Do you consider South Africa’s economic policy to be a puzzle or a mystery? Should you resort to your favourite search engine and search for ‘South Africa’s economic policy’, the eighth result would point you to a puzzle – Dan Rodrick’s 2008 article, ‘Understanding South Africa’s economic puzzles’.

Only the article does not explain what a ‘puzzle’ is. Even the 2006 article from which it originates does not provide an explanation either. Then there is Kevin Lings’ 2014 piece, which was headlined ‘The missing piece: Solving South Africa’s economic puzzle’. So, does this imply that South Africa’s economic policy is a puzzle?

Using your favourite search engine to find out whether South Africa’s economic policy is a mystery will provide no meaningful answer at all.

With the opening question still unanswered, it might be opportune to provide you with insight into the difference between a puzzle and a mystery. In this regard, it might be ideal to quote the distinction offered by Gregory F Treverton, the former chairperson of the US National Intelligence Council, who said: “There is a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction, along with frustration. Even when you cannot find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.

“But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent; it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.”

As a quick recap, a puzzle can be solved, but a mystery, on the other hand, has no definitive answer, because the answer is contingent on many factors. In the instance of a puzzle, you do not have enough information, but someone else holds the vital information. With respect to a mystery, you have not much information.

The distinction between a puzzle and a mystery is not trivial. If you consider South Africa’s economic policy a puzzle, then the logical response is to increase the collection of information and undertake more research. If you consider it a mystery, then you might ponder whether the collection of more information would make it worse.

So, what is to be done if things go wrong? In the case of a puzzle, the culprit is easy to identify – it is the person who has withheld the information. A mystery is quite another matter, for the information that you held might have been inadequate, incomplete, or you might not have been up to the task to comprehend or analyse the information at hand.

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, puzzles come to satisfying conclusions, while mysteries often don’t.

Indisputably, South Africa’s economic policy is a mystery. There are simply too many economic policy documents. Too much of a good thing? Well, that is if you consider these economic policy documents to be any good. If South Africa’s economic policy was the chalkboard of my yesteryear, then now should be that dreaded Friday afternoon, when it needed to be cleaned. Any person, of any age, who ever had to clean a chalkboard would tell you that it was a chore that one did not volunteer to perform. Now is the time to wipe the South African economic policy chalkboard clean, call it a week and start Monday refreshed, with a new piece of chalk and a clean chalkboard. It is time to solve the mystery and stop being puzzled.