CYRIL’S CHOICES: Lessons from 25 years of freedom spells out the choices before Ramaphosa and South Africa. For the first time, Matisonn explains work he began at the time he met Nelson Mandela a day after the future president left prison. In September, 1991 he resigned his job as a foreign correspondent in South Africa to study the problem first at the University of Chicago, then in Japan and Russia. Drawing on experience from Moscow and Kyoto, Harare and Bangui, and the highways and byways of South Africa, the author shows that rapid growth and job creation are a policy choice that can be made by changing how we identify drivers of rapid South African growth. Since his study visit to Russia in 1992, the author has traced the rise of the Russian oligarchs who befriended President Zuma and other African leaders to sell nuclear plants and take over mines, and how the immigrant Indian Gupta family became South Africa’s own oligarchs. Since Japan’s was the most successful economic transformation in history before China, and the first so-called “developmental state,” Japan provides guidance as South Africa sets a new course. Cyril’s Choice is a sometimes humorous but seeringly frank portrayal of where we went wrong. It offers clear answers to a South Africa in search of hope: we must learn from others as we develop our own unique African success story, if we are again to provide a beacon of respect and success on the African continent. South African voters are getting impatient with all the major parties. Without decisive progress, the ruling African National Congress and the official opposition Democratic Alliance are at risk of being overtaken by new forces we cannot yet see. What do they need to change to reverse public disillusionment? And what will replace them if they don’t? We can’t change the past, but we can draw on strengths we’ve shown we have in order to change the future. For his latest work, John Matisonn draws on more than 40 years in journalism, government and the United Nations. Now he connects the dots like nobody else can