The best bits of former Business Day editor Songezo Zibi’s new book, Manifesto, come in the closing paragraphs as he dreams of a government free from the pressures of patronage and factions.

“Were I to be president,” he writes, “I would dismantle the department of trade & industry as it is, and abolish the department of small business development ... I would place all macroeconomic co-ordination under the National Treasury, which in this instance would include industrial policy and economic modernisation.”..