Some situations seem impossible to handle. Chaotic scenarios full of tangled complexities that leave us bewildered and frozen. But if you can spare a little patience, a vital strand in the knotted ball becomes apparent – if you just reach down and pull it, the whole mess unravels and you can begin again.

For me, that happened today. Whether the right people will take hold of the strand remains to be seen, but let me tell you where it is – no one will be able to say they didn’t know.

It starts with a statement by Deputy President David Mabuza made to Parliament today: he says that “the government did not know that money set aside to combat the COVID-19 pandemic would be stolen.” That’s it, it’s all right there.

In case that doesn’t make sense

Think about the last 15 years: thousands of investigative journalism pieces, commissions, trials, testimonies, books, interviews, whistle-blowers, bankrupted municipalities, failed audits and corrupt tenders – every single one of these pointing to the likelihood of systemic corruption on every level of South Africa’s state administration.

Every level: health, education, housing, water projects, agriculture, social relief, policing, state-owned media, borders, sewage and water processing, dam maintenance, road management, the defence force, state-owned enterprises, Home Affairs, all kinds of licencing and crisis management agencies… there just isn’t enough space to list it all.

OK, so maybe that wasn’t enough evidence

Even if the state managed to miss that, they had the best possible current warning system: everyone from the media to citizens, and even international voices, warned the government that the COVID-19 relief funds were at massive risk. So, if government says that it didn’t know that relief funds intended for COVID-19 were at risk of being stolen, what does it tell us? It shouts that they’re either incapable of processing information, or deliberately ignoring it.

Now we know

Either way, here’s the strand: they won’t, or can’t, manage the basic needs or future aspirations of 53 million people. Do we pull it and unravel the mess, or carry on pretending that this tangled monstrosity is home-grown fashion?