Cyril Ramaphosa has just executed the most clinical political transition imaginable. Jacob Zuma may have been playing games in these past few weeks, offering to introduce our Cyril to the leaders of the Brics and the African Union ("Some of them are my friends," he said, referring to Vladimir Putin), but he would never in his wildest dreams have imagined when Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma lost the ANC leadership vote on December 20 that he had less than two months left in office.
These are days of wonder, again, for South Africa. We have a second chance. We stopped just at the precipice. We have learnt lessons we will never forget about leaders. Whoever they are, including Ramaphosa.
Still, it was hard not to be moved by his state of the nation address on Friday. "We are one people," he said, "committed to work together to find jobs for our youth; to build factories and roads, houses and clinics; to prepare our children for a world of change and progress; to build cities and towns where families may be safe, productive and content."We are determined to build a society defined by decency and integrity, that does not tolerate the plunder of public resources, nor the theft by corporate criminals of the hard-earned savings of ordinary people.
"While there are many issues on which we may differ, on these fundamental matters we are at one."
After the threatening years of Zuma's presidency, it felt like we had been transported to another dimension.
But we should not get ahead of ourselves. Buried inside Ramaphosa's rhetoric were some impossible goals about industrialisation, special economic zones and job creation.
There's a worldwide race to lure industrial investors. Sri Lanka is in it. Bangladesh and Ethiopia are in it. Britain will soon be in it. We long ago opted out of it by insisting there'd never be places here where our labour laws and decent wages didn't apply. If that doesn't change, Ramaphosa can forget about reindustrialisation through special zones.
And he'll occasionally disappoint us. My bet is that Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba will deliver the budget on Wednesday despite a clamour for him to be fired.
It's complex. Ramaphosa will want to make sure the Mosebenzi Zwanes and Bathabile Dlaminis are out of the cabinet, but Gigaba is not in their league and it is not fair (yet) to put him there.
Yes, it was Gigaba who officially kicked off the state capture project when in 2011 he took a knife to all the big state-owned company boards and placed Gupta family proxies on them...