Can all the whining white people all over Twitter and Facebook please shut up? Just shut up. Stop talking about how stupid ANC voters are. Stop talking about how you’re convinced the EFF are going to kill you in your sleep. Stop calling people baboons. Stop behaving like Helen Zille is the true saviour of South Africa. For the love of Woolworths, stop pretending like you and only you know what Nelson Mandela would have wanted. Stop saying that anyone who voted for the ANC deserves poverty and AIDS and crime. Take a deep breath, and stop.

I’m not, for a second, going to stand here and say the ANC are saints. They’re not. Zuma is not a man I’m proud to call my president. But we’ve just had an election. And whether or not a few boxes of ballots went astray, the vast and overwhelming majority of this country voted for the ANC. And your snide, patronizing belief that you know better than them, that’s the slippery slope, right there.

Smugness will eat you alive. But maybe, just maybe, the ANC still have an overwhelming majority because the alternative that voters are being offered just doesn’t cut it. Maybe this is demonstrating the failure of the opposition to really, truly address the issues that voters care about. Human beings are not pure beacons of logic, floating in space. We are emotional beings. That doesn’t make us stupid, it makes us human, not robots. The ANC means so much to so many people. And like it or not, the DA represents so much to so many people.

The ANC brought us democracy. The ANC ushered in our constitution. The ANC have brought a huge amount of change to this country. The ANC have good policies. Why are we consistently creating things to be afraid of? We don’t have enough real problems in this country, we want to have endless paranoid debates about what might happen in your imaginary futures? People are not voting ANC “to support corruption” or “because they don’t care about this country”. So kindly remove your privileged head from your arse.

And while I’m losing my shit, no, I didn’t vote for the ANC, I voted for the EFF. And I wish they’d got more seats. I do think it’s time for change in this country. But not your kind.

• This piece, originally a rant on social media, is republished here with the kind permission of Karen Jeynes.