Those who have read Jacques Pauw's depressing and troubling The President's Keepers will be familiar with the name of Jonas Makwakwa.
The South African Revenue Service executive was suspended for a year after the Financial Intelligence Centre told SARS commissioner Tom Moyane about suspicious cash deposits into his bank accounts.
On Wednesday Makwakwa returned to his post as chief officer: business and individual tax after SARS said an investigation had cleared him. He may well be innocent, but since his name appears throughout Pauw's book - which describes how allegations of wrongdoing against leaders of our "gangster republic" are routinely swept under the carpet - SARS should forgive the sceptics.
Moyane himself is so central to Pauw's narrative that two chapters are named in his honour (though "honour" isn't a quality Pauw attributes to him). They describe how he rapidly dismantled the SARS of Pravin Gordhan, turning an institution that consistently over-delivered into one now lost in a R51-billion black hole.
"By adopting a strategy of wild allegations, media leaks and subterfuge, Moyane eradicated the most effective law-enforcement unit in the country," Pauw writes. Makwakwa, by the way, is Moyane's right-hand man.
The overwhelming message of Pauw's book, others like it, and the leaked Gupta e-mails, is that functional institutions have been systematically destroyed in the eight-and-a- half years since Jacob Zuma became president.
His successor will inherit a country that is flat-lining. Forget about radical transformation; South Africa needs radical emergency surgery. It will come with severe pain and a recovery period which will have us living on a knife-edge for years - if we're lucky.
The last time South Africa was brought to its knees by evil men, we had Nelson Mandela to get us back on our feet. This time?
