The Covid-19 crisis is stress testing all of our political leaders. Ministers and senior officials are patently exhausted. The uncertainty that surrounds the impact of the pandemic has left their heads spinning.

Covid-19 will be our companion for 18 months or two years, until a vaccine or effective treatment becomes available. The early lockdown was appropriate, but the government has taken too long to register the magnitude of the associated economic crisis. Now it seems curiously unwilling to take steps to ramp up economic activity.

National Treasury predicts an annual contraction of the economy of between 5% and 16%, and between 3-million and 7-million more unemployed people. In the context of often permanent losses in economic capacity, the government should take every step possible to help job- and wealth-creating businesses survive.

Yet the level 4 regulations — and even the level 3 that lies tantalisingly out of reach — fall far short. Economy-transforming e-business platforms that could bring long-excluded smaller enterprises to the market and increase competition are strangled. An informal sector that supports millions of livelihoods is still largely locked down.

Trade & industry minister Ebrahim Patel has dismissed Treasury forecasts and rejected suggestions that businesses should open when and if they can implement health and safety plans.

In parts of the ANC, fantasies are circulating that the patriotic bourgeoisie is poised to buy up assets in fire-sales, perhaps with government help. The fallacy that there is a fixed amount of work in the economy is meanwhile taken to prove that “black” tourism entrepreneurs will arise automatically in the place of bankrupt “white” companies.

Public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan seems to believe the collapse of domestic and international airlines will create a “space” that can be filled by a thriving new SAA.

The Left has risen from its intellectual slumbers to castigate a private sector “investment strike”, to call for a pliant Public Investment Corporation, and even to demand prescribed assets.

Human beings — politicians and academics included — possess alarmingly little intellectual self-consciousness. We usually adopt theories on the basis that they are politically convenient and intellectually undemanding. Little wonder “modern monetary theory” and the “entrepreneurial state” are so popular among the same politicians and scholars who brought us the parastatal-driven developmental state just a decade ago.

It is interesting, but probably futile, to speculate what President Cyril Ramaphosa’s position may be on the growth of magical money trees in the Reserve Bank. But it is sensible to take seriously his recent words on the “new economy” he ostensibly hopes to create. He reportedly told KwaZulu-Natal’s Covid-19 provincial command council this week that SA is witnessing the “total destruction of our economy”.

Radical economic transformation, he observed, must be central to our post-Covid economic reconstruction: “We are going to have to go for growth in a big and exponential way and be willing and be brave and courageous enough to massify whatever needs to be done”. In the “new economy”, the government will identify growth sectors and “find, create and build jobs for the many of our people who are going to lose [them]”.

Covid-19’s heaviest impact will be in townships, informal settlements and rural areas. Otherwise inexplicable regulations, such as the curfew, a defined three-hour exercise period and a 5km exercise radius (which places Sandton, for example, beyond the reach of protesters from Alexandra) suggest an unflinching government preparing for an extended hard lockdown.

Government is not just witnessing the economy’s “total destruction”, as Ramaphosa claims, it is also partly causing it. There is still time to keep more businesses alive, and to retain the public trust the country will need as it moves into the more challenging phases of the epidemic.

Wishful thinking about the capabilities of a post-Covid government should be saved for another day.

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

Government’s proposed easing of Covid-19 restrictions will have to balance health risks with economic effects. But the human, social, and political dimensions of the response should not be ignored.

We are confronted by three great fields of uncertainty. The first concerns the health science of Covid. We remain poorly informed about how the virus spreads, asymptomatic carrying, the effectiveness of social distancing, treatment options and testing reliability. Above all, we do not know if those who are infected will develop sustained immunity, or whether and when an effective vaccine will be available.

A second zone of uncertainty is economic. The implications of lockdown are hard to estimate. We face an explosion of public debt, companies will be destroyed and never return, unemployment is rising, and output shrinking. We face a potential collapse of the international trading system.

While government has carefully counterpoised “health” and “economy”, a third zone of uncertainty — human culture and behaviour — has been largely  ignored.

We do not know how citizens will respond to their confinement, and whether it will permanently change patterns of respect for authority. Will post-lockdown consumers return to pre-lockdown patterns of behaviour, travelling, consuming, and working in habitual ways?

Equally importantly, we do not know if the trust and co-operative behaviour required for self-confinement and compliance with official guidance will survive heavy-handed enforcement.

This third, human, dimension of the pandemic tends to fall in the cracks between the social sciences.

Economists have selectively harvested cognitive science and social psychology to elaborate various supposed “cognitive biases”: a normalcy bias that makes us slow to recognise threats; a confirmation bias that supports our preconceptions; and an “exponential myopia” that prevents us from understanding the basic maths of an epidemic.

The idea that human beings are basically rational, but with “biases” that impair our judgment, is deeply unhelpful in our abnormal world. Indeed, many popular reactions to the coronavirus have eschewed scientific and economic rationality altogether.

In our early HIV/Aids epidemic, more than two decades ago, the sexual transmission of HIV was used to blame the victims. Today we are headed down the same moralising path: liquor and cigarettes, according to our new moral guardians, increase vulnerability to Covid-related death and must be “banned” — or rather moved to the informal economy.

Our security apparatus has recovered its suppressed consciousness of how an authoritarian government should behave. The casspirs are freshly painted. Police roadblocks have appeared in exactly the same places they were found 30 years ago: on the borders of townships, similarly designed to contain protest. The talk is that we should not isolate individuals but rather communities; this used to be known as apartheid.

What does this mean for SA’s response to Covid-19? Government’s strategy has bought time to prepare the health system. We certainly need field hospitals, testing kits, masks, ventilators and burial places: they can help prevent the health system from being overwhelmed. Time has been bought to scale up screening and disaggregated information gathering; hopefully we are building a testing and tracing infrastructure.

This can all support a targeted lifting of the lockdown that distinguishes regions, different sectors of the economy, risks of transmission within sectors, lockdown effects, and broader economic and health considerations.

But we also need to consider the effect of lockdowns on ordinary people: their trust in government, their willingness to comply with regulations, their stigma, and their anger.

Four weeks of lockdown has been a long time, but we are starting a marathon that may last for 18 months or two years. The trust and willing compliance of ordinary citizens will become a valuable resource. We must be careful in these early stages not to break the link between government and the people through thoughtless and unnecessary actions by arrogant ministers and officials.

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

The national lockdown that starts from Friday may buy SA some time. The unprecedented worldwide search for effective treatments could bear fruit, and our public health authorities have an opportunity to start systematic testing for the coronavirus.

Given the limited capacity of the country’s public health system, however, there are difficult and unavoidable decisions ahead about how scarce resources should be allocated. Governments always have limited resources, whereas health-care demands are essentially limitless. This poses the question: which patients first?

Frederick Banting and Charles Best discovered in 1922 that insulin could be used to treat diabetes. But only small quantities could be made. Banting simply decided himself who would be saved; this included his friends and powerful politicians.

In the early 1940s, the efficacy of penicillin as a treatment for a wide range of bacterial infections became clear. Since this was wartime, military uses were prioritised. Penicillin was “rationally” allocated according to its efficacy and the speed with which it would enable soldiers to return to the front. This meant gonorrhoea among soldiers was given priority over the lives of sick children.

Dialysis became feasible for chronic kidney disease in the early 1960s. Seattle’s Artificial Kidney Centre decided that “rational” choices should be made about which patients would have access to this lifelong and expensive treatment. A patient selection committee decided that beneficiaries had to be taxpayers in the state of Washington. Patients were also ranked by “social worth”: occupation, income, education, emotional stability and “future potential”.

A less explicit rationing unfolded two decades ago in SA with respect to antiretroviral (ARV) medication. Specialists argued about the merits of treating early phase HIV patients, who had better survival prospects rates, or later phase patients whose condition was more “urgent”. There was also debate about whether to prioritise children or specific occupational groups.

In reality, campaigners partly ducked the issue by arguing for a “universal programme” that could not be provided. Politicians were wary about becoming embroiled in debates about who should be treated, and hid themselves behind the obfuscation and confusion of the “denialist” era.

In practice, the question “which patients first?” was answered arbitrarily and unjustly. Resources were concentrated in private sector clinics and hospitals. Large companies extended coverage to their skilled workers to prevent reduced productivity and skills shortages.

Politicians, judges and senior public servants joined the rich at the front of the queue. Special programmes were designed for soldiers and police officers to maintain public order and the stability of the state. Health-care workers themselves received privileged access because they were at risk of infection and had to be well if they were to treat others.

Donor agencies elaborated their own criteria for deserving recipients. “Adherence to treatment” assessments saw patients selected on the basis of their family background, clinic attendance, emotional stability and commitment to safe sex.

Who was at the end of the queue? Rural programmes were almost nonexistent. The very poor everywhere were unable to pay the bribes that were sometimes needed. Outsiders or refugees found access hard or impossible.

Those stigmatised or confused about HIV/Aids simply did not come forward for testing or treatment. And those denied the education and information they needed to make informed choices about their own health died in ignorance of potential treatments.

Patient selection will be a potentially divisive issue once again over the coming months. Perceptions of unfairness could easily aggravate tensions based on race, class, religious belief or country of origin. In the short time we have been bought, we need a broader public debate, both about how very few patients our health system will be able to treat, and about the criteria by which they will be selected.

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

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global pandemic. Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch argues that “within the coming year some 40%-70% of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes Covid-19”.

The WHO has called for greater urgency on the part of governments. By its estimate, 13% of symptomatic patients will require hospitalisation and 6% will need intensive care.

In Japan, Iran, Italy and South Korea cases exploded from tens to hundreds to thousands in the course of weeks. Affected governments are moving from containment strategies to mitigation ones, trying to flatten the peak of the epidemic to allow time to prepare health systems for the huge caseload.

South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and others are quite effectively using “social distancing” measures, initially isolating sick individuals and their contacts but then moving swiftly to “reduce social connectivity” by cancelling gatherings and events. Citizens have been told to work from home, wash hands regularly and thoroughly, avoid travel and crowded places, and self-isolate when they feel sick.

SA may be vulnerable. We are young, but we have poor respiratory health as a result of our high prevalence of HIV and tuberculosis (TB) infection. There are weaknesses in the public health system with regard to training, overcrowding and shortages of protective masks, clothing and critical care ventilators.

Poverty may increase vulnerability as a result of immune system weakness, a lack of access to reliable information, and overcrowded settlements and public transport systems. Most workers cannot work from home, and they lack paid sick leave to fund self-isolation. Further challenges result from the circulation of people between rural and urban areas, and hostel accommodation in institutions such as prisons.

SA can learn from the experiences of countries at a more advanced stage of the pandemic, and we are fortunate to have the capabilities of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) to draw on.

Three lessons of our own HIV epidemic may be especially valuable. First, credible communication is vital and the government must remain honest to retain public trust.

Second, we need a “whole of government” approach. Like HIV/Aids, Covid-19 is not just a health challenge that can be managed by the health department. Every government institution, especially large employers such as the departments of education and police, must take steps to prevent the spread of Covid-19 among their workforces. Feasible self-isolation strategies cannot be planned from the centre.

Each national department needs to prepare a plan for supporting its particular “clients”. Are schools implementing appropriate hygiene and disinfection strategies? How exactly will Covid-19 be managed in our prisons? How will our development and trade departments support businesses facing disrupted supply chains?

Moreover, intervention windows are available to every minister, if they can be identified. Has the department of transport formulated guidance for minimising the spread of the coronavirus in taxis, trains and buses? Has traditional affairs developed a strategy for mobilising traditional leaders and healers? How will the transmission risk posed by social grant distribution be managed? Will the water & sanitation department resurrect former minister Ronnie Kasrils’s water, sanitation and health (Wash) programme from the early 2000s to facilitate handwashing in poorer communities?

A third lesson from HIV is that the government sometimes needs to grasp the nettle. It is difficult to see why sporting events, religious meetings, university lectures and any other large and unnecessary gathering in a public venue or private company should go ahead given that these pose a clear risk of accelerating the epidemic. As Lipsitch observes, the goal is to minimise the number of contacts between people early on, in the hope of averting the need for more drastic and costly interventions later.

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

Readers of the Book of Revelation have long prophesied that credit ratings agency Moody’s post-budget day of judgment will be preceded by the arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, representing war, famine, pestilence and death.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has tried to defy such gloomy prophesies by unleashing instead the three great elephants of the liberation movement: mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan and finance minister Tito Mboweni.

The elephant represents strength and patience, symbolising the wisdom, loyalty, reliability and determination that characterise the creature’s behaviour in the wild. The giant African political elephant, known to science as Loxodonta Mantashe Africana, presents a magnificent spectacle. The largest mammal in the world, with a torso span of more than 4m, it drinks upwards of 100l of water per day, and communicates by means of low-frequency rumbles that can be heard a dozen kilometres away.

Mantashe’s critics forget that once roused to anger he can storm unstoppably across the plains of Boksburg or through the meetings of the national executive committee. In recent months he has generated confusion, even despair, among energy sector analysts, but the direction of his march towards independent power production, municipal electricity generation and a renewable energy transition has finally become set.

Gordhan is widely revered as a repository of the deepest secrets and a divine representation of intellect and wisdom. The elephant is typically a gentle giant and very slow to anger, but the relentless provocation of Ganesha Gordhan by the EFF leadership will not be forgotten. When yapping and snarling EFF members cornered the minister in parliament in July last year, Gordhan stood unmoved and entirely fearless, simply demanding that “they must touch me”.

In his budget speech on Wednesday, Mboweni revealed himself as the third member of the government’s elephant herd. Disdainfully ignoring calls for prescribed assets and the tapping of public sector pension funds, he pushed back against central bank nationalisation and advanced the cause of exchange control liberalisation. Then, flapping his great ears, he charged fearlessly in the general direction of the public sector unions.

We must not get ahead of ourselves. Elephants do not always move very fast. Gordhan, Mantashe and Mboweni may be pragmatists, but they view the world through dramatically different intellectual lenses. As a result of their enormous bulk, the three can cause great damage to one another if they fight.

The financial and operational crises in the parastatals have meanwhile not been resolved. The Treasury no longer claims that national debt is on course to stabilise over the medium term. The likely rate of growth in the years immediately ahead remains dismal. The scope for damaging unintended consequences from public sector disruption should not be underestimated.

Nevertheless, the boldness of the three ministers offers some reason for hope. Ramaphosa’s government has appeared paralysed by powerful commercial and political interests and enmeshed in debilitating internal compromises that make reform impossible.

All three ministers, in their unique ways, have dragged themselves out of the swamp that is ANC economic policy and asserted positions at odds with the movement’s prevailing and untenable conventional wisdom. Government action freed from party shackles has been shown to be possible — at least in principle.

Have the three elephants done enough to push back an expected Moody’s downgrade decision in March? It is hard to say. The agency shares with the authors of the Book of Revelation a reticence about specifying the precise conditions that will precipitate the apocalypse, and a remarkable talent for mystification. But Mboweni has probably won the government a little more time.

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

Vengeance is in the air. In a marked deviation from the ANC’s preferred post-Zuma script, citizens are clamouring for state capture miscreants to be put in prison.

ANC leaders anticipated that the Zondo commission of inquiry into allegations of state capture would push any reckoning back to 2021 or 2022, by which time public anger would have abated.

The Zondo commission began promisingly for the cover-up crowd: the key victims of its work were fundamentally honest men, including former finance minister Nhlanhla Nene.

While the inquiry meandered on, the guilty parties had time to get their stories straight and decide which junior officials would take the rap.

So slow is the inquiry that we may soon see the Seriti commission’s “Modise” option brought into play. Named after a former defence minister, the late Joe Modise, this refers to the attribution of criminal misconduct solely to people who have fortuitously died.

Many citizens are no longer persuaded of the merits of the commission model. This has been brought into focus in recent weeks by the activities of the Anglicans, an amiable Christian sect perhaps best known for unfamiliarity with the Old Testament, support for renewable energy and faith in the value of forgiveness.

According to chapter eight of the gospel according to St John, Jesus responded to demands that a woman be stoned to death for committing adultery with the words, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” This is very much the sentiment of the national executive committee of the ANC.

Former North West premier Supra “Black Jesus” Mahumapelo has been the most vocal proponent of the Anglican “missionary” position that blame must not be fuelled by self-righteous anger.

The Anglicans, however, have now abandoned their own philosophy of forgiveness. Delivering his recent Christmas sermon at St George’s cathedral, Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba proclaimed 2020 the “year of the orange jumpsuit”. Initially misinterpreted as a fashion guideline for dowdy Anglican youth groups, it transpired that these words referred to “a year of reckoning for those whose greed has driven the country to the brink of disaster”.

This week, more than 30 civil society organisations gathered at the cathedral to reiterate the demand that 2020 should be the year of orange overalls. The twin proponents of forgive and forget — Black Jesus and deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo — have failed to assuage popular anger. A huge weight of expectation now lies on the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).

Huge political fallout will follow perceived bias in case selection. Describing the list of the potential accused as “impossibly long”, Hermione Cronje, the head of the NPA’s investigative directorate, recently spoke about a process of dividing cases into “priority areas”. South Africans, she claimed, will see the “logic and the strategy” once charges have been laid. However, the principles according to which such prioritisation has been undertaken are crucially important.

At a lecture at the University of Cape Town in January, Cronje observed infelicitously that, “we know who we are after and we will prosecute them”. Mahumapelo and his crowd are already building a counter-narrative about politically engineered prosecutions, condemning “machinations” designed to “make sure that the political challenges that are there are not resolved politically, but are [instead] resolved through the courts”.

The last time politicised case selection became an issue in the ANC, the relevant NPA agency — the directorate of special operations, better known as the Scorpions — was closed down in short order.

The NPA urgently needs to develop a clear and consistent set of principles according to which cases are to be selected and taken forward. These principles need to be articulated and defended openly by government ministers and the president.

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

Human settlements, water & sanitation minister Lindiwe Sisulu is the closest thing to a celebrity politician in today’s ANC. But her high profile exposes her to more intense scrutiny than less famous ministers.

In recent weeks she has come under fire for her appointment of former spy boss Mo Shaik and former prosecuting authority head Menzi Simelane to her ministerial staff. This controversy came hot on the heels of her decision last November to elevate former social development minister Bathabile Dlamini to the chair of the interim board of the social housing regulatory authority.

The appointment of former spooks, liars, and incompetents to positions of power is far from unusual in the contemporary ANC, but it is just too obvious that Shaik and Simelane are not water and sanitation experts. The relentless political ambitiousness that has marked Sisulu’s career has inevitably led to claims that a “leadership bid” lies behind her recent actions.

As the daughter of ANC giants Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Lindiwe has always been liberation movement royalty. She rose through Umkhonto we Sizwe as an intelligence specialist, and eventually as a key assistant to top spook Jacob Zuma. She served Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki as deputy home affairs minister, keeping a wary eye on her senior, Mangosuthu Buthelezi. She was briefly rewarded with the position she craved, that of intelligence minister, but Mbeki quickly moved her sideways to housing. Zuma brought her back to international relations before shuffling her to public administration and then back to housing (now more grandly called “human settlements”) where she remains uncomfortably confined.

In the ANC she has “seniority”, but she also has a very long history of misjudgments for a presidential hopeful. Her notorious extravagance, most memorably her solo trips on air force planes, is out of step with our more austere times.

In October 2017, in the run-up to the Nasrec conference at which she hoped to be elected president, she became embroiled in a slanging match with Gwede Mantashe, questioning his record as secretary-general and asking “where was he when we were fighting for this freedom in exile and in jail”. This claim that exiles were superior to mineworker organisers such as Mantashe confirmed to many that she was out of touch and arrogant.

It is little wonder that the water “master plan” she launched hurriedly in 2019  was widely greeted as a personal vanity project.

Sisulu has long considered herself presidential material, but since she is 65 years old — part of Ramaphosa’s generation rather than deputy president David Mabuza’s or ANC treasurer Paul Mashatile’s cohort — there is no credible strategy for her to ascend to the throne after two Ramaphosa terms.

This leaves an ambitious politician with only long-shot avenues to power. She could position herself as a “third-way” compromise candidate in the event of a 2022 challenge to the incumbent from Mabuza and Mashatile. Or she may be contemplating a more direct presidential run in 2022, resuscitating the “time for a woman” campaign that failed Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma so dismally.

Last May, she ostentatiously joined the ANC Women’s League, of which Bathabile Dlamini is president. Dlamini warmly embraced her, observing that “she is coming to be part of a big family that is here to stay”. ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule has littered recent speeches with condemnations of “patriarchy”. Anti-Ramaphosa forces may seek to make gender a battleground, possibly resurrecting the failed smear campaigns they undertook so ineptly before Nasrec.

Another scenario is perhaps more plausible. Sisulu may have gotten wind of potential legal obstacles to deputy president Mabuza continuing in office after 2022. Such a development would leave the position of deputy president open for contestation, and gender could become a decisive determinant of the outcome.

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

President Cyril Ramaphosa was beleaguered this week. A manufactured army of protesters demanded that he strip public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan and his department of control of the Eskom reform process.

Direct attacks on the leadership capabilities of the president also escalated, some of them from erstwhile allies. In an example of an organisation discovering it had testicles at just the wrong moment, Business Unity SA chair Sipho Pityana railed this week against “summits, conferences and lekgotlas”. He demanded “credible, single-minded, resolute and decisive leadership that sets the tone, determines direction and pulls the nation with it”.

Both sets of critics are likely to be disappointed. Ramaphosa is unlikely to be transformed overnight into a conviction politician. But it is also improbable that he will sacrifice Gordhan as a result of political pressure.

Pityana’s pointed comments certainly raise legitimate questions about Ramaphosa’s presidency. Do the president’s problems flow from personal psychological or intellectual limitations? Or are they a product of fundamental clashes of interests that make leadership almost impossible?

In common with many national leaders, Ramaphosa has realised his lifetime’s ambition to become state president. He would not be the first to discover that the qualities that got him the job are not the ones he needs to succeed at it.

But the president is learning that lines in the sand can work. During last year’s SA Reserve Bank “crisis”, in which the proxy issue of public ownership was deployed to destabilise his administration, Ramaphosa’s decision to reappoint the Bank governor to a second term brought a whipped-up political storm to an abrupt close.

He probably knows he will soon have to make a clear statement of a nonnegotiable Eskom reform pathway and timeline. This is a prerequisite for maintaining any kind of coalition behind him.

The bigger issue is that Ramaphosa faces a deep and almost unmanageable clash of interests. At Eskom, an unholy alliance has been forged between unions representing the workers in the coal-energy complex and beneficiaries of the parastatal’s coal and diesel supply chains. These vested interests have direct influence within the ANC through the tripartite alliance and as party (and lifestyle) funders.

Some critics complain that Ramaphosa simply does not know what he is doing. His backgrounds in black consciousness politics, trade unions and business pull him this way and that. He has no clear intellectual or moral framework, they argue, and so he simply cannot decide what to do.

This is improbable. Indeed, Ramaphosa’s detached approach has many merits. He has surrounded himself with a concentric circle of economy cluster ministers who represent distinct approaches to the way forward.

Novelist F Scott Fitzgerald once observed that a test of intelligence is “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”. In this complex situation Ramaphosa is probably right not to rely on his own immediate instincts.

What does this imply about the future of Pravin Gordhan? Gordhan is a target because he sat for almost two decades at the top of the most important informal intelligence network in SA. Relentless attacks on him over the past decade, from captured institutions, the public protector and the EFF, testify to fear of Gordhan and his network: perhaps a decade of criminal activity is finally going to result in prosecutions.

Gordhan is also custodian of the only Eskom plan we have. Passing the job on to Gwede Mantashe and his ramshackle department would mean a resurgent coal lobby, no single market operator and prescribed assets to keep the leaky vessel afloat. Will Ramaphosa abdicate his presidential responsibilities because Mantashe is his friend and closest political ally? I would bet not.

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

Ho ho ho! We have reached that time in the year when the little boys and girls across the land look forward to a visit by a fat man in a red suit carrying a sack of shiny presents.

Santa has the hardest job in the world. He runs the workshop where the toys are made, oversees the elves who do the work, and trains the reindeer that pull his sleigh. He has to deliver millions of gifts to almost impossible deadlines.

Recently the little children have been very sad. Grumpy Santa Thabo didn’t like giving gifts at all, and Santa Jacob gave all the best presents to his friends and relatives. Nerthus (“mother earth”) Dlamini-Zuma rode a sleigh all the way from Addis to save us, but somehow we got Chinese Santa Cyrildene instead.

Father Christmas has to be very round and jolly, and silly folk once said Cyril was too thin to do the job. He always used to stand next to Gwede “Low Centre of Gravity” Mantashe, the Reindeer Not Responsible For Energy After All. Because of the so-called “moon illusion”, Mantashe appeared gigantic when he was close to the horizon, which made Cyril look skinny by comparison. But now Uncle Gwede has got stuck in the chimney while trying to fix the Medupi generator Cyril’s supposed rivals, such as Lindiwe “I’m a real Princess” Sisulu, and the three skinny dwarves, “DD”, Paul and Zweli, are all much too thin to be real Santas.

Santa Zuma’s friends have been sent to a correctional facility by the sea, called “Bosasa Parliamentary Precinct”. Bongani “big bottom” Bongo, Faith Mutant, Mostbendy Zany and Tina “Swedish Moneybags” Pettersson have become “committee chairpersons”. This means they sit on chairs all day long and aren’t allowed to do anything. Ho ho ho!

The little boys and girls are likely to be disappointed once again this year. Their favourite uncle or aunt, Mbaks “Zandile Gumede” Mbalula, doesn’t love them any more.

The gender-balanced children’s leadership, Julius and Floydinia, wrote a manifesto with their crayons that turned out to be political correctness gone mad!

Now they have a new “Top Six”: themselves plus four little boys and girls nobody has ever heard of, called Poppy, Omphy, Marshy and Veronica. Everyone with more than 100 Twitter followers has been sacked. Like “Doc” the Ice Boy, all the little children now have to kneel down before Big Julius. But what will they all do when the Top Two go to jail?

Santa Cyril’s biggest problem is getting the job done. The old factory management dwarf, Rob “pointy ears” Davies, has retired (to the 1970s). But Santa has replaced him with Ebrahim “pointy ears” Patel, who has just the same ears, and ideas.

The new Reindeerial Handbook hasn’t really cut the cost of sleighs, and the National Development McPlan Meal has gone cold. Meanwhile, the elves are growing restless. Since last Christmas, Santa has been paying them the Very Minimal Wage to make unemployment go down, but amazingly this has not worked! Now the crazy elves want Santa to raid their own piggy bank, the Piggies Investment Corporation, to keep the Goblin Run Enterprises going.

But Pravin Goblin, the previous Keeper of the Golden Chest, still does not know how to fix the generator. In fact, Snoozy Zondo’s Cover-Up Commission, fuelled by gazillions in lawyers’ fees, has produced far more hot air.

Santa exists only because the little children believe that he does. If he doesn’t get a move on and set the generator, the factory and the reindeer in motion, little boys and girls across the land will at long last stop believing in him. Then Santa, and the magical movement that he leads, will simply disappear into thin air.

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