What if Cyril Ramaphosa had walked away from the deputy presidency in protest against his boss Jacob Zuma and his association with the masters of state capture, the Guptas?
What if he had never taken the job in the first place? What if he had refused to stand for the ANC deputy presidency at the party's 2012 national conference on the grounds that he would not have his name on an election fronted by a tainted president?
Would SA today be in a better or a worse position than it is to combat corruption? Would we even have the state capture commission?
These are some of the questions that came to mind as one watched Ramaphosa battle to explain the tough political choices he and some of his comrades had to make as it became clear that the Guptas were not only running their boss, but were now calling the shots in the government and some of the major state-owned enterprises.
We will only know when the final report comes out what deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo thinks of the whole "fighting from within" defence presented by Ramaphosa at the commission this week.
Significant sections of the population, however, appear to not be convinced. What they were hearing were excuses by a politician who was willing to look the other way and do nothing - in the face of great injustice - just so that he did not jeopardise his ambition of rising to the top office.
Seen from their perspective, Ramaphosa is an unprincipled opportunist whose commitment to fighting corruption is conditional on that fight not hindering his personal political ambitions and interests.
Yet the question lingers: what would have happened had he publicly stood up to Zuma much earlier than he did and got himself fired? Most likely Zuma - who never really wanted Ramaphosa as a deputy in the first place and was forced to choose him to win the support of ANC branches in such provinces as Limpopo and Gauteng ahead of 2012 - would have replaced him with a more compliant second-in-command.
The question lingers: what would have happened had he publicly stood up to Zuma much earlier than he did and got himself fired?
There is an argument that being fired would not have been a fatal political blow for Ramaphosa; after all, Zuma himself was fired as the country's deputy president in 2005, only to be elected ANC president two years later - hence paving his way back to the Union Buildings. But Ramaphosa did not have the kind of power base in ANC branches that would have enabled him to pull a Zuma of his own.
Hence the route he chose: remain in office and stay onside until the time is right.
What about quitting in protest? It would probably have harmed his prospects at the next conference, which was to be held in 2017. He would have received public praise for a few weeks and then everybody would have forgotten about him. ANC branches, on the other hand, tend not to back leaders who quit.
So Ramaphosa stayed on, in the belief that he stood a realistic chance of replacing Zuma at the next conference. The gamble paid off.
But at what price? Silence in the face of rising corruption and the hollowing out of state institutions?
In asking these questions, we should not lose sight of the fact that there were crucial moments when Ramaphosa, the then secretary-general Gwede Mantashe and the then treasurer-general Zweli Mkhize - now disgraced - used their positions in the ANC top six to block or reverse some of Zuma's decisions. During his testimony at the commission Ramaphosa referred to their opposition to the disastrous appointment of one Des van Rooyen as finance minister and, later, the removal of Pravin Gordhan from the same post on the strength of a spurious "intelligence report".
But there were other instances, such as an attempt by Zuma in the months leading up to the Nasrec conference to appoint an individual with questionable connections to ex-convicts as national police commissioner.
Who knows what the appointment of such a person as top cop would have led to?
Of course Ramaphosa and many others who were in the government during this period have to be held accountable for what they did, or omitted to do, to stop the rot. But equally important is what they do now and in future.
What was most disappointing about the president's appearance before Zondo this week was his insistence that he will wait until the judge's final report is released before acting against members of his executive who have been shown to have done wrong.
It is this hesitance that prompts serious doubts about his appetite to take the battle against corruption to its logical conclusion.
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