Picking up a slightly thumbed copy of The Economist’s annual roundup of world events, one was intrigued by the prediction that the following year would “be the year for Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein to fall …” Likewise it suggested that “President Robert Mugabe’s increasing retreat from active policy determination could presage a stepping down.”

The year in question, lying ahead dim and uncertain, was 1993.

It would be tempting, given the grim inaccuracy of those predictions, to wax cynical about the nature of change and stasis over the past 11 years. But this piece of journalistic amber, with its curious political mosquito trapped within it, far more valuable as a barometer of change than stagnation.

South Africa’s prospects for 1993 were dim. In fact, said the magazine, the country would not be able to “return to 1981 living standards before the next century.” But of course many South Africans never left 1981; and 2004 found them still living in a shack, ignored by a conservative government run by wealthy insular nationalists.

Certainly the police don’t kick down their doors any more, and they’re free to vote for the status quo, but apartheid is alive and kicking : the apartheid of rich and poor, of healthy and sick, of the cherished and the raped.

But more has changed than has stayed the same and, for some, 1981 has given way to 35BC with marble halls hosting marathons of consumption; dinners of editor’s tongue punctuated with trips to the vomitorium to hurl all over the public accountability.

And for the first time ever we’ve got some fighter-planes that don’t need a team of stokers and half a ton of coal to get them off the ground. Of course it came as a terrible disappointment to the arms acquisition team back in 1999 to learn that BMW doesn’t make jet fighters (resulting in the immediate cancellation of a large order by the South African Defence Force for chrome mags and buckskin-upholstered ejector-seats), but they have since accepted that what the Saab Gripen lacks in sex-appeal, it makes up for with its headroom and handy hatch-back.

At last South Africa has the capability to protect its airspace. No longer need we fear biological and chemical bombardment by the Zimbabwean Air Force, the Very Few of the Zanu-PF flinging socks full of pig manure out of their three crop-dusters. Let Namibia scramble its five manned weather balloons, the bombardiers winding up to make their one rock really count. We’re ready.

Most importantly, President Thabo Mbeki can now visit seedy, imploding Caribbean Islands and not worry about being shot at by the locals.

Indeed, the pre-emptive napalming of Port Au Prince wold have gone a long way to preventing the diplomatic blushes that followed his whizbang visit to Haiti at the beginning of the year.

All the noise scared the local wildlife, and on his somewhat dishevelled return to South Africa, Mbeki had a thin, bespectacled creature in tow. “It followed me home,” he told the country. “Aw shucks, can we keep him? Can we?” Jean-Bertrand Aristide was scrubbed and fed, and when, after some weeks his owners in Haiti hadn’t phoned to pick him up, he was given a blanket and some state-subsidised toys and forgotten about.

Not so lucky was beleaguered Deputy President Jacob Zuma, whose attempts to get the state to subsidise his toys haemorrhaged into the courts and the media. Premature announcement about prima facie evidence violated Zuma’s rights to dignity, but Latin’s right went unheeded by newsreaders who tampered with the evidence each night, changing prima facey to prima Farsi to prima fucky.

The trial that followed introduced South Africa to the Shaik brothers - Mo, Larry, Curly, Daryl, his other brother Daryl, Bashful, Dopey, Alvin, Simon and Theodore - and revealed that someone had failed to grasp the fax of life regarding proper document shredding.

The prima Fassie evidence, however, was undisputable : it was too late for Mama after she smoked some dodgy cocaine. The nation mourned, and made tracks to buy her albums. I mean her sales spiked. I mean shot up. Moving on …

Meanwhile, one was left wondering what being a “spymaster” like Mo Shaik entailed. Was being a spymaster some sort of spring-loaded exercise device that spies used to tone their buttocks? And if so, how much spymastering should the overweight agent do before heading to the bar for a Protein Shaik?

But all such questions were forgotten as the 2004 election neared. It was bitter campaign, the liberal South African media repeatedly levelling scathing personal attacks at the incumbent and his dominant party, but the result - a landslide win for the president - was never in any real doubt. And so started George W Bush’s second term.

Of course, there had also been a little election in South Africa, some months earlier. A 70% endorsement of the African National Congress put a dampener on those Patricians who had voted for the new Independent Democrats in the hope of deLillerance from one party hegemony, but it spelled absolute catastrophe for the National Party, led by someone whose name escapes me now.

Final evaporation of the Nats in August was toasted with Martini van Schalkwyks, a drink served in a very short glass, easily shaken but very difficult to stir, and best taken with a large pinch of salt.

And drinks were on the Ministry of Finances when the rand finally came out of its coma and found itself staring into the loving eyes of Trevor Manuel, who had sat by its bedside since 1999.

So now that one can afford to buy glossy English magazines again, how misguided will this year’s predictions for 2005 by The Economist seem in 2015? Will Western doubt over South Africa’s current motto - “BEE all that you can BEE” - seem ridiculous in the light of a stable and relatively prosperous United States of Southern Africa?

Will the lament over the Aids pandemic still be heard, or will it be a whisper through empty streets where grass pushes up through cracking asphalt?

There’s no telling. And now it’s time to close the blinds, take the phone off the hook, and allow 2004 (in the words of PW Botha, the 87th Greatest South African) to roll off my back like a duck’s water.

With acknowledgements to Tom Eaton and the Mail & Guardian.