ANN CROTTY: How the mighty have fallen
2017 hasn’t left us with much to believe in
It has been an appalling year. We’ve been in a state of flux for so many decades you’d think we’d get used to it. But flux is never stable; it gets steadily scarier. We thought it couldn’t get much worse than the firing of finance minister Nhlanhla Nene in 2015. But with this year’s Gupta e-mail leaks, "much, much worse" became the new norm. This was also the year in which corporate SA could no longer pretend that all the country’s difficulties lay with conniving politicians. The year started with a toxic mix of business and politics imploding over the multibillion-rand social grants contract; as it ends, the controversy around that contract remains unresolved — but lots more has been stirred into the mix. Most of all, 2017 has been an iconoclastic year. At the end of it, there isn’t much left to believe in. It’s difficult to believe in business, auditors or chartered accountants; in consultants, legal firms that provide paid-for investigative reports for state-owned entities, or in...
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