The news cycle has rolled on but Cyril Ramaphosa’s smart city has stayed with me like the fragments of a fevered dream that linger once the sweat has dried.

In the heat of the moment on Thursday night it felt insulting. For Ramaphosa to fantasise about a technological utopia while his government presides over the industrial-scale destruction of potential and hope seemed to verge on a kind of medieval tone-deafness, the sort where the king orders the serfs to get excited about the new tapestry he’s commissioned for his bedroom...