What happened? How did we get from booting out Jacob Zuma to recession so fast? How did we get back to a R20 pound sterling with a solid finance minister? How did we get to the point where there is no money to fix anything that's wrong?
We're at a standstill. There's a pall, an ennui, over us. There is so much to repair, but talking about it seems pointless. We cannot get past race. Land, which a few years ago would have ranked quite low on the expectations of the poor, is the new answer to everything.
That is rubbish, yet now it must be dealt with. The ANC, which raised the question, cannot answer it with one voice. Its common ground is to change the constitution so that it can do what it likes. This is typical. The ANC has always been ineffective, always the victim.
It fought a feeble armed struggle. In exile it begged for money in Europe on the backs of black people suffering back home. Now, with the ANC back home and in power for more than 20 years, the poverty it claimed to have the answer to is still there every day, begging at street corners, watching enviously on the edges of far-flung country roads as gleaming cars slide by as they have always done.
Back home, the ANC has entrenched the colonial and apartheid yokes of "traditional" leadership because it requires control in the parts of our society it cannot reach, just as the British and Afrikaner nationalists did. It imprisons the poor in rural areas and neglects them in cities and towns.
No-one who had any experience of the ANC in exile would be the least surprised about the mess it has made of the economy. It took courage to survive exile and, far from home, the ANC, the men particularly, were often damaged and depressed.
The depth of exiles' psychological injury is clear today - rampant corruption, Life Esidimeni, state capture. In Johannesburg a condemned building full of public servants going through the motions of running a provincial government finally catches fire and the blaze takes three days to extinguish.
Nothing the ANC touches works properly; not the hospitals, not the schools, not the trains. Not the fire hoses. No water pressure, you see.
Left to the ANC alone, there is no prospect of any of this getting better. The party simply doesn't have the will to manage our vast social and mechanical complexity on the ground.
Islands of excellence like the National Treasury and the Reserve Bank are under constant threat from the party itself.
We can no longer refit the frigates the navy bought in the late 1990s. There's no money to buy spare parts. The ships will slowly rot.
Rich or poor, you will probably, in your heart, have already decided these people can't help you. The land issue will take years to resolve, if it ever is. The ANC will have to take on traditional leadership. And it cannot make laws that distinguish between white and black. The courts would tie it up forever.
Our only salvation now is economic growth. We are promised a stimulus package but hardly anyone believes it. The best stimulus would be to cut taxes and put criminals in jail, but that is all too much for the ANC. It would need to workshop the idea first.
If there is hope for SA it is in the private sector and civil society. Both work. Both are strong. But since President Cyril Ramaphosa took over from Zuma earlier this year, both seem to have sat back with relief and, more recently, shock.
Money that was available to finance NGOs or investigative journalism has dried up. After all, with Zuma gone, all would be well.
We desperately need civil society on the streets again with business at its back. Whatever happened to Sipho Pityana and Save SA? Is a police force that doesn't act even in the face of the strongest evidence of corruption what you fought for, Sipho?
I'm not scared, just disappointed. My house isn't going to be expropriated. Neither would my farm be, if I had one. Even if it wanted to the ANC simply doesn't have the ability to make land reform happen. It should hand the entire process over to Agri SA, tell it to find x-million hectares and partner with and take responsibility for the new farmers it puts on the land.
That's easy. The hard part is recasting our politics into something that represents the structure of the economy instead of merely the race of the people in it. That will take decades but, mercifully, it'll end in the demise of the ANC - which, right now, seems to me to be a dream worth workshopping...