Did we stumble into a time warp this week? We woke up and found ourselves once again under the rule of a police state whose preoccupation is to ban anything and anyone that exposes its diabolical intent and the corruption at its core.

The State Security Agency (SSA) has threatened to ban Jacques Pauw's The President's Keepers, the best-selling expose of malfeasance in the state with President Jacob Zuma at the centre. Also threatening to gag Pauw and his publisher, NB Publishers, is the South African Revenue Service (SARS).

This is not the kind of response one would have expected from state institutions functioning under a constitutional order that is founded on transparency, justice, equality and accountability.

Institutions under this order would err on the side of investigating the veracity of the claims and not on the side of quashing this important work to protect the state.

This should not just be owing to Pauw's own track record as a journalist who exposed police death squads in the 1980s and 90s.

It should be informed by the healthy scepticism contained in our constitutional architecture that the state needs less protection against citizens than the citizens do against the state.

That is the logic, for instance, of having a whole chapter dedicated to the establishment of state institutions to support constitutional democracy - Chapter Nine institutions. These organs are accountable only to the National Assembly, the direct representatives of the citizens.

There is no more convincing evidence that the SSA and SARS have indeed been captured and subverted to serve ends other than that of furthering the public interest than these recent developments.

The biggest mistake we have made as a nation is to underestimate the importance of strengthening and protecting our institutions from manipulation.

Entering the second decade of our democratic era we were so entranced by the leadership wrangles in the ANC that even those who rallied behind Zuma overplayed his personality traits and charisma over the need to safeguard institutions.

The SACP, Cosatu and the ANC's leagues all decried the Mbeki administration's exploitation of institutions of state for political ends.

But their response had less to do with remedying the weaknesses in our institutional infrastructure and more to do with getting back at a political rival.

This is the mistake that is being made in the contemporary discourse.

All debates about the removal of Zuma are preoccupied with the replacement of one personality by another.

What Pauw's investigation and preceding reports around state capture reveal is that what we are dealing with is not a personality disorder but a systemic poisoning of our constitutional institutional framework.

The debate cannot be merely about saving SA from Zuma and replacing him with Cyril Ramaphosa or about saving SA from the ANC and replacing it with the DA or EFF.

The biggest challenge that all citizens should be applying their minds to is how do we wrestle key state institutions out of unscrupulous hands.

There is enough information and evidence to inform a campaign to apply pressure for the prosecution of those allegedly involved in using state institutions and resources to serve narrow ends.

Political parties, civil society, business leaders, citizens and all those who love this country and value our constitution need to take the fight to the protagonists of state capture.

This is more than just an ANC succession race in 2017 or partisan challenge for the control of the government in 2019.

This is the battle for the soul of our constitutional order.

Where are the patriots?