Who is to blame for the disaster that is SA Inc for the past twelve years? In its presentation on rebuilding the SA economy, released last week, the new umbrella body for SA businesses said that in the past ten years we had “stumbled”. It said foreign direct investment had declined, national debt had soared, ratings had plummeted and unemployment and inequality continued to rise.

From the way we debate all this, you would be forgiven for thinking that something had “happened to us” in the period since December 2007. If you scraped the niceties aside you would realise we are essentially saying President Jacob Zuma and his kleptocratic cronies “happened” to us and we went from a fast-rising country into a downward spiral...