Wherever the truth lies in this sorry saga, what we have is a fundamental lack of transparency and trust between a government and its citizenry. We simply cannot believe what Ramaphosa or any of his Cabinet ministers say any longer, not about Russia, electricity, safeguarding us from harm or anything else.

Is it too early to declare 2023 South Africa's annus horribilis? Perhaps -- because as any South African knows, something more politically or socially grotesque is always possible. It is becoming a tired line, but to live here one has to have resilience in spades. Things may well become worse before they get better.

As SA Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago said recently, South Africa is the victim of its own "largely self-inflicted wounds". Last week several of these were the subject of global focus.

First, there was the power blackout clip on the BBC with dystopian images of South Africans going about their daily business in the dark and setting out the painful truth of corruption, collusion, mismanagement and State Capture at Eskom. We are all too familiar with the facts.

The President's response has mostly been to watch as we lurch from crisis to crisis. On the electricity crisis, he recently appointed a minister of electricity, someone without any powers (a pun in itself, but this is a country that embraces irony) except to visit power stations and tell us the bleeding obvious. We all know that it is really the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy,...