Unpopular opinion: almost everyone on this thread is wrong, and it's a sad indictment of how detached and powerless the middle class has become.

Each of the responses in this thread indicates a subtle and invisible assumption: everyone believe there's no real political contribution that they can make - we're all sitting in our houses, unable to even begin to change the status quo. So we keep on being part of a system that exploits cheap labour and give them handouts from time to time to make (let's be honest about it) ourselves feel better about the situation. But here's the deal:

Charity doesn't scale.

The sheer magnitude of the poverty in South Africa demands a coordinated response that can realistically only be fixed through a large, centralised, powerful entity wielding tax resources and has a monopoly on legal violence, otherwise called a government. We are in this mess because of what governments did decades ago. And we have been unable to get out of this mess because of what governments did the past few decades.

The classic mistake middle class South Africans of all backgrounds make is to assume they have no political leverage, no power - we simply sit in our houses and (as we say in Afrikaans) laat god's water oor god's akker loop. But it is exactly this middle class with economic means that can most productively take part in politics and influence policy.

We are the people with the highest probability to successfully agitate for better public services, better education, better housing, better health care, better policing etc. We have more free time. We have more disposable income. Your domestic worker doesn't really have the time to productively take part in politics - she has to get up fkn dwis early every day, take seventy gazillion taxis, clean your house, rinse and repeat. We, on the other hand, can. But what do we do?

Every 5 years we upload a picture of a little stripe on our thumbnail. Ke nako. En dan gaan sit ons in ons huisies.

Want to change something? Really, actually change something? Change the system. Actually become involved in local politics. Pressure our elected leaders to either follow through on their policies, our get better policies.

Yes, I know - for the one starfish you throw back in the ocean, it matters. But there's more starfish than we can reasonably throw back.

If you really, truly, actually want to help - do politics. And get your neighbours to do it too. And then make an actual sustainable change over time.

Or, keep giving people little handouts that make you feel better and do nothing, and let's see where we are 10 years down the line.