Cyril Ramaphosa has said what most people and his party peers know is true, that the DA would do a better job at running South Africa than the ANC would. It wasn't always like that. For around 15 years after 1994 the ANC did much better than it has received credit for. How the ANC in government cut debt levels in half whilst doubling the number of people in employment at the same time as rolling out the world's most expansive social welfare programme stands as one of the most remarkable successes of emerging market governance.

Helen Zille now occupies the most important political position in the country. The race for Johannesburg is the key directional indicator for South Africa's political future. If she wins the city and sets it on a recovery course, a big chunk of the urban aspirant middle-class vote will break from the ANC to the DA in 2029. Even if she falls short and the ANC, MK, and the EFF get to run the city for another term the effect may be the same and urban periphery aspirant middle-class voters, horrified at continued decay, may break in numbers for the DA in 2029.

A wandering albatross tells The Common Sense that Zille women often live to the age of 100+. Not a thought to cheer worried ANC strategists.

The Cabinet remains divorced from reality. Quarterly GDP growth came in at 0.8%. The central bank lifted its growth forecast to 1.2%. Both pieces of data were celebrated as reflective of the success of policy reforms. South Africa's peer economies are growing at least three times as fast. If South Africa was driving the right reforms it would be growing at the same rate.

The right Cabinet response to the growth and related data would be that South Africa faces an investment and economic emergency. And emergency measures to address that should be in place with the near single objective to raise the investment rate (which is half of what it could and should be).

Thank goodness therefore for South Africa's democracy and the good sense of its people. Neither point is sufficiently appreciated or factored into long-term assessments of where the country might end up. South Africa became a democracy so that if the country reached a point where it was not well governed, and the government remained detached, people could do something about that. Those people remain perfectly pragmatic, centrist, and moderate on issues from climate change to energy policy to empowerment, labour market policy, foreign affairs, and race relations. If that remains true, and the electoral system remains free, then upside outcomes for South Africa's long-term future remain in play.

Spending time with South Africa’s top commercial farmers is a reminder of the extraordinary skills and entrepreneurship South Africa possesses. South Africa is not an easy farming environment. Much of the country is very dry. Unlike Europe and America there are no subsidies. Stock theft is rampant. Government policy is hostile. Farmers are far more likely to be attacked in their homes than the average for the rest of the population whilst the share of those attacks that culminate in a homicide are a multiple of the national average. The state has lost control of foot and mouth disease posing a severe threat to the livestock and milk industries. Margins are very tight. And yet South Africa's commercial farmers carry on with a dogged, patriotic, and at times even cheerful outlook. The government has no idea of what the country would lose if that changed.

Directly comparable data is hard to come by but public opinion in South Africa often seems far more centrist and united than that in much of Western Europe and the United States. In America the Democrat/Republican split on core values and policy issues is often stark and even absolute. In South Africa ANC and DA supporters have far more in common on policy and values than divides them.