CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Perhaps the best comment on President Jacob Zuma's very recent sacking of Nhlanhla Nene as South Africa’s finance minister came from the extreme populist, Julius Malema.

Describing the situation as one of “pathological crisis,” Malema said that “no one in the world will trust a political leadership that changes cabinet and finance ministers like underwear.” It is also difficult to argue with Malema's reference to Nene's short-lived replacement David Van Rooyen as having “questionable political credentials.”

Nene was sacked because he stood up to the outrageously expensive demands of Dudu Myeni, one of Zuma's lady friends, who he put in to run South African Airways. Beyond that, Zuma had been pressing Nene very hard over the deal for nine nuclear power stations which he is keen to conclude with either Russia or China. It is universally assumed that any such deal will include massive kickbacks for interested parties on the South African side. Nene had dug his feet in and said that South Africa could, at most, afford two such plants.

The sacking of Nene after only 18 months in office was quite brutal. Zuma said simply that “I have decided to remove” Nene, gave no reasons, and had no other immediate job offer for Nene, who had shown considerable integrity in his back-to-the-wall effort to prevent South Africa falling off a fiscal cliff. He had been forced to give in to a further huge pay increase for the country's civil servants — like all other African countries, South Africa is ruled by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie — which had used up all the contingency funds in the budget for three years ahead; and only last week, two of the three credit rating agencies downgraded South Africa to just one notch above junk-bond status.

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Straight after sacking Nene, Zuma gave a meandering talk to a business audience in which he attacked “Africans who don't know who they are” and who therefore did the bidding of the enemy (whites, capitalists, imperialists). This seemed intended for Nene. Zuma also confided in his audience that he didn't believe in the “law” of supply and demand. That was all nonsense.

Instead, he suggested that the old Marxist labor theory of value still held true, clearly oblivious to the fact that even Marxists have stopped arguing for that for the last 50 years. Pretty clearly, Nene had warned Zuma how spooked the markets would be by his actions, an argument indignantly dismissed by Zuma as the language of white capitalists.

But spooked the markets certainly were. Within two days the South African rand, already one of 2015's worst-performing currencies, fell by another 18 percent. All South Africa's banks were immediately downgraded by the credit agencies and saw up to 25 percent wiped off their value.

It is not clear that the bloodbath is over. In the general panic a lot of capital has fled the country and business confidence has taken such a severe knock that a recession in 2016 and a consequent downgrading to junk status now seem more than likely. Zuma has issued a defiant statement denying that he is responsible for this collapse of the currency — and also denying that Dudu Myeni is the mother of another of his love-children. Then, after just four days and an angry demarche by ANC bosses, Zuma sacked Van Rooyen and re-appointed Pravin Gordhan, who had served as finance minister from 2009-2014. The markets staged a small recovery but the impression of a banana republic was complete.

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When I published "How Long Will South Africa Survive?" in May, I suggested that South Africa was heading fast toward a major economic crisis as its bonds got down-rated to junk, leading, thereafter, to an IMF bailout and a probable regime change. Thus far, events have followed this script almost to the letter. But shortly after the book's publication I got a waspish email from a Treasury official who claimed that his department had everything in hand. Did I not realize that a tough fiscal discipline was in place which would steer us well clear of the rocks? I did not reply because, I realized, the real differences between us were a matter of judgment.

My own assumptions were based on looking at the strength over time of the multiple pressures for higher public expenditure. It was, in particular, difficult to believe that the government had the mettle to stand up to the civil service trade unions. There was the enormous political pressure to keep increasing both the amounts and the number of recipients of social grants — already these go to nearly 17 million people. There was the complete unwillingness of the ANC government to insist on financial discipline at any of the “parastatals,” and thus always the likelihood that they would be bailed out no matter how large their deficits and no matter how irresponsibly they had been incurred.

There were also the large promises already made for vast new expenditure on a National Health Insurance scheme (at least doubling health spending), not to mention all those nuclear power stations and a new private jet for Zuma. If you looked at the track record, it was simply very difficult to believe that the government would hold the line. If a finance minister really tried to do this, he would be sacked — Q.E.D.

One reason for this is that the economy has been so lamentably mismanaged that there is a tendency to let public spending take the consequent strain — through new investment projects, more pensions, more grants and even down to creating large numbers of jobs. But the key point is that the ANC state relies completely on patronage networks and on private looting. What this means is that there is always more pressure to find new means of patronage — new jobs, new contracts, new tenders and so on. And the expectation of the clients in this patronage kingdom is that each of these new initiatives will carry with them opportunities for extensive private gain. Both of these two factors require public spending to keep inching up.

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But Zuma not only confirmed all those fears. More alarming still, he revealed the true state of South Africa's governance. His recent speech to business leaders saw an exhibition of Zuma's thinking: a genial but semi-educated Zulu peasant who still believes in a Stalin-era Marxism, who makes decisions without any regard to how the markets or international opinion will receive them, and who is willing to axe a competent finance minister because one of his girlfriends wants him to. This is not how anyone imagined a country like South Africa — a G20 member, after all — was governed.

The glimpse of that reality was nothing less than terrifying to the local business community and international investors alike. Moreover, Zuma's presidency has four more years to run and he has already lined up his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to succeed him — which most believe will see Zuma continue to exercise considerable influence.

Zuma's predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, was responsible, through his AIDS denialism, for the unnecessary deaths of some 350,000 black women and children. Zuma, happily, put a stop to all that. But it is no small measure of the despair now gripping South Africa that everywhere one hears voices wishing that Mbeki were still in power.

R.W. Johnson, a veteran South African journalist, is the author of “How Long Will South Africa Survive?: The Looming Crisis” (Hurst, 2015).