South Africans should not be surprised by the jubilation of some among us at the outrageous torching of parliament or the attack on the Constitutional Court last week. SA faces the future as a deeply polarised country, a place of two mindsets and two sharply contrasting visions of where we are headed.

The first mindset is of a small elite, built around a personality cult, which wants to tear our constitutional democracy and its institutions down, create chaos, ascend to power and then loot. Then there’s the rest of us: people who wish for a prosperous, peaceful and democratic country...