I’m sure many of us will remember 2018 as the best of the past few years. Yes, it was a year of contradictions and paradoxes, but as Charles Dickens put it so eloquently in A Tale of Two Cities, we had the best of times, and the worst of times. Last year began on a crest of hope, mostly because we had a new president, who had taken the reins of the ruling party. At the time, the state capture commission promised to reveal the truth, and the rand was finally recovering. But as the year unfolded, some of the ministers implicated in state capture and corruption refused to leave. The Vrede dairy investigation hit one speed bump after another. Then the state capture commission struggled to get co-operation, especially around the vetting of its staff by the State Security Agency — which, itself, is implicated in state capture. All the while, the stark realities of the country weren’t improving. Stats SA announced that 64.2% of black people are poor while 55.5 % of South Africans across ra...

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