With SA still reeling from the “farmgate” scandal that threatens to upend President Cyril Ramaphosa’s bid for a second term as ANC (and SA) president, making sense of the foreign exchange regulations he potentially transgressed has been no easy task.

Like the president himself, major law firms have gone to ground and declined to comment, while the Reserve Bank has tried to deflect media scrutiny by citing Regulation 6 of the Exchange Control Regulations, which states that residents of SA who have become “entitled to sell or to procure the sale of any foreign currency” have 30 days to sell it to an authorised dealer (that is, a bank)...