Our budget has become a political football, and the economy Donald Trump’s punching bag. For a country perpetually teetering on the edge, this should feel familiar. Crisis is our comfort zone.

At a time that vision and maturity are being demanded, our leaders have defaulted to petty squabbles. Parliament is a theatre of the absurd, where the absence of leadership is rivalled only by the lack of any sense of the bigger picture. South Africa’s major political parties have embraced a zero-sum, winner-takes-all mentality — and they’ve done so at the worst possible moment...