President Cyril Ramaphosa has been a terrible disappointment in many ways, but even his harshest critics would have to agree that it was a brilliant bit of statecraft on his part a few years ago to move the state of the nation address (Sona) from the afternoon to the evening.

Give your speech in the late afternoon and you are speaking to a tired and irritable nation just itching for some hypocrite in a shiny suit to lie to it so it can spit invective at the telly or get on Twitter and denounce you as a gutless fantasist...