South Africa's Constitutional Court, apparently unimpressed by the passage of time as a corruption-management strategy, has ordered parliament to resurrect impeachment proceedings against President Cyril Ramaphosa over the so-called Farmgate scandal. Parliament's lower house duly announced it would convene an impeachment committee — a body whose existence the ruling African National Congress, which holds a parliamentary majority, had presumably hoped to avoid indefinitely.

The scandal centres on allegations that Ramaphosa concealed large amounts of foreign currency found hidden inside furniture at his Phala Phala game farm following a reported theft — a chain of events that raises questions a reasonable person might describe as fundamental, starting with why that quantity of cash was stuffed into upholstery in the first place. The president has denied wrongdoing, a position he shares with approximately every other head of state ever to have faced an impeachment inquiry.

For a nation still processing the colossal looting of the Zuma era, watching its reformist replacement navigate his own scandal-driven impeachment process carries a particular flavour of exhaustion. The ANC, which campaigned on cleaning up after its own previous leadership, must now preside over a committee investigating whether its current one is clean enough to stay.