All of the government's future attempts at dumping its hot potatoes in private sector laps will rely on the government keeping its word, being able to execute sensibly and quickly, and politicians trusting and understanding what the department is doing and why. Not one of these things happened in this case.

Following the announcement by Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan that the Takatso transaction had been cancelled, several pertinent questions arise: Who is to blame? What does it mean for SAA? What does it mean for future privatisations?

Oh, one thing. Did I write "privatisation"? My bad. That's not what I meant. We don't use such an ugly word in public any more. What I meant was a "public-private partnership". This is not the process of the state admitting failure and dumping its badly run hot potatoes into the private sector's lap. God forbid.

Anyway, assigning blame is usually pretty difficult, but in this case, it's easy: the blame falls squarely on Gordhan. At each stage of the process, Gordhan had crucial decisions to make and he consistently made the wrong ones. That's easy to say in retrospect; success in governing is often a marginal affair.

Let's go through those decisions. Right at the start of the process, the government decided that the political cost of pumping billions into SAA was (at last) not sustainable, so the idea was to pass that responsibility on to the private sector. Sorry. I mean, enter into a public-private partnership.

Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) was...