Whatever happens in the forthcoming no-confidence vote against Jacob Zuma, or in the general election in 2019, cleaning out South Africa's vast Augean stables will be a massive undertaking stretching years into the future.
Thousands of cases of fraud, theft, and other crimes need to be investigated, many hundreds of people prosecuted, and plenty imprisoned. Having themselves been captured, neither the so-called "Hawks" nor the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) can be trusted to do the job.
President Zuma and his Cabinet are too compromised to be entrusted with any of the measures needed to clean out the stables they themselves have fouled. There is little reason to trust any commission of enquiry into "state capture" appointed by Mr Zuma. Nor will there be much public confidence in the team of prosecutors recently appointed by the national director of public prosecutions, Shaun Abrahams, to investigate capture.
Luthuli House cannot to be trusted either. The secretary general of the African National Congress, Gwede Mantashe, rightly says that the ANC cannot "set up its own police force" to "round up the Guptas". Instead, the police should arrest those implicated and the criminal justice system should then "kick in". This is to wash his hands of the problem. Mr Mantashe knows there is little will to make the necessary arrests, certainly not of any big fish. He also knows that the prosecution system has been crippled by the very people he and his comrades have put there.
As for the various parliamentary committees investigating skulduggery at the SABC, Eskom, and elsewhere, they have no powers of arrest and prosecution. The ad hoc committee proposed by the Democratic Alliance is likely to be toothless.
It is time to abolish the Hawks and bring back the Scorpions. It is also time to strengthen the country's prosecuting capacity to handle all cases arising from capture and other major instances of malfeasance in government, the public service, and state-owned entities.