Initially, The Twilight Zone was a US TV series in the '60s. Since then it has come to mean the mental state between reality and fantasy - roughly where South Africa is at the moment.
Think about it. On Wednesday, President Jacob Zuma's finance minister, Malusi Gigaba, gave his first medium-term budget policy statement, a rough three-year rolling assessment of our fiscal position. He had hideous news. Tax revenue, under his boss's hand-picked tax commissioner, Tom Moyane, would be R51-billion behind target this financial year. The final figure will probably be even worse.
That R51-billion is roughly the amount the government needs every 90 days to keep up repayments of its debt - for now.
But on November 24, Moody's and S&P will issue their latest ratings of our debt, and after Gigaba failed to signal any prospect of turning the economy around to keep debt from rising any further, they will downgrade us further.
Gigaba tried, I believe, his best but it was not nearly enough. New downgrades will make it even more expensive to service our debt and the R550-million we pay in interest every day will rise.
Sitting close to Gigaba as he spoke was Zuma, the ultimate cause of all of this. Eyes closed, he was listening, but not to the detail. His relentless calculation is at what point he falls over. His calculation is about when his own party irreversibly turns on him. When and under what conditions does he give up?
He is a master of delay. He wants to ensure the ANC leadership election in December goes his way, that his candidate is elected to replace him. That may buy him time, but even if Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma wins in December, she will quickly figure out that he cannot stay on as head of the government. He is simply too destructive. His administration is even more dysfunctional than his party, which is saying something.
She will have to fire him quickly or face being in charge of the state when the country's finances collapse.
And don't too be distracted by talk of the Russians being the new guiding force behind Zuma. The Russians are way behind the Guptas. It may or may not be true that Zuma has already taken money from Vladimir Putin to ensure he places a big nuclear power order with Moscow (I've yet to see proof), but even if he has, he is incapable of making the order happen. The Treasury doesn't have the money and, in any event, civil society would stop him. Anyway, the payment will be lying untouched somewhere in an escrow account.
I've already written that the surest way to stop nuclear is for the leaders of the combined opposition to jointly declare that, should they come to power in a coalition, they will simply not honour any nuclear commitments the Zuma administration makes. They could lodge the declaration with the International Chamber of Commerce, which rules on international commercial disputes.
The Guptas and state capture remain the biggest threat to Zuma. He has let it go so far that international law-enforcement agencies are now actively investigating it.
SAP, the world's biggest provider of accounting software, has just confessed to bribing Gupta agents to get business in South Africa. But they didn't confess to the Hawks, nominally our guardians against corruption. They confessed to the US's Securities and Exchange Commission and its justice department (read the FBI). In Britain, Lord Peter Hain, the anti-apartheid campaigner, has won the backing of the chancellor of the exchequer for a probe by the Serious Fraud Office into the Guptas' possible use of UK banks.
This is huge. Zuma may be able to save himself but he also needs to help his son, Duduzane, who the Guptas made a partner in their South African adventure, and have cynically abused. Duduzane is a young man and his dad won't be around to protect him forever. And with every passing day the tentacles of international (and, one day, South African) law close in on him.
What Duduzane needs now from his father is the space to break free from the Guptas. He needs the best criminal lawyers in the country behind him. He needs to prepare, if he hasn't already, a section 204 statement that would allow him to turn state witness in a trial should the need arise.
I am genuinely sorry to be the bearer of such bad news, but the need will arise, no matter how fiercely Zuma resists. Life is full of surprises like that in the Twilight Zone, even for JZ.
