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.

It sometimes seems that SA is inherently unstable and beset by calamities that threaten to unravel the whole fabric of society. However, in a conservative and deeply resilient country such as SA, an apparent crisis is usually not a real crisis.

At first sight, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s ambitious drive to boost foreign and domestic investment cannot be reconciled with his calls for land expropriation without compensation. Surely a crisis of confidence in property rights will destroy investor confidence?

The trouble with a real catastrophe is that once it strikes it is usually too late to do much about it.

The most astute politicians and business moguls recognise this fact. For this reason, they try to identify the potential solutions to major challenges in advance. Only then do they engender a sense of crisis that allows a chokehold on policy change to be released.

SA’s apparent crises are often the creations of canny politicians and businesspeople working in cahoots.

Take the democratic transition, in which Ramaphosa played such a crucial role.

The negotiators on both sides could see what a sustainable political settlement would entail. Their real challenge, however, was to bring their own constituencies into line.

How could white racial extremists, leftist anticapitalists and African nationalists be persuaded to support a constitutional settlement based on human rights and commerce? Only by creating a sense of historic crisis.

This admittedly violence-fuelled uncertainty encouraged unexpected compromises to be reached. Ultimately, it resulted in a settlement that could never have been sold to either side based on rational dialogue alone.

Less than a decade later, an HIV/AIDS calamity threatened fiscal crisis, social disintegration and the destruction of democratic politics. A crisis-awakened country responded with massive prevention and care interventions and with the world’s largest treatment programme. Conflict over HIV entrenched the legitimacy of an activist judiciary and established the fallibility of overbearing presidents.

It is arguable that the greatest challenge for AIDS policy in SA today is that the HIV epidemic is no longer viewed as a crisis. New HIV infections have fallen by half since 2010.

However, SA still has the largest epidemic in the world, with more than 7-million people living with the virus.

A little more than half of HIV-positive people are receiving antiretroviral therapies, rather than the nine out of 10 that is the government’s stated goal.

In SA, a crisis is sometimes needed to get the right things done. A land expropriation crisis may therefore be the opposite of what it seems: an opportunity rather than a threat.

Ramaphosa doubtless had little choice but to act on the resolution adopted by the ANC at its conference last December, but the political energy that has been unleashed by the “land question” may now be channelled towards long-anticipated and benign policy changes that have been blocked by entrenched interests.

Vested interests take many forms: traditional leaders who deny their subjects control over their own land in much of rural SA; commercial farmers who have used evictions to reduce their exposure to perceived political risks; municipalities that have failed to document ownership in peri-urban areas; parastatals and government departments that have blocked the use of their land for housing and economic development; and property owners who have used political donations and litigation to protect their private economic advantages.

Engendering a sense of crisis always carries risks, of course.

Having a land crisis in SA, however, may ultimately be far less hazardous than not having one.

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

As the government and trade union negotiators lock horns in the Public Service Co-ordinating Bargaining Council, there has been a growing clamour in the business community for the public sector wage bill to be slashed. After all, the ANC describes SA as a “developmental state” in which investment should take priority over consumption. Diverting a third of government spending into wages suggests precisely the opposite tendency.

The government has been forced to cut key grants for municipal infrastructure, water services and urban settlements to accommodate higher pay for more numerous public servants. A growing public sector payroll, meanwhile, forces the finance minister to borrow more, thus crowding out private investment.

Unilaterally imposed public sector pay cuts or freezes offer a tempting route to fiscal consolidation. An across-the board 10% wage cut could, in theory, reduce public spending by a whacking 3%.

But governments elsewhere have accumulated a wealth of experience about the risks of sweeping cuts or freezes. The “conditionalities” imposed by international lending institutions have often damaged countries’ longer-term economic and developmental prospects.

SA can learn the following lessons from these experiences:

• Wage cuts tend to affect aggregate demand unexpectedly hard because public sector workers have a high propensity to consume. Cuts should therefore be concentrated among highly paid public servants. Government negotiators’ current proposals, which favour employees on levels one to seven and mildly penalise levels 11 and 12, do not go anywhere near far enough;

• Increased taxes tend to promote better distributional outcomes than spending cuts. Carbon taxes, sin taxes and perhaps even land taxes can also contribute to meeting wider policy objectives;

• Approaches that spread the pain around, such as general recruitment freezes and pay cuts for the workforce as a whole, tend to result in suboptimal outcomes. Pay rises should always be linked in some way to productivity gains. Freezes of frontline posts in education, nursing and policing invariably have negative long-term consequences for human and economic development. Cuts should instead reflect a considered strategy to streamline government operations. President Cyril Ramaphosa’s pledge to “review the configuration, number and size of national government departments” is thus welcome;

• The public service is the key motor for class mobility and it has been the vector through which hundreds of thousands of black citizens entered the middle class. The government needs a clearer sense of what such sociohistorical gains are worth to the country and of how to price them; and

• The less tangible costs of freezing recruitment and pay should not be underestimated. When downsizing or cost-cutting, the best private firms prepare detailed implementation and communication plans, and follow these up with employee care and retraining programmes. Downsizing, however, still affects motivation, institutional memory and performance. In the public sector, pay or recruitment freezes that are experienced as essentially arbitrary will similarly undermine employee loyalty and engagement to the detriment of work quality and performance.

The government needs longer-range strategies for improving the quality of state spending and the performance of public servants.

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

The effectiveness of party president Mmusi Maimane has been questioned by the DA’s own researchers. Controversies swirl around senior party figures, including Western Cape Premier Helen Zille and City of Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille.

The DA’s strong performance in the 2016 local government elections was built on hypermotivated white voters in Gauteng and their coloured counterparts in the Cape. It is ironic that tribalism in politics is now exhibited most visibly by the DA. But it is wrong, if tempting, to attribute all the party’s problems to racial politics.

Ideas matter. Some party activists remain wedded to the curious variant of liberalism that guided the Democratic Party. The current leadership includes one prominent proponent of creationism and homophobia, a black consciousness activist, and a champion of xenophobia and free market access to hair products. No wonder electors are confused.

Certain key factors explain the resilience of swaggering, dominant parties such as the ANC. They make full use of the advantages of incumbency, shamelessly allocating jobs, contracts and state resources to party supporters. Their seemingly inevitable victory discourages office-seeking politicians and energetic volunteer activists alike from supporting any other party. Right now, it is still the ANC that offers a route to national office. What rational, young politician would join a party that cannot reliably deliver a seat?

Opposition parties such as the DA and the EFF adopt “noncentrist” policies that do not appeal to typical voters. Because candidates and activists joined with little hope of winning, they tend to be a bit crazy: many of them are ideologues, extremists or sociopaths, such as Julius Malema or Zille. Socioeconomic concerns preoccupy most South African citizens. The DA is obsessed by corruption and a narrow swathe of urban and peri-urban policy issues. Opposition leaders such as Zille indulge in ideological posturing that they must know is damaging to their parties’ electoral prospects.

The DA is also trapped by its funders. It has allowed commercial farmers to waste water resources at great cost to the Western Cape’s economy. The party has bowed and scraped before these dinosaurs, and such grovelling can only be explained by party donations.

The DA’s credibility will rest on its coalition-building strategy. It has benefited handsomely from previous liaisons with the Inkatha Freedom Party, the National Party and the Independent Democrats. But the DA’s alliance of convenience with the EFF is destined to fall apart in the very near future, generating great animosity.

The ideological distance between the two parties will grow if Cyril Ramaphosa keeps occupying more of the political middle ground. Who will be the DA’s partner now?

The DA and the EFF will have to be more ruthless if they are to continue to grow. They need to find out where the rough centre of ground in SA politics lies, drag themselves towards it, message smartly to different constituencies and silence their egregiously self-indulgent leaders.

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

The report highlighted a global need to reach a billion people currently without access to energy, to keep costs affordable, to reduce carbon emissions, and to accommodate and exploit new technologies.

The Forum’s Energy Transition Index (ETI) measures how well national energy systems promote inclusive economic growth, secure reliable access to energy, and advance environmental sustainability.

It also assesses “transition readiness” — the ability of a country to secure the capital, skills, effective regulatory mechanisms, stable institutions, and supportive infrastructure required to facilitate a transition to a low-carbon economy.

Like many such composite indices, ETI rests on questionable methodological foundations, but it can, nevertheless, help governments understand how they are performing relative to peers and learn lessons from others.

It is worth reflecting on why SA placed second to last out of 114 countries in WEF’s league table.

SA’s energy challenges encompass coal production and the governance of the liquid fuels sector. But the most pressing problems lie in electricity. These problems were worsened by, but did not originate in, Jacob Zuma’s two dismal terms as president.

These market-friendly proposals reflected international trends, and were driven by environmental considerations, new technologies that reduce capital intensity in generation, and advances in computer-based control systems that undercut conventional “natural monopoly” justifications for energy dinosaurs such as Eskom.

An unholy alliance in SA blocked desirable reforms. Unions bewailed “privatisation”. Energy-intensive businesses protected their opaque — and often apparently corrupt — long-term contracts with Eskom. ANC elites had already begun to use parastatals such as Eskom as a source of patronage and rents.

In this way, a sadly predictable ANC alliance of leftists, crooks, and big business empowerment partners insisted that Eskom must be left in control of generation and the grid. Private investment was effectively blocked.

The key consequences, in short, have been an absurdly inefficient parastatal, a tripling of electricity prices that has hit economic growth and the poor, load shedding, cash flow crises, debt junking, and systemic risks to the entire economy.

The one bright light has been some investment in renewables by private power generators.

The Electricity Regulation Act of 2006, and associated regulations promulgated in 2009, empowered the energy minister, in 2011, to formulate an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) that set out a proposed generation mix in the light of demand and cost projections.

In consequence, the government invited R150bn of private investment in wind, photo-voltaic, and concentrated solar power in the years that followed. This represented just 3% of energy supplied to the grid — but it set out a potential future path to a sustainable economy.

Eskom adopted its usual blocking strategy, generating dubious statistics, menacing private generators, and eventually, in 2016, threatening to exclude private generators from the transmission grid.

The IRP became a political football. Zuma’s five morally challenged energy ministers, shadowy energy officials, and wily Eskom senior managers, together defended apparent abuses of procurement powers and perpetuated Zuma’s personal project of nuclear power procurement from the Russian Federation.

While Zuma’s ministerial underlings were undermining SA’s prospects of sustainable and affordable energy, the rest of the world had woken up. Renewable prices fell globally as a result of technological breakthroughs in solar and wind generation, and falls in the cost of storing electricity.

While some South African “expert” consultants promoted coal and nuclear generation, and disparaged renewable “utopias”, international orthodoxy was radically changing. As Bloomberg’s New Energy Finance observed last year, renewables will probably account for 72% of global power-generation investment by 2040.

Renewables are already cheaper than coal and nuclear by any sane measures. Renewable generation costs are likely to drop by two thirds for both solar and wind power over the next two decades.

It is little wonder that even in nuclear-friendly China, wind-power investments have outstripped nuclear since 2012.

The real motivations for nuclear power generation have disappeared with Zuma’s resignation. It will, however, take time for propagandist and compromised officials to be removed, and for the disinformation campaign that government officials and industry consultants have engaged in for more than a decade to be neutralised.

Reason and evidence will hopefully now play a more decisive role in decisions about SA’s future energy mix.

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