Jacob Zuma Tells MK Party Supporters ‘We Are All Slaves’ But Who Holds the Chains

Jacob Zuma gripped the podium and told a packed hall of uMkhonto weSizwe Party faithful on Wednesday that South Africans had crossed into a collective condition of bondage — his voice rising as he declared that every person in the room lived as a slave. The former president chose no diplomatic softening, no careful framing. He meant it, and the crowd felt it.

Zuma’s exact words cut through the noise of routine party rhetoric: ‘We have reached a point where we think we are slaves, we all of us. It’s a reality — you think, you feel, you are slaves.’ MK Party officials confirmed the statement originated at an internal address, though the recording spread rapidly across WhatsApp networks before mainstream outlets amplified it countrywide.

MK Party spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndhlela told journalists the president spoke from deep personal conviction about economic marginalisation. Opposition parties responded sharply — Democratic Alliance federal leader John Steenhuisen called the language dangerous and irresponsible, while the Economic Freedom Fighters described it as borrowed thunder from their own longstanding inequality narrative. SAPS public order units monitored no immediate unrest following circulation of the clip.

Zuma built this ideological groundwork across eighteen months of MK Party gatherings, consistently framing post-apartheid democracy as a hollow transfer of political power without genuine economic liberation. His departure from the ANC in 2023 gave him a fresh platform to pursue increasingly combative positions, drawing supporters who felt mainstream politics had abandoned their daily struggles against unemployment, hunger, and crumbling municipal infrastructure.

In the front row, a sixty-three-year-old grandmother from Nongoma named Nomvula Dlamini clutched a printed MK Party cloth in both fists and wept openly — not from sadness, witnesses recounted, but from the raw recognition that someone powerful had finally named what her household endures each month on a R2 090 pension grant.

No government spokesperson had issued a formal response by Thursday morning, and Presidency officials remained silent on whether President Cyril Ramaphosa viewed the slavery characterisation as a direct assault on constitutional democracy. The question hanging over Parliament, township streets, and suburban dinner tables alike is both simple and enormous: if thirty years of freedom produced slavery, what does Jacob Zuma intend to build instead?

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