The provision of visionary education, responsive health-care, employment, proper housing, piped water, electricity, sanitation and refuse removal to the majority of the country’s citizens living in the shacklands and rural areas has eluded the ANC government 20 years into its incumbency - and the DA in the Western Cape too. But they have managed to deliver T-shirts at political rallies, sod-turnings, government functions and imbizos – usually with a lunch that isn’t free because one’s presence is co-opted for politically cynical reasons.

While Marie Antoinette would have France’s poor eat cake, South Africa’s political elite would have the country’s marginalised starve materially and mentally in party-political or government T-shirts.

President Zuma wanted good stories to tell at his State of the Nation address? We laud government’s and mainstream political parties’ ability to deliver Chinese-made T-shirts to the masses.