What I found most impressive about Mamphela Ramphele’s speech launching Agang was its broad sweep, for the first time for very long, we heard someone give a ‘state of the nation’ and a sense that what is going on, terrible and systematic as it is, is not inevitable.  We are not doomed to have monies stolen that could provide health care and education, brutality and violence need no longer be celebrated.  The constant theme is that 20 years is too long to wait and in fact much of what could have been done to better the lives of the poor has been embezzled by public representatives and their friends.  I do not myself know whether Agang will translate its message into electoral inroads, but one thing is clear, and that is that it does present an alternative that is meaningful.  I personally do not see electoral reform as so significant a factor as Ramphele does, but that is a detail. The overall vision is if one thinks of it, the only political vision that we are now being offered.  Agang is breaking the mould where politics is no longer about wealth, positions or point scoring.  This launch was a very important political event, not because of numbers or what numbers may come to support Agang, but because it took the current shameful and shameless ANC head on and presented a meaningful alternative.  It may change the shape of SA politics