As SA noted the 30th anniversary of FW de Klerk’s momentous speech, a couple of inevitable thinkpieces asked a curious question: why can’t Cyril Ramaphosa make the kind of tough decisions De Klerk made, putting the needs of the country before the positions and egos of party hardliners?

I understand why people might lunge for this extremely tenuous historical parallel. The politics of SA feel so utterly exhausted that encouraging the incremental improvement of existing systems feels naive. Voluntary regime change of the sort De Klerk initiated seems like a much more sensible approach...