What do we have left now as institutions fall like nine pins?

Once there was the Scorpions, a respected crime-fighting unit. The populace had faith in this institution. The corrupt feared it. Jacob Zuma quaked when he thought of it.

Then in 2007 he took over the reins of the ANC and it was destroyed by his faithful lapdogs Maggie Sotyu and Yunus Carrim within months.

Now we have the Hawks. This is the unit that lays charges against Pravin Gordhan. This is the unit that cannot muster a decent case against any criminal.

This is a unit that now works to persecute – note my words, persecute and not prosecute – those who raise a word against Zuma.

Berning Ntlemeza, the apartheid cop, now insists he is the Hawks’ master and commander despite numerous court rulings that he is not worthy to be a filing clerk at the unit. He can be bold because he knows he has Number One rooting for him.

What do we have left now? They say the road towards a failed state is a process, one failed institution after another, over time. Then, suddenly, you realise that you too are Zimbabwe.

The new public protector says nothing about the State of Capture report. Those who have benefited from their nefarious activities with the Guptas while at Eskom and other state entities are now members of parliament, with bulging bank balances, while whistleblowers such as Mcebisi Jonas are fired and hounded out of public office.

There was a time when young students would shout and scream with adoration when the public protector came to visit their schools. Now the public protector is busy taking pictures – smiling wide – with a man implicated in not one but numerous reports from her office. She says she wants to have a good relationship with this Thief-in-Chief. She, like him, has no shame. The Thief-in-Chief, without shame, goes to pray with the people who have offered Jonas, Vytjie Mentor and others bribes.

What do we have left now? Cast your mind back to the year 2006. The economy was growing like nobody’s business. Unemployment was decreasing. The black middle class was growing. The white elite was growing, too, not diminishing. Just 12 years after democracy, we were no longer a country that’s in junk status. We were riding the crest of a wave.

At the time all these rich and rising rich individuals had a hero. He was the taxman – Gordhan. What kind of country is this where ordinary people know the taxman? The SA Revenue Service was hailed internationally as one of the best in the world.

What do we have now? We have a SARS where employees are kidnapped and locked in boardrooms, where the Number 2 is only dealt with four months after it emerged that he was depositing huge amounts of cash in his and his girlfriend’s bank accounts. This is not an institution anymore. It is a weapon in Number One’s hands.

It is worth noting what the deputy president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, said when he made his displeasure known about the firing of Gordhan as finance minister four weeks ago. He explicitly said when his president, Zuma, told him and the ANC top six officials of his intentions citing an intelligence report that said Gordhan was travelling to London to mobilise against Zuma. Ramaphosa said this fake intelligence report reminded him of the early 2000s when then president, Thabo Mbeki, alleged that Ramaphosa, Mathews Phosa and Tokyo Sexwale were plotting against the state. Of course, we know that Ramaphosa continues to smile and giggle at Zuma, who has not even had Mbeki’s decency to apologise for such a report.

So we don’t have an intelligence service in SA. We have a bunch of spies who manufacture rubbish in the name of Zuma. The bogus Gordhan report has been denounced by our compromised intelligence minister, who says he did not know about it. So who gave this badly-written, illogical, ill-conceived report to Zuma? How can anyone have any respect for a man who believes such utter rubbish?

In the 2000s we had a national prosecuting authority led by men and women of integrity. Now we have the spineless Shaun Abrahamse, a man who still has to explain what he was doing at Luthuli House before he slapped Gordhan last year with bogus charges.

Over the next few months you will see how the most respected of our state institutions, the National Treasury, is drawn and quartered. See how the very best among its economists and other professionals are hounded and intimidated out of their jobs. See how it becomes a mere shell of its former self. See how the new finance minister, the friend of the Gupta family, Malusi Gigaba, guts it and puts it out for favours for these friends and benefactors of the Gupta family.

So what do we have now? What we know now about SA is that the institutions of democracy are falling like nine pins. Our politics are now conducted on the steps of the Constitutional Court because parliament is Zuma’s poodle and the executive is his lapdog. Institutions of state are broken. The judiciary is all that’s left.

Soon the media will feel Zuma’s jackboot. Civil society bodies already feel his harassment. NGO workers are routinely harassed and many know that their phones are tapped. Fear is the order of the day.

So what do we have now? So what is left of the SA of our dreams? Where are the institutions which the colonial and apartheid monster perverted and which we fixed in 1994 and subsequent years?

Jacob Zuma has perverted them all. This is what is left now. This is what is left for me, for you and for our children. A perversion. In future, don’t say you were not warned.