Now that the wrecking ball from Nkandla has finally been sent packing, the great job of rebuilding SA must start without delay. Cyril Ramaphosa gets sworn in as president today, and his immediate task will be to assemble the best possible team of technocrats to reprioritise the ANC’s motto, “a better life for all”. The Financial Mail joins the rest of SA in wishing him the best success. The trickier part will be offloading the albatrosses who enabled the giant state looting project of the past nine years. At the front of the queue is the finance minister, the 46-year-old former ANC Youth League leader Malusi Gigaba. You might intuitively imagine that Bathabile Dlamini (social development) or Mosebenzi Zwane (mining) were Jacob Zuma’s most ruinous appointments. You’d be wrong: it is Gigaba who has single-handedly done the most damage to the economy. To understand why, you need to go back to May 2009, when Zuma appointed Gigaba as public enterprises minister. It was the mother of blun...

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