As long as we do not end up being another Angola. That is how a friend who spent much of his youth in ANC camps in Angola used to conclude his monologues in social gatherings, as friends tried to make sense of the party's presidential race in the run-up to the 2007 Polokwane conference.
He wasn't talking about the civil war that ravaged the oil-rich country for much of its first 20 years as a sovereign nation.
His preoccupation was with how Angola's ruling MPLA, which had led the struggle against Portuguese colonialism, degenerated into a corrupt political machinery whose main mission was to turn the state into a self-enrichment factory for then president José Eduardo dos Santos and his family.
He feared SA was headed in the same direction. And so, every time an argument arose over who should emerge victorious between then president Thabo Mbeki and his challenger, Jacob Zuma, he would give a long history lesson about Angola and corruption. He would conclude with the words: As long as we do not end up being another Angola.
The friend is no more, having succumbed to a long illness a few years ago.
But I do wonder whether, if he was still alive today, he would not be enjoining President Cyril Ramaphosa's SA to be more like his counterpart João Lourenço's Angola.
Since taking over from Dos Santos in 2017, Lourenço has been on an anti-graft crusade that has surprised many pundits, given the fact that he largely owes his presidency to having been hand-picked by Dos Santos as his successor.
Not only has Lourenço, who is nicknamed JLo by some Angolans, been in pursuit of Dos Santos's daughter Isabel, reputed to be Africa's richest woman, but his government this week secured the conviction of the former president's 42-year-old son, Josè Filomeno dos Santos, for fraud.
Josè Filomeno dos Santos is alleged to have transferred $500m (R8.6bn) from the country's sovereign wealth fund, which he headed, to a bank account in Switzerland.
He was sentenced to five years in prison.
News of his conviction came as SA was still reeling from the latest round of shocking revelations at the state capture commission.
The NPA and other law-enforcement agencies need to be beefed up with the necessary personnel and other resources
This time three former bodyguards told the commission chair, deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo, that they witnessed a former cabinet minister and two former Transnet CEOs apparently receiving bags full of cash from the notorious Gupta family.
Malusi Gigaba, the former minister in question, and ex-Transnet CEO Brian Molefe have denied the allegations.
Illuminating as the Zondo commission may be, the reality is that most South Africans are growing frustrated by the fact that no high-profile individuals have been brought before the courts, let alone convicted, for crimes linked to "state capture".
As we hear testimony after testimony about how some of our politicians and public servants aided and abetted the Gupta looting spree under Zuma, and read about corruption and theft continuing to spread even in Ramaphosa's "New Dawn", a growing number of our citizens are blaming our constitution and the democratic system. They start to look approvingly to countries run by strongman politicians such as Lourenço and Rwanda's Paul Kagame.
Too often, these days, one hears arguments on radio for a "strong leader", or even a "benevolent dictator" to "get our country back on track".
However, the problem is not that we are a democracy with a constitution that is strong on protecting individual rights. It is that the institutions that have been set up to deal with these kinds of crimes have been deliberately weakened and infiltrated over the years. This is as true of the National Prosecuting Authority and the police service as it is of the National Assembly.
The NPA and other law-enforcement agencies need to be beefed up with the necessary personnel and other resources.
But all of that would be of little help if that process is not accompanied by the cleaning out of the agencies of individuals who collaborated with the looters.
A fiercely independent and well-resourced NPA that is free of the executives who either looked away or actively assisted as the country was being looted would do a much better job in bringing wrongdoers to book.
And, no, we do not need to become an Angola to do so successfully.
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