Zupta phoney war well and truly over – prepare for the unexpected.

Over the past few months, South Africa’s ruling ANC has worked ever harder at presenting a united front. Even as criminal charges were being laid against Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, his opponent President Jacob Zuma insisted it was none of his doing.

That charade has now ended. Zuma cancelled Friday’s pre-Davos breakfast meeting with SA participants – a tradition that ensures that all members of “Team SA” deliver a consistent message at the World Economic Forum. And yesterday the world heard that his business associates will be presenting to court evidence of a conspiracy by the banks and, indeed, Gordhan himself.

Until now, the Zupta response to growing criticism has been like World War Two’s “Phoney War” – those eight months between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, and April 1940, when literally nothing happened on the Western Front. But then Hitler launched a second Blitzkrieg and in six weeks German soldiers were marching through Paris’s Arc de Triomphe.

There might be a good reason for the unprecedented cancellation of the pre-Davos briefing. But none was given. And there could be more than vivid imagination behind the Gupta court action. But that seems unlikely. What we do know, though, is SA’s Phoney War has ended. Prepare for the unexpected.

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