Everyone else is doing it, so I’m going to have a bash too. Predict the new cabinet. You will know if I’m on track or a damn fool soon enough.

But first, an anecdote, perhaps apocryphal.

While Thabo Mbeki was still president, he sat next to a Stellenbosch-based tycoon, who said the following.

“In business, if one of my companies is in trouble, I take my best manager, put him in charge of it, and get him to fix it,” said the tycoon. “I don’t see this happening in government.

“You have, heading the South African Revenue Service, one of the best public servants in the world in Pravin Gordhan. Why don’t you swap him with Jackie Selebi, make him commissioner of police and Selebi head of SARS?

“The result would be fabulous. There’d be no crime in South Africa, and no one would pay tax!”

The former president’s response is not recorded.

“I was the decoy. While Helen Zille was calling me names, Jacob Zuma was sprinting to the Union Buildings.”

ANC Youth League president Julius Malema’s boast at Walter Sisulu University in East London just before voting day could be the epitaph for this election. The Democratic Alliance leader allowed herself to be distracted from her own strengths.

What was overlooked was that this election was about two questions: which party would be the champion of the constitution, and which party would be the champion of delivery.

Zille nailed the first, and got distracted from the second, despite a track record that put her in a strong position to claim she could deliver against an ANC taking the heat for widespread delivery failure.

From the beginning of the campaign the DA was in tune with most of the media, the other opposition parties, as well as important voices in the law, the church and academia in reflecting concern about a Jacob Zuma presidency.

Power in Zimbabwe has reached a tipping point.

If you listen carefully to the sounds coming from Zimbabwe, the sound you are hearing is the shift of power from the sclerotic, corrupt old establishment to a new generation. And it requires clear, new policies from South Africa and governments around the world.

For years there have been increasingly anguished debates about how to deal with Robert Mugabe, between those who said “fight him till he’s beaten” and those who said work for change from within.

But now, for better or worse, there is a government whose power is growing by the minute. The workaholic Finance Minister Tendai Biti and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai have promised to pay salaries in hard currency, and they have met their first payrolls. Goods are coming back into the shops.

This deal is South Africa’s deal. South Africa sacrificed its reputation as a human rights advocate for it. It sacrificed international respect. We sacrificed probably upwards of one percent of our growth rate for our plan for Zimbabwe. And that pain caused a disruptive flood of desperate refugees, bringing cholera and desperate hunger to South African streets.