Goodbye to a year of living dangerously

This time last year Des van Rooyen was about halfway through his 92-hour tenure in charge of the country's finances. Imagine, for a moment, that he had stayed ...

Had President Jacob Zuma not been held with his feet to the fire on the fateful weekend following 9/12, the appointment might have stuck and our slide to junk would have been accelerated. It didn't happen. Pravin Gordhan was reappointed within four days of the biggest strategic misstep of Zuma's political career. And despite relentless assaults on the National Treasury during 2016, we are finishing the year in better shape than we started.

Historians will marvel at how close we came to self-destruction.

Nenegeddon provided the crisis South Africa needed to evoke the rallying cry of state, labour and business co-operation. It's far from perfect, as our third-quarter GDP number of 0.2% will attest, but the ratings decisions of recent weeks that have kept South Africa out of junk show that the country, while deep in the relegation zone, is still being given the benefit of the doubt.

It's a great excuse for a party. For those of us, who, Grinch-like, abandoned the year-end charades ages ago, 2017 cannot come soon enough.

Not that next year is going to be considerably better politically or economically, it's just that we cannot wait to see the back of 2016. Going to a party on December 31 will be like going to the funeral of your Grade 3 playground nemesis. You want to make sure 2016 is dead and buried.

It was a year in which millions of South Africans woke up to the fact that they were being conned. January greeted us with plunging confidence following Nhlanhla Nene's sacking and continued with the constant insecurity that has dogged Gordhan and the Treasury since his reappointment.

It was the year of near-zero growth. The year in which the lid on the pot of youth dissatisfaction began to rattle as the political temperature rose to boiling point. Globally, it was the year in which Donald Trump was elected to the White House andBritain voted against short-term prosperity and (possibly) destroyed the cohesive force of the EU that has ensured the longest unbroken period of European peace in modern history. It was the year in which Vladimir Putin consolidated his hold on power and we braced for the departure of Barack Obama, the first thoroughly decent politician in the Oval Office since Jimmy Carter.

Italian voters this week voted against constitutional reform and Matteo Renzi became the 41st Italian leader to quit in 70 years. In France, National Front leader Marine Le Pen is gaining traction as an era of consensus politics and liberal democracy faces down populism and nationalism on a scale not seen in generations.

But there is an upside to down. Historians will look at Nene's sacking as a turning point: a president, seemingly emboldened by the lack of public opposition to previous appointments with the backing of wealthy friends, did the unthinkable and was slapped down.

It was the year that former public protector Thuli Madonsela raced to ensure that the cesspit she'd uncovered in the complex web of relationships between senior political figures and business-savvy families was exposed.

Without the crisis, we would have been in downgrade territory by June this year. Ironically, one of the biggest acts of deliberate political sabotage of our modern democracy, which felt catastrophic at the time, is likely to be shown over time as a key catalyst in the slow turnaround in the country's fortunes.

Five years from now we will look back at 2016 as a positive turning point in South Africa's history.

Make sure you hold a wake to 2016 - be sure that its worst bits are behind us. Titanic could have had a long and illustrious career on the high seas had Captain Smith simply chosen to avoid the iceberg.

As we near 2017, we need to make sure we do the same.

• Whitfield is a public speaker on the political economy, and an award-winning financial journalist and broadcaster. His "Upside of Down" corporate speech has taken public events by storm this year