Nice speech, too bad No1 didn't understand it

When President Jacob Zuma finally got a chance to deliver his state of the nation address on Thursday night, almost everything he said made sense to me. Yes, his struggle to read a prepared speech in English, his fourth language, can be painful to watch, but his message was clear, uncontroversial in my view, and urgent.

You would have to be mad to oppose the notion that black people are still excluded from the economy to an alarming degree, that parts of the formal economy are way too concentrated, and that the land issue is an existential threat to our long-term prosperity as a united nation.

Sadly, by the time Zuma began speaking, the interest in his speech was elsewhere. Parliamentary security staff, apparently hired from Thug Central, roughed up resisting EFF MPs as they were ejected from the chamber. The DA got up and left the house on a point I immediately lost sight of. Both the EFF and the DA had planned their evenings. They knew how they would end.

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The problem is, it is no good standing up and trying to argue that Zuma is an illegitimate president. That is just not true. It is a lie.

He is a pretty incompetent one, sure. And he may have been rapped across the knuckles (way too lightly) by the Constitutional Court last year and, yes, the court did say he had "failed to uphold, defend and respect the constitution as the supreme law of the land" in the Nkandla matter.

But none of that removes him from a position to which he has twice been constitutionally elected.

To argue that he should not dare go to parliament is absurd. I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wanted to hear him tell me what he means by the term "radical social and economic transformation", that language of the left he has recently adopted as he grasps for some political traction in a difficult year.

So I was thrilled (although a bit sleepy) when he actually said: "What do we mean by radical social and economic transformation?"

I sat up and listened. At the end of the explanation I was none the wiser and neither, clearly, was he. He doesn't know what radical economic transformation is, not even a fraction of it.

And even if you strip away Nkandla and his dodgy friends, Zuma's great weakness is that he is just intellectually lazy.

More blacks should be industrialists. Oh, really? What is an industrialist? What is industry? Is tourism an industry? And if it is, does that make an industrialist out of an innkeeper? What don't we make here that new industrialists could make? Why is established industry not already making it?

The fact is that the radical transformation he spelt out on Thursday night is exactly the same argument for inclusive growth that moderates like me have been making for (in my case) two decades now.

Mass inclusive growth is perfectly possible. It may not sound appealing with the EFF breathing fire, but they are still just a distraction.

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But it is hard and detailed work. If you're not able to focus and concentrate and work really hard at getting it right, you'll fail, and the EFF will stop being a distraction and become your government.

If the president understood how much he could really achieve in his remaining two years in the Union Buildings he would be amazed.

But he needs two things. First, a responsible finance minister, which he already has, to make sure the country does not go bust while transforming itself; and second, the courage to clear a political path not for the right people but for what is right.

Back your cities and scrap the provinces. Run the country from the centre. Between them, Johannesburg and the Vaal Triangle, Durban, the Cape Town-Stellenbosch axis, Port Elizabeth, East London and Bloemfontein-Welkom, given greater powers to compete for talent and taxes, could reignite the South African economy.

Pass laws to make business act in the long and not the short term.

Budget to ensure every citizen gets R100,000 or 1,000m² of land at the age of 21. Go to town!

The business concentration you'll struggle with. The few big banks we have used to be a lot of smaller ones. There's a reason the smaller ones died. Find out what the problem was. Make an effort.