It has been another difficult week for the DA. This time, the party’s internal conflicts concern black economic empowerment. The DA’s federal council in July rubbished ANC empowerment policies.

The government has sought to increase ownership, management, and control of businesses by blacks, and to use preferential procurement to spread empowerment. But the costly and fronting-prone policy has satisfied neither black nor white businesspeople.

BEE has discouraged investment and decreased the efficiency of government expenditure. Empowerment has facilitated patronage relationships between party, state, and business. Ditching the ANC approach may be easy, but identifying a credible alternative is harder. The task fell to the DA’s newly appointed federal policy head, Gwen Ngwenya, a former Institute of Race Relations policy wonk.

Her reported preference for disadvantage — rather than race-targeted interventions — has apparently generated controversy in the party. A statement on Monday from Ngwenya and DA federal chair James Selfe quoted DA leader Mmusi Maimane: “We need … to move away from race-based policies that enable elite enrichment, towards policies that fundamentally break down the system of deprivation.”

But, beyond untested disadvantage-targeting, the policy proposals so far on offer have been limited to a national contributory pension scheme, a “black tax” credit for people supporting adult dependants, and employee share ownership programmes. The DA’s ideological opponents in the SACP have also been rethinking BEE. Recent issues of African Communist, the SACP’s forum for ostensibly Marxist-Leninist ideas, have dwelt on the limitations of BEE policy.

The SACP describes the Mandela and Mbeki presidencies as the “first phase of postapartheid primitive accumulation”, intended to “normalise” or “deracialise” the existing capitalist system.

The creation of a black “patriotic bourgeoisie” was to be accomplished by early BEE policies that used state regulatory power to extract encumbered (debt-financed) shares from businesses. This all formed part of an implicit deal between business and the ANC leadership, in which one side got investor-friendly policies and the other secured politically mediated access to economic opportunities. The SACP likes to describe black businesspeople involved in this trade-off as a “comprador bourgeoisie”.

The Party, as much as the DA, now recoils at the resources poured into such empowerment partnerships. A second process that also began under Mbeki was “petty-bourgeois primitive accumulation”, organised around state procurement.

Low-end political entrepreneurs made money from deals with municipalities and provinces, and then invested their gains back into party elections to secure further deals.

The SACP describes the black business people involved as a “parasitic bourgeoisie”. This does not seem to be a commendatory appellation. Under Jacob Zuma, patriotic and petty bourgeois accumulation continued, as new public sector procurement regulations, designed to support black-owned smaller businesses, in reality further empowered politically connected entrepreneurs.

Despite the vast ideological gulf that separates the DA and the SACP, there is a remarkable congruence in interpretation of the failings of ANC policy. Both parties condemn the milking of public resources by a parasitical business class. Communists and liberals alike are deeply sceptical that “elite enrichment”, or the building of a “comprador bourgeoisie”, are sustainable objectives. And there is concern that current policy frameworks have significantly worsened unemployment and poverty.

So the DA is not alone in its scepticism about BEE. But nor is it alone in its failure to advance a credible alternative vision.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

The EFF’s claims that its Commander in Chief, Julius Malema, fired a pop-gun at the party’s fifth anniversary rally in the Eastern Cape last weekend, captured the party’s overall predicament well. “It was not a real gun,” national spokesperson Mbuyiseni Ndlozi insisted. “It was a simulation which collaborated with the fireworks … it was a toy.”

Critics have long denigrated the EFF as an army without any real soldiers. Some still claim it is an ANC Youth League faction that treasures its toy-telephone link to the real liberation movement.

There can be no dispute that the EFF has exercised influence in South African politics. It has placed land reform and youth unemployment at the top of the political agenda. It has rejuvenated Parliament, replacing the decorum of the Mbeki era with gripping political spectacle.

The EFF’s strategic dilemmas, however, were exposed by former president Jacob Zuma’s decision to take early retirement.

First, there is the problem of Malema himself. A youth movement with a charismatic leader can be palatable to electors for a few years; but a youth movement of the middle-aged, with an erratic commander for life, is quite another matter. Who among them has the capacity to contradict the commander, let alone supplant him?

Second, the EFF is divided about its approach to coalition politics. Is the EFF a political party in its own right, one that might seek allies anywhere? Or is it merely an ANC faction, waiting for an opportunity to return to the mother body on its own favourable terms?

Deputy leader Floyd Shivambu stated last week that the EFF’s days as “spectators” are over: the party will participate in government in 2019. This looks like wishful thinking. EFF leaders are running out of funders, their elected officials are fed up paying tithes to the party, and there are deep divisions about the relative merits of coalition partners.

Third, commentators have struggled to explain why the party has dumped its recently acquired anti-corruption credentials to launch pitiful rescue missions for board members of corrupt parastatals, suspended revenue service commissioners, and other Zuma-era gravy-trainers. Worse still, the party has attacked prominent Indians in government, many of whom once risked their lives against real rather than pop guns.

Citizens will inevitably conclude that such shameful attacks must have been precipitated in part by financial inducements. More important, however, these actions reflect the EFF’s failure to break out of an electoral prison.

In the 2014 national elections, the EFF attracted more than 10% support in Limpopo, Gauteng and the North West. In contrast, the party secured less than 3% in the Cape provinces. In KwaZulu-Natal, it recorded 1.85%.

Perhaps the EFF fears that it still remains a narrowly regional and ethnic party? Many of the EFF’s flip-flops on corruption, and its shameful ethnic slurs, seem to flow from a cynical effort to capture voters and funders from Zuma’s key provinces, and especially from KwaZulu-Natal. Such a strategy, if it exists, would be both cynical and misconceived.

Finally, the EFF is running aground because of a lack of credible policies and skills. It is fine to promise state control of everything, but electors begin to rethink the whole matter once you come close to reaching office. It would help if more EFF leaders had run something — even a student organisation — that had not collapsed.

Land reform may be the key policy issue in the election. Despite a good deal of media hyperventilation this week, notably when Caudillo Cyril Ramaphosa apparently parked his tanks on the lawns of the state broadcaster, the ANC has not changed its position on the process to initiate amendments to Section 25 of the Constitution.

The EFF is, meanwhile, stuck with the policy of “expropriation of everything”. In its world, citizens will apparently queue up, perhaps at expanded home affairs offices, to renew their land-use licences. This scenario probably can’t be sold to many electors, yet the EFF lacks the time, and the agility, to change it for something more credible in advance of the 2019 elections.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

It is intriguing to speculate what might have happened had Ramaphosa accepted then president Nelson Mandela’s invitation to him in 1994 to serve as foreign affairs minister, a consolation prize for being passed over for the deputy presidency. Ramaphosa declined that offer.

He was then on the left of the ANC, once spending days on a boat off the coast of Cuba waiting for an opportunity to pay homage to Fidel Castro.

Ramaphosa’s years in business remade his understanding of international affairs. As chairman of MTN he helped smooth the cellphone giant’s growth on the continent. His stake in Standard Bank immersed him in the complex politics of Chinese-South African economic co-operation. He went out of his way to interact with broader global elites, serving on the Commonwealth Business Council, the Coca-Cola advisory board, Unilever Africa advisory council, Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS and the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty.

He has mingled with the great and the (sometimes) good of our times: US diplomat Richard Holbrooke; former Mexican finance minister Ernesto Zedillo; Italy’s Renato Ruggiero; “Ben” Makihara, the legendary chairman of Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation; James Bolger, transformative prime minister of New Zealand; Petronas baron Tan Sri Dato’ Mohd Hassan Marican; space and gym entrepreneur Richard Branson; Lakshmi Mittal, chairman and CEO of Mittal Steel; and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

Ramaphosa eschews conflict on the basis of ideology. His support for a “rules-based” international order — reiterated this week at the Brics summit — is fully consistent with his actions as union leader, political organiser and businessman.

SA’s trade relations are complex, with China and the eurozone key to our prospects. The US African Growth and Opportunity Act underpins major export industries.

Investment sources are equally differentiated. International investment targets Ramaphosa set this year — $100bn over five years — recognise the centrality of international investment to domestic prosperity. SA needs to maintain investment rates at 25% of GDP or higher. Only international investors can compensate for our low levels of domestic saving and provide access to new technologies, managerial capacity, financial markets and international distribution networks.

SA’s investment partners — whether in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, China, the EU or the US — are not going to be uniformly appealing to every citizen. But a crisis-ridden medium-sized economy in a turbulent world cannot afford to shun partners, whoever they may be.

In the longer term, SA may be able to “punch above its weight” in international affairs or even adopt a foreign policy founded on moral values. But this will occur only if objective and remediable obstacles to doing business in SA — structural weaknesses, uneven infrastructure, unskilled and expensive labour, crime, corruption and a host of other impediments — are removed, and a dynamic economy becomes a magnet for investors.

Ramaphosa sent out one clear signal of intent. He flagged what might become his signature contribution to SA’s continental politics: the creation of an African Continental Free Trade Area to provide access for international investors to a market of 1-billion people plus. This is a deeply ambitious but potentially historic project.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

The meeting of the alliance political council that concluded on Monday offered depressing insight into the anachronistic preoccupations of the trade union and communist partners of the ANC.

Discussion centred on the survival of jobs in sunset industries and how to “reverse” the damage that has been done to state-owned monoliths.

Only one forward-looking topic was touted for the agenda of an upcoming alliance economic summit: the “fourth industrial revolution” and the “future of work”.

Revolutionary new technologies are causing concern around the world. Industrial jobs are already being lost, and there is a growing threat to many occupations in service industries.

The disruption caused by the technological revolution is likely to be greatest in developing countries. World Bank president Jim Yong Kim suggested in 2017 that, “two-thirds of all jobs that currently exist in developing countries will be wiped out by automation”. The bank has observed that, “the winners will be those who encourage skill-upgrading so that all can benefit from digital opportunities”.

Rather than focusing exclusively on education, however, our policy makers need to consider how to maximise the potentially positive impacts of automation.

Technological change will generate new and often unexpected forms of work. The most important of these, for which SA can begin to prepare now, will flow from a greater scale and variety of “tourism”.

The global tourist industry already embraces more than a billion travellers annually; SA receives around 10-million of these. This number has grown fast as a result of the emergence of new middle classes in developing countries such as China and India, an upswing of travel among western millennials, and population growth in Africa.

One by-product of technological advance is likely to be a huge scaling-up of such recreational travel. The fortunate citizens of wealthy countries are increasingly freed from mundane activities, and enjoy ever-easier access to cultural and leisure global opportunities.

Even more importantly, as automation continues to transform employment patterns, perhaps a third of the working age population of wealthy societies may find themselves unable to secure work at a living wage. There is currently a debate raging in the global North about how such displaced workers can be accommodated.

Although some political leaders have argued for the development of guaranteed work for all citizens, a more realistic proposal is the provision of basic income grants or longer periods of state-funded absence from the labour market.

In tandem with growing life expectancy, this change has the potential to bring about a massive increase in the number of visitors — many of whom may arrive in the guise of students, conservation volunteers or retiree “knowledge tourists”.

Rather than the 10 days that tourists spend in SA on average, they may spend long periods in low-and middle-income countries. Here basic incomes can stretch further, and unemployment can be recast as meaningful cultural engagement.

A major change in the mind-set of politicians and labour leaders will be needed if SA is to adjust to the changes that a tourist economy requires.

Successful tourist nations are obliged to endure some immediate humiliation and to abandon preconceptions about the nature of dignified labour.

Contemplate contemporary Britain: the theme park character of its towns and villages, the vulgarisation of its traditional leaders (or “royals”), and the repackaging and commodification of all aspects of its culture. A dose of cultural discomfort, however, is a small price to pay for what might ultimately be an increase in income and employment.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

What a difference a year makes. The whole country is enjoying a new manager bounce.

This time last winter a David v Goliath contest began to unfold when sleeping giant Cyrildinho ventured into the zone of uncertainty.

Pundits claimed he would come a cropper against trophy-holder Jacob “The Elephant” Zumario, who had been almost unplayable in his day.

Zumario’s “Ewags” (ex-wife and girlfriends) dubbed the challenger a dead man walking, but in a long match they failed to put away the ball.

It was The Elephant who received his marching orders: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Crashing out of the competition in December, Zumario was forced to hang up his boots for good. With his clinical finishing, Cyrildinho had played a blinder.

It has been a baptism of fire, but possession is nine-tenths of the game. “CR”, as his fans call him, always reaches for the skies and never gives less than 110%.

The Brazil-influenced coach has brought veteran stylists Nenê and Gordhanio off the bench. He has slowed the flow of the game. Video assistant referee (VAR) Mogoengio Mogoengio has levelled the playing field in provincial red-card incidents.

Loyal to whoever is coach, head of elections Mbaks “Preservativo Explodindo” Mbalululio is a midfield terrier who covers literally every blade of grass on the pitch.

Fitness coach Gwede “Big Suits” Mantashio is running his socks off, using his notoriously low centre of gravity to deny “The Ace” control of the Luthuli Training Centre.

Form is temporary, while class is permanent. Cyrildinho is a playmaker who can control the pace of the game. If the team consistently deploys his ideological zonal marking system he could literally take the minnows to the cleaners in 2019.

The Blues and the Red Berets are in a relegation dogfight. Despite a giant-killer reputation, the Berets have been left red-faced by their travelling circus of hooligans. Julius Malemalario has proved to be a bit of a handful, but the young lion keeps pulling on his old team’s shorts. Spokesman Mbuyesenio Ndlozi insists that “we have had no bids for Malemalario … it would take silly money for him to leave”.

But locker-room gossip suggests the striker slammed a “derisory bid” from his old side, and the two clubs remain “miles apart” over the size of the fee.

The Blues have also been under the microscope.

“Dancing Queen” Helen Zilleria is as sick as a parrot.

Patricia de Lillio is back in the transfer zone after being frozen out by her team. There has been no shortage of suitors, with even the Red Berets mulling a bid. After going 2-0 up in the Western Cape High Court this week, she could be headed for the dreaded transfer limbo. She may have to start blowing her own vuvuzela once again.

If Cyrildinho lifts the Cup in 2019, the caretaker manager will start firing on all cylinders at last. Laggards will get the hairdrier treatment. There will be a flurry of yellow cards and a raft of substitutions. This time SA is literally in the last-chance saloon, but the fans will never stop believing. It’s always the hope that kills you.

Leading a team is a marathon and not a sprint. The new manager will have to grind out a result at whatever cost, and his fresh legs could help him go the distance. Cyrildinho certainly looks good on paper, but he will need to score to win.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

On Saturday South Africans will celebrate Youth Day, a commemoration of the uprising that began in Soweto on June 16 1976. The uprising was triggered by the imposition of Afrikaans as a language of instruction but it drew on deeper grievances about apartheid SA.

Are we likely to see a repeat of this historic rebellion against injustice? Many things have changed for the better. Education is now celebrated for its ability to unlock fundamental rights to health, liberty, security, and political participation. It can deepen self-understanding, enhance economic growth and help society to adjust to the unfolding revolutions in artificial intelligence and robotics. The trouble is that SA now has two fundamentally different school systems, only one of which is even minimally equipped to take on such tasks.

Three-quarters of SA’s 14-million pupils attend dysfunctional schools that consistently underperform when it comes to educational outcomes. In rural provinces and townships, schools have seen a significant increase in grade 9 completions over the past two decades, but educational quality remains poor. Children are going to school but they are not learning.

Too few preschool children access adequate nutrition or attend well-organised creches. Their families are poor and sometimes broken, in communities often riven by violence. Teachers are poorly qualified and motivated. The South African Democratic Teachers’ Union has been implicated in the sale of posts, interference in promotions and resistance to mandatory competency testing.

The uneven provision of learning materials, buildings and facilities disrupts even well-run schools. Rural provinces and their failing and corrupt administrations cannot cope with large student numbers.

Most schools do not have effective governing bodies through which parents and communities can hold school managers, principals and teachers to account. Precisely because parents and pupils are so comprehensively disempowered, however, these prisons of the poor are unlikely to be the centres of any rebellion against the state.

Perhaps surprisingly, formerly white and Indian schools are far more likely to become sites of protest. While rural and township schools remain mostly monoracial, urban and suburban schools have become multiracial over two decades.

The children of the black middle class are now sharing some of the benefits of inclusion in a formerly whites-only arena. However, much as these schools may celebrate “diversity” and “inclusion”, they continue to be dominated by suburban catchment areas, white majority intakes, quasi-European cultures and languages, and predominantly white teaching staffs.

Educationalist Jonathan Jansen has harshly observed that the “black elite” sends its children to these schools in a “class compact between privileged whites and the black elite to keep the schools their children attend as essentially white institutions”. If Jansen is right, this is a fragile compact indeed, and it will be neither possible nor desirable to sustain very far it into the future. It is easy to see how conflict could be triggered among the supposed beneficiaries of this race and class compromise. It is even easier to see how those excluded from it will tire of their children’s marginalisation.

This is one area in which the government needs to plan ahead rather than to wait for a crisis to force its hand. “White-dominant” schools remain crucial pipelines that feed maths-literate and analytically accomplished learners — black as well as white — into post-school education and employment. The whole project of transformation depends on government’s ability to bring about meaningful change while not disrupting this key conduit of skills and capabilities.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

President Cyril Ramaphosa will soon conclude his first 100 days in office. Debate continues to rage about the likely impact he will have on the future of the country he now leads.

Supporters of the president claim that his rise represents a turning point for the nation. Sceptics counter that Ramaphosa has once again this week shown himself to be a weak leader who is unable to confront the inexorable forces tearing SA apart.

All this brings us to the most imponderable question of leadership: what difference can he make?

Social scientists and historians tend to discount the influence of leaders. They prefer “structural” explanations for events that focus on what is likely to happen in the longer term, regardless of the intentions and actions of particular political figures.

FW de Klerk astonished the National Party politicians in February 1990 when he announced the unbanning of opposition parties and the release of Nelson Mandela. But the economic and political forces driving the National Party to negotiate were so powerful that any other leader would, sooner or later, almost certainly have had to take more or less the same steps.

Few scholars would venture that the broad character of the post-apartheid settlement would have been dramatically changed if a leader other than Mandela had been at the helm of the ANC. In most scholars’ eyes, leaders are the vectors of wider historical forces rather than the “makers of history”.

Even in more narrow fields of human endeavour, great leaders rarely alter the course of human affairs for long. The replacement of one business leader by another does not usually change the share price of a major global corporation. Great generals such as Hannibal, Napoleon Bonaparte and Rommel won stunning victories but were ultimately swept aside by lesser opponents who could deploy greater resources.

The arrival of Donald Trump in the White House has brought the “question of leadership” back to global prominence. The late historian Eric Hobsbawm once reflected that the US has “probably elected to its presidency … a greater number of ignorant dumbos than any other republic”. No matter how feeble the president, however, “the great US ship of state has sailed on as though it made very little difference”.

If the US political system is “foolproof” as Hobsbawm claims, this is because every leader is embedded in a strong system of institutional constraints. When it comes to Trump’s America, we will have to wait and see if such institutions are as robust as the historian assumes.

At least Ramaphosa’s political history should give us some cause for hope here at home.

Jacob Zuma’s tenure confirmed that it is far easier for a political leader to do harm than to do good.

There is absolutely no reason to suppose that Ramaphosa will initiate disruptive programmes of factional enrichment or institutional destabilisation of the kind that marked Zuma’s two terms. Ramaphosa’s primary accomplishments across his career have been in the creation of new and enduring forms of authority. The National Union of Mineworkers testifies to his ability to build an enduring institution. The final Constitution of 1996, forged in extremely trying circumstances, continues more than two decades later to shape national political life for the better.

The true value of Ramaphosa’s leadership should not be measured in terms of the hasty purging of factional opponents or in his success or otherwise in staging show trials of the agents of state capture.

Ramaphosa will make an enduring positive difference to this country only by rescuing and constructing enduring institutions and by entrenching effective and impersonal systems of good governance.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.

December’s ANC elective conference proved that money is not always decisive in the movement’s politics. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s victory was a double-edged sword for party modernisers, however. He supports their cause, but his win has relieved pressure for change in how the ANC is run.

Activist and former environmental affairs and tourism director-general Crispian Olver’s insightful 2017 book, How to Steal a City, sets out the scale of the reformists’ challenge. While SA watched aghast as state capture unfolded, at provincial and local levels “money-politics” and patronage have become most deeply entrenched. Olver was part of a “regional task team” assembled to render a discredited local ANC electable in Nelson Mandela Bay in 2016. He was also reporting directly to the prominent anticorruption fighter and minister Pravin Gordhan on what had caused the rot in the city.

Olver’s diagnosis begins from the insight that factions “are not born out of money”. A left-oriented ANC grouping, under the moniker “Stalini”, started out promoting pro-poor upliftment. Licensed by ANC doctrines that dismiss the border between party and state, the group interfered in the appointment of city officials and in the management of council affairs. Pretty soon it was doling out contracts, jobs and money to those whose support it, to win political battles. Criminal syndicates recruited participating city officials and politicians, serving as “bankers” to the dominant faction. Money was made available to win internal power struggles, only to be repaid in contracts and jobs. Along the way, many players amassed tidy personal fortunes.

Olver is keen to present positive news about the turnaround operation. A well-organised intervention group with political protection successfully expelled corrupt officials. Criminal charges and civil claims will eventually bring financial ruin and imprisonment to many offenders. With better support from state security agencies and the prosecutions authority, still more might have been accomplished.

Olver does not explore how the ANC’s loss of power in the city in 2016 affected outcomes. After all, the impetus to investigation and prosecution is strong in part because it brings political advantage to the city’s new governors. A “cleaned-up” ANC under candidate mayor Danny Jordaan might not have undertaken lasting reforms to financial control or supply chain management systems.

While the Gauteng ANC has shown that transparent planning, housing and staff appointment systems are not intrinsically alien to the movement, it remains an open question whether such practices can take root in the ANC elsewhere. One key problem, as Olver observes, is that the ANC is ideologically opposed to any clear dividing line between the governing party and the state. This makes it hard to establish an expertise-valuing and performance-based culture.

He links this challenge to the still uneasy relationship between citizens and public authority. The state is still widely viewed as an alien and hostile entity that can justifiably be evaded, outsmarted or even looted. The partial clean-up of Nelson Mandela Bay, on Olver’s account, would not have been possible without the energies of civic organisations, whistle-blowers and journalists. Rooting out the ANC’s deep-seated hostility towards just these civil society actors is another massive challenge.

The deepest conundrum for ANC reformers is that its own powerful provincial and local leaders are unlikely to rally behind a modernisation programme. Politicians who have risen by means of rigged internal elections and patronage will need to be persuaded that wide-ranging reforms are in their best interests. This is not impossible in principle; but it is not yet clear how it might be accomplished in practice.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town.