By Gillian Schutte
Somewhere between squeezing his teenage zits and setting up his selfie-stick, Pieter Kriel has stumbled onto centre stage of South African political theatre – arms outstretched, voice shaking with borrowed conviction. He delivers lines like “land restitution” and “anti-imperialism” with all the depth of a breakfast show weather report. And always – always – with the absurd punctuation of “Ladies and Gentlemen.”
What revolutionary says that? Clowns say that. Cheap magicians say that. Better Call Saul says that. Che Guevara did not. Neither did Steve Biko. Nor Chris Hani. Nor any revolutionary whose name was earned through blood, not lighting cues. But Pieter repeats it like a nervous tic – because he’s not a revolutionary. He’s a puppet on the payroll.
And his puppetry became unmistakable in his response to my first article. I could virtually see the strategy meeting – handlers gathered, whiteboards out – figuring out how to discredit my views without so much as breathing my name.
That’s right, manene, namanenekazi, this white makoti – yes, the Engelse Boeremeisie gone rogue – has been shadow-banned by the very same think tanks propping up Lil Pieter. Me, whose name must never be spoken on their platforms (not since around 2016), lest the memory of my dissidence disturb their illusion of curated consent.
And honestly, the response was so insultingly scripted, so sanitised and smug, that I make no apologies for summoning my inner tannie – the one baking buttermilk rusks, with a built-in bullshit radar, and with zero patience for min bekvol politiek. Even my English-speaking upbringing couldn’t suppress the wrath of my Dutch ancestry. So yes, I’m now giving this little shit the verbal snotklap he was begging for. Not out of pettiness, but out of inherited instinct. Because nothing enrages an old-school tannie – even one raised on Shakespeare and fish paste on toast – more than a smug white laaitie trying to rebrand revolution as if no one died for it.
Foeitog!
But let’s not waste another paragraph on the puppet—let’s talk about the puppeteers instead and their methodology.
In 2024, Helen Zille opened a new laboratory – not of the “Black boys” she once boasted of engineering in her DA test kitchen – but of white boys. Blonde, well-lit, PR-ready. Less risk, same strategy. She called it a youth revival. Others might call it a settler reset.
Zille has used this method before. She didn’t start off quoting Cecil John Rhodes. She started off performing solidarity theatre – dancing gumboot-style with Black workers, wrapping herself in struggle aesthetics, branding herself as post-racial while never threatening structural power. It was all pantomime – strategic posturing to win over hearts and minds, and more importantly, votes.
And when it had served its purpose, the real Zille surfaced – tweeting that colonialism wasn’t so bad, defending white power under the guise of “rational debate,” and doubling down with every backlash. That wasn’t a deviation. That was the script. The “pro-Black” performance was simply the first act in a donor-funded masquerade.
But Zille was not operating in a vacuum. The funding that underwrites her Democratic Alliance (DA) machine is tied to a broader ideological architecture – a web of reactionary think tanks, settler sympathisers, and Western backers. The Institute of Race Relations (IRR), the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), AfriForum, and their global affiliates – yes, the very same networks that funded the colour revolution which recently ushered in the GNU and the DA into national power through coalition sleight of hand – are not just donors. They are the scriptwriters.
They exist to preserve structural white power under the illusion of constitutionalism, free speech, and “non-racialism.” Zille is merely their local emissary, and Pieter is the new puppet. A sacrificial emoji in a long tradition of false messiahs.
She tried her DA boys – Chris Pappas, Jordan Hill-Lewis, the clean-cut, blue-blazered prototypes of neoliberal grooming – but they were too visibly DA. Too obviously institutional. So she found a boy with a better image. A boy who could cosplay “the future” while saying nothing new. A boy with the audacity to erase the Left while pretending to revive it.
Pieter, the boy who speaks of land without setting foot on it.
Pieter, the anti-imperialist who curates his feed from colonial hotels in Jerusalem.
Pieter, who mistakes a ring light and an AI slogan for politics.
Ladies and Gentlemen.
You may see leadership. I see performance art tailored for the liberal algorithm. A soft-power magic trick — now you see the revolution, now you don’t. He says land back, but only in ways that soothe the donor class. He says Palestine, but crops the Israeli flag from his hotel in Jerusalem. He tours Israeli-planted olive groves with no grasp of the ancestral Palestinian link to ancient olive groves, razed by settlers. He posts one olive tree and calls it war reporting — from Jerusalem — while Gaza burns. His biggest “clash” is with a tripod.
But behind the infantile theater is a precise intelligence operation.
Donor-funded youth labs. Scripted dissent. Carefully curated anger that never threatens ownership, never touches empire, and never organises the poor. This is how intelligence functions in the post-truth era – not with spooks and trench coats, but with shallow analysis and viral clips. And in this performance, Pieter even becomes the DA’s moving billboard: throwing in the occasional critique of the party, just sharp enough to seem independent, but always followed by a mention that keeps their name circulating in the algorithm. That’s how brand laundering works – embed the product in the mouth of the so-called outsider, then let the illusion of critique double as marketing.
I know it. Because I’ve seen it before. And because I have a gift for sniffing it out. And because once I’ve seen it I do not let go.
I don’t need dossiers or leaks. I can smell manufactured dissent from kilometres away. Intelligence think tanks may be strategic, but they’re rarely original. Once you know the choreography, you see every step coming.
Pieter wasn’t chosen by these labs for brilliance – because brilliance he is not. He was chosen because he’s compliant. Mouldable. A vessel. A ventriloquist puppet. He’s not the message – he’s the delivery boy, tasked with pacifying Black youth by echoing their pain just loudly enough to appear relatable, but never radically enough to ignite action.
His new look – evolved from mullet to media-trained – comes complete with presidential poses, a crisp white shirt, a reliable gaze, and arms folded just so, to signify power. It’s image management 101: the transformation from awkward youth to calculated candidate. His delivery is strident, devoid of self-reflexivity, and fuelled by the overconfidence of someone groomed to lead before he’s ever had to follow. His arrogance is outpaced only by his ignorance. This is a boy who declares he will “show the world the truth” because “the Left is dead” – as if the memory of Biko, Hani, and Sankara aren’t still speaking louder than his TikToks. A boy who positions himself as the messiah of a struggle he never lived, erasing the names of true revolutionaries with every bossy monologue.
Biko. Sankara. Sobukwe. Fanon.
Gone – in a flourish of Instagram captions and vacant stare-downs with olive trees.
And with that erasure comes the erasure of lived trauma. The children shot in 1976. The tortured. The imprisoned. The barefoot bravery of a generation that rose up against guns with stones – and paid with their futures, their limbs, their lives. Their story is reduced to a backdrop for Pieter’s great performance of “discovery.” It is an outrage masquerading as outreach.
It’s not just offensive. It’s dangerous.
Because erasure is a tool of empire.
And when you erase the real struggle, you clear the path for a counterfeit one.
I will take the abuse, the misrepresentation of this as “jealousy” or “a spat”, the gaslighting from all side of the ideological map. My interest has never been clout. My interest is in truth. And the truth is this:
Pieter Kriel is the puppet.
I am focused on the handlers.
And I will not stop.
This isn’t about one boy in a yellow T-shirt. It’s about the apparatus that elevates him. The same Helen Zille who once danced Black for the camera, now pulling strings from behind it with her army of Western funders and think tanks. The same settler logic now rebranded in youth skin – repackaged, reamplified, and redeployed to neutralise resistance while performing progress.
We don’t need another influencer telling us what revolution looks like.
We know what it looks like.
It looks like Biko’s blood. It looks like Sobukwe’s silence. It looks like apartheid death squads. It looks like a mother’s grief in Gugulethu when her teenage children disappeared into the prison system. It looks like land seizures and mine deaths and hunger strikes – not ringlights and hashtags.
So please – wake up. Smell the deceit.
This isn’t a movement. It’s a memo.
Don’t allow Pieter Kriel to be manufactured by the DA into a future SA president – shouting about revolution today, only to quote Cecil John Rhodes tomorrow in place of land return. That’s exactly what his DA icon Helen Zille did. She performed solidarity, then defended colonialism.
So the next time you hear, “Ladies and Gentlemen,”
Know that you are not being welcomed into truth.
You are being sold a product.
Here are some hashtags that align with your tone, critique, and themes of soft-power manipulation, decoy activism, Palestine, and donor-class politics:
#DecoyPolitics
#DigitalColonialism
#PalestineIsNotAStage
#RevolutionAsContent
#SoftPowerEmpire
#LiberalAlgorithm
#DonorApprovedDissent
#PerformativeActivism
#SettlerColonialism
#FreePalestine
#FalseProphets
#InfluencerOccupation
#ZionismIsViolence
#NGOIndustrialComplex
#NotInOurName
Satire: Media for Justice does not necessarily agree witht the views expressed in this satire.