TWO days into January and already it feels as it has been a momentous year. The joy, the heartbreak, the heights scaled, the depths plumbed, the exams failed, the votes cast, and what have you.

For a glimpse into the future and to gauge 2016’s biggest stories we turn once again to what passes for a crystal ball here at the Mahogany Ridge, a Disneyland snow globe. (It features a terrified Bambi in an ominously dark forest, probably moments after his mom was killed by a rich American on safari, and if that’s the sort of thing that passed for yuletide blessings in 1947, who are we to argue?)

Anyway, a few good shakes – of the martinis, not the snow globe – and the fog lifts and the curtains part, and there, rising from the murk. .. 

The year’s biggest story is the local elections. The ruling party, mindful of the pasting it faces in the metros, hastily twins cities with villages in tribal reserves in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and the North West Province. Opposition parties cry foul but are dismissed as paranoid fantasists. “Who is this Gerrie Mander?” ANC secretary general Gwede Mantashe demands. “We know of no such person.”

A redrawn map of the Cape Town metropole now resembles the old Bophutatswana blueprint. Even a collection of huts and a spaza shop an hour to the north of Ulundi now falls within the municipal boundary.

There are amazing scenes when the new mayor, Tony Ehrenreich, is sworn into office. To celebrate the city’s cultural diversity, he wears a Manchester United football jersey and leopard print underpants. An iklwa, the Zulu short stabbing spear, completes the ensemble – although there is some unhappiness when it emerges that the traditional weapon has been mass produced in China.

In a few weeks, when they return to the universities, students discover that the fees have not, in fact, fallen. To correct this oversight, they burn down libraries before sacking nearby bottle stores.

President Jacob Zuma will reshuffle his cabinet several times. By December there will be more than 50 ministers and deputy ministers. New portfolios will include Dance and Related Affairs, Ubuntu and Certain Values, and Beer. 

Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan – he keeps his job, in case you’re wondering – will make a few noises about fiscal prudence, empty coffers and the like but will be mollified to a degree when a Commission to Determine Alternate Revenue Streams is announced and there is much giddy chatter of a new currency.

To this end, the Presidency suggests a #RandMustFall campaign. It comes to nothing, however, with the realisation that the rand has already fallen rather badly.

Besides which, Zimbabwe, which scrapped its own currency in 2009, has already dabbled in a mess of foreign tom before recently settling on the Chinese yuan. What now would be left for us? The Venezuelan Bolivar fuerte? The Guatemalan groat? A barter system based on livestock? What about the shingle? (Not so much a currency, but certainly a sign that one has perhaps been sowing a bit of wild oats here and there.)

There are important anniversaries in the offing. The Castle of Good Hope, for example, is 350 years old, and will feature prominently in Tony Ehrenreich’s plans for the city. There is much talk of painful symbols of the past.

Within a few weeks of its relaunch as a housing project for the homeless of Cape Town, its otherwise dull ramparts become an explosion of riotous colour as laundry flaps in the wind. As such, the Castle will remain a prominent tourist attraction.

Another important date, in September, is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the very, very many so-called architects of apartheid who simply refuse to die despite being quite dead.

Amid the hysterical shrieking of the nationwide #VerwoerdMustFall protests will be a small sombre gathering, attended by the usual lunatics, outside the downtown Hout Street store that sold parliamentary messenger Dimitri Tsafendas the knife that the tape worm in his head directed be plunged into the prime minister’s heart.

Incidentally, this year we also celebrate the 55th anniversary of the death of David Pratt, the Magaliesberg farmer who, outraged by the Sharpville shootings the previous month, shot Verwoerd twice in the face with a .22 pistol at point blank range when the latter opened the Union Exposition in Johannesburg in April 1960.

Although he claimed he’d shot at “the epitome of apartheid”, Pratt stated that he only intended to injure, not kill Verwoerd. A likely story – and the courts quite reasonably committed him to a mental hospital in Bloemfontein, where on October 1, 1960, he took his own life.

And on that cheerful note . . .

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.