making history. And now he has the audacity to stand before us as though his current posture of fiscal conservatism is the product of wisdom rather than the latest in a long career of ideological convenience.
But the confession, devastating as it is, is not the worst of it.
The Minister then turned his gaze upon the millions of South Africans who take to the streets, who raise their voices against an economy that has systematically excluded them, and he dismissed them with the most callous words a Finance Minister in a constitutional democracy can utter. He said, and we quote him directly: “These people, I don’t worry about this one. They march every day, every day. I’ve got a budget because they’ve no work to do.” Let that settle in the bones of every unemployed young person in this country.
Let it settle in the bones of every mother who has watched her child leave the house each morning to look for work that does not exist and return each evening with nothing but the weight of rejection on their shoulders. The Minister of Finance, the very man entrusted with the architecture of economic policy, the custodian of the national fiscus, the individual who above all others should lie awake at night tormented by the unemployment crisis, has looked at the wreckage of his own making and blamed the victims for having too much time on their hands.
He did not say they march because they are hungry. He did not say they march because the economy has abandoned them. He did not say they march because the social contract has been broken. No. He said they march because they have no work to do. As if unemployment is something people choose. As if protest is what you do when you are bored. As if the pain of eleven million people without work is just idle mischief. That is not a policy disagreement. That is contempt. Pure, undiluted contempt from a man who has crossed the class line so completely that the people on the other side have become invisible to him.
A Finance Minister who mocks the unemployed for being unemployed is a Finance Minister who has lost all right to occupy the office. He is not governing for the people. He is governing against them and laughing about it.
And then, as if to sign and seal his own political obituary, the Minister told us who he does listen to. Not the workers. Not the youth. Not the mothers who stretch R500 across a month and still come up short. No. He said, and again we use his own words: “But those who understand the economy say, you guys are doing well, and I’m happy with that. Thank you very much.” We know exactly who these people are. They are the ratings agencies. They are the boardrooms. They are the international finance institutions, the IMF whisperers, the World Bank disciples, and the same neoliberal voices he once pretended to oppose over Heineken.
And here is what stings the most about that sentence. Look at how he has divided the country in his own mind. The people who march, they are idle, they are a nuisance, they do not matter. But the people “who understand the economy,” oh, those ones are credible, those ones get his ear. So what is he really saying? He is saying the working class does not understand the economy. He is saying their suffering does not count as economic data. He is saying their hunger is not a fiscal indicator. He is saying their desperation does not show up on the spreadsheets he now worships. Only the approving nod of capital counts. Only the applause of the market matters. And when the market claps, the Minister takes a bow and says “thank you very much” while eleven million people stand behind him with empty hands and emptier stomachs.
The Minister has not changed his mind. He has simply changed tables. He has gone and sat himself down in Trevor Manuel’s old chair, picked up Trevor Manuel’s old vocabulary, and started running Trevor Manuel’s old programme. The only difference, and it is the cruelest difference, is that he spent years pretending to be against all of it. At least Trevor Manuel never hid what he was. This one hid behind a Heineken and a radical pose for as long as it was fashionable, and now that the costume is off, he wants us to clap for the man underneath. We will not clap. We will not.
And let us talk about what this man has actually done with the responsibility he now wears like a badge of honour. The Minister speaks of those “who understand the economy” praising his work, but the economy itself tells a different story entirely. Under his stewardship, South Africa’s GDP growth has limped along at figures that would embarrass even the most pessimistic forecaster. His much celebrated Operation Vulindlela, dressed up in the language of reform, has delivered structural adjustments that serve the logic of the market while leaving the structure of poverty untouched. His embrace of fiscal consolidation, the polite term for austerity, has seen the social wage squeezed year after year while debt servicing costs now consume more of the budget than health or policing. The Minister balances his books on the backs of the poor and then expects applause from Harvard seminars and Davos panels. He has returned from every international engagement more convinced that the medicine is working, even as the patient convulses on the floor.
And then there is his Growth, Inclusion, and Sustainability framework. Let us be honest about what it is. It is orthodox economics dressed in progressive clothing. It talks loudly about inclusion but goes dead quiet when you ask about redistribution. Growth for whom, Minister? Inclusion into what exactly? Sustainability of whose privilege? The economy grows on paper and contracts in the stomachs of the people. The Minister measures success in basis points and credit ratings while the people measure it in whether there is bread on the table by the end of the month. If these are the metrics of a man doing well, then the metrics themselves are rotten, and the Minister is too deep in the theology of neoliberalism to smell it.
The YCLSA says what must be said without decoration or diplomacy.
You do not get to drink with the struggle for twenty years, wake up in the mansion of fiscal conservatism, and then laugh at the people still queuing at the unemployment office. You do not get to walk into meetings, attack comrades who held real positions of responsibility, go home to your Heineken, call it all noise, and then decades later demand that the working class take your current convictions seriously. You do not get to table austerity budgets that cut social spending to the bone, starve public hospitals and schools of resources, preside over the most unequal economy on earth, and then wave away the anger of the people as the idle pastime of those with nothing better to do. You do not get to fly to Harvard, collect your certificates in neoliberal orthodoxy, return home and implement textbook austerity, and then tell the people who suffer under it that they simply do not understand. You do not get to do all of this and then tell us you are happy because the markets approve. You do not get to say “thank you very much” and walk off the stage while the country burns behind you.
The markets did not liberate this country, Minister. The people did. The very people you now dismiss. The very people you say you do not worry about. The very people whose marching you find tiresome.
The YCLSA wishes to remind the Minister of the material conditions his budgets have failed to address and in many cases have worsened. More than eleven million South Africans are without work. Youth unemployment has surpassed sixty percent and in some communities sits closer to seventy. The expanded definition of unemployment, which includes those who have given up looking because the economy offers them nothing, paints an even more devastating picture. The national minimum wage remains a poverty wage that insults the labour it is meant to compensate. Inequality has not narrowed under his watch. It has deepened. South Africa remains the most unequal country on earth, and the Minister’s budgets have done nothing to challenge the structural foundations of that inequality. The cost of electricity, food, and transport has made daily survival an act of endurance for millions of households. Load shedding has destroyed small businesses and eroded whatever fragile economic participation the poor had managed to claw together. These are not abstract statistics for academic conferences and investor roadshows. These are the lived realities of the people the Minister swore to serve, and they march not because they have nothing to do, but because he has given them nothing to hope for. They march because the economy he manages does not manage to feed them. They march because the budgets he tables do not set a place for them. And when he says he does not worry about them, he confirms their deepest fear, that the government has abandoned them and feels no shame about it.
The YCLSA further calls upon the Alliance, the African National Congress, and all formations of the Mass Democratic Movement to reflect with the seriousness this moment demands on whether a Minister who holds the base of the movement in such open contempt can credibly continue to serve in the name of that movement. This is not a call we make lightly, and it is not born of factional mischief. It is born of political principle. You cannot laugh at the unemployed and then expect us to trust you with the job of saving them. You cannot tell the whole country that your radical days were just noise between Heinekens and then turn around and ask us to believe you will champion economic transformation. We do not believe you, Minister. The Minister told us himself that responsibility changed his attitude, that once he had power, he abandoned every position he ever held. That is not maturity. That is capitulation. That is class treachery dressed up as pragmatism. And the movement must decide, with urgency, whether it will be led by those who capitulate to capital or by those who remain loyal to the people.
The youth and working class of this nation will not be mocked by an aloof Minister who has made a career of being on the wrong side of every class question while somehow always landing on the comfortable side of every appointment. The Minister may have graduated from a Heineken revolutionary to a champagne neoliberal, but the vintage has not improved his politics, only his taste in drinks. The people of South Africa are still drinking from the same bitter cup of poverty, unemployment, and inequality that his budgets have done nothing to sweeten, and no amount of applause from those “who understand the economy” will wash the taste of betrayal from their mouths.
If the Minister finds the marching of South Africans irritating and tiresome, perhaps he should take a deep look in the mirror and consider for a moment that his failures are directly related to what those protesting find unbearable. If he does not worry about them, let him know that they worry every single day, about rent, about food, about whether their children will inherit anything other than the same despair that this economy has bequeathed to their generation.
And if he is happy because the markets are happy, then let him know that the people are not happy, and it is their happiness, not the market’s, that should keep him up at night.
The YCLSA has said what it has said.
Issued by the Young Communist League of South Africa
National Secretary: Mzwandile Thakhudi
For interviews and enquiries:
National Spokesperson: Ramatolo Tlotleng Cell: (074) 478 4403
Media Liaison Officer: Dineo Mokoena Cell: (073) 969 8532
