Stop right there. It is becoming fashionable to lump together the failing Cyril Ramaphosa administration with the corrupt Jacob Zuma one. As the bad news — from unemployment figures to the failure to prosecute corrupt politicians— assails us and we wring our hands in despair, it has become easy to just say: "They are all the same."

Well, stop it right there. If we continue to misdiagnose our problem this way, we will end up with the wrong solutions. Saying they are all the same means the precipice we stood on in the mid-2010s when Nhlanhla Nene and Pravin Gordhan were fired from the National Treasury is exactly what we face today. That is not true. The problem of a David Des van Rooyen in the safe with his two mint-new advisers given to him by the Gupta family is not at all what we face today, with an Enoch Godongwana in the finance minister’s chair...

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