It looks increasingly likely that a win by President Jacob Zuma’s incumbent faction at the ANC’s conference in December will bring about “radical economic transformation” — there will be an unprecedented transfer of wealth from ordinary working people to an already bloated elite.

The key instrument in this radical programme of reverse empowerment will be the Public Investment Corporation (PIC), an entity that manages R1.8-trillion in government employees’ pensions and other guardian funds.

Earlier this week, Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba told union federation Cosatu’s central executive committee that he could not guarantee PIC-managed funds would not be used to “re-capitalise” state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

Such SOEs include the struggling national flag carrier, South African Airways (SAA), the SABC, and PetroSA, which have, together, accumulated losses of more than R25bn over the past decade.

In a carefully disseminated narrative, such SOE bailouts have been hailed as protecting jobs and promoting the national interest. In the absence of incentives to reform, however, SOE rescues simply buy time and space for further looting and mismanagement. The drunkards are soon back for another hand-out — and the Treasury’s pockets are now empty.

In the case of the SA National Roads Agency, the PIC has taken a step further, becoming the Gauteng pariah’s primary bond holder. This looks like an abuse of pensioners’ savings to rescue political elites from the fal-lout of the e-tolls debacle.

The worst is yet to come. The PIC has now established significant precedents for “political investing” in companies that offer no, or vanishingly little, prospect of returns. The PIC has thrown money into marginal platinum miner Lonmin. This has set a precedent for public-sector pension funds to be used to buy out ailing and “politically connected” resource houses, so dumping their toxic environmental and labour legacies on unwitting public-sector pensioners.

On yet another front, the PIC’s role in the purchase of the terminally sick Independent Media empire by Sekunjalo Investments has still not been explained or justified. This move has opened the door to a stream of further politically motivated abuses.

Public-sector pensioners are now being carefully groomed by their abusers to pay for a massive injection of capital into one of the world’s largest financial white elephants: Eskom.

Back in May 2015, the head of the ANC’s economic transformation committee, Enoch Godongwana, proposed that private pension funds might “address Eskom’s cash-flow situation … in return for equity”. The roughly R100bn initially required, however, could never be forthcoming from private institutional investors in SA, or from international power companies, in the absence of governance reforms that the ANC is too weak-kneed and compromised to contemplate.

For this reason, ANC leaders have spent two years lobbying for “worker investment” in paraststals to “protect jobs” and to “promote development and transformation”. But the only funds the workers have to invest are their pensions.

• Butler teaches public policy at the University of Cape Town

Political theorists know that disputes about the meaning of “democracy” usually cannot be settled by appeals to reason or evidence alone. Elections, at least, have been central to almost everyone’s idea of democracy since its unlikely emergence in ancient Athens.

Writing on the eve of SA’s own transition, the greatest of all living political scientists, Adam Przeworski, defined democracy as a regime in which “government offices are filled as a consequence of contested elections”. But most scholars insist that democracy must also be a “liberal” system in which fundamental rights and freedoms are constitutionally protected.

Can democratic decisions be delegated to others? In large and complex commercial societies, electoral participation has mostly been limited to periodic votes for representatives who then deliberate on citizens’ behalf.

While western political scientists struggle to define democracy and to understand its implications, the Chinese Communist Party is bypassing the concept altogether.

Chinese people are increasingly unwilling to tolerate the crony capitalism and corruption of the “party-state”. Reformers have talked guardedly about the potential merits of constitutionalism — or even of intraparty elections involving carefully vetted candidates.

But conservatives insist that democracy is costly, destabilising and inefficient. Far better, they argue, to use new technologies to rebuild the party’s legitimacy. Behind China’s “Great Internet Firewall”, an army of censors has long overseen indigenous Weibo social media, taking down the posts of frustrated citizens, identifying antiparty agitators and facilitating the arrest of dissenters. Now the party has reportedly begun to use social media data more constructively to tackle the sources of popular discontent.

Corrupt local officials have been identified and (when politically convenient) removed or punished.

Ordinary people’s revealed anxieties about pollution and public service failures have been translated into remedial actions. Official websites have been set up to filter and channel citizens’ complaints, while the posts of “rumour-mongers” continue to be deleted.

Party officials can now knock on the doors of outraged residents whose houses lie in the path of a rapacious property developer. Informed by Weibo analytics about the intensity of the citizens’ anger, the party can make available appropriate and differentiated compensation to each household, and so avert the formation of a local protest movement. Through this lens, issue-based protest politics simply shows that party officials have not yet identified and tackled the root causes of discontent.

Social media giant Facebook, banned in China, has an almost magical ability to target relevant advertising at consumers. In representative democracies, candidates with deep pockets — and their big-business sponsors — have recently started using the same social media analytics to target political advertising at voters. This growing technological nightmare for the proponents of liberal democracy in the West may be a dream come true for Chinese communists.

Advances in the machine-based processing of social media communications could in future allow the party to know what citizens want before they do themselves. If it can identify the factors that generate discontent, and ameliorate the causes of antiparty sentiment before they turn into anger and protest, the governing elite will be able to dispense altogether with the bothersome and inefficient practice of democracy.

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

Parties that agree to regulation and disclosure will be compensated by increased public support.

It will also consider bans on donations by party-or state-owned companies and multinationals.

The ANC document has many merits. It recognises the advantages of greater openness and acknowledges the needs of smaller parties and new entrants. It accepts opposition parties’ fear that disclosure will drive donors away or underground.

Nevertheless, opposition MPs will need to keep their wits about them if they are not to be disadvantaged by new legislation.

First, international experience points to the dangers of evasion and selective regulation. When donations are banned or capped, they turn into “loans”, are hidden in commercial deals or opaque legal trusts, or are packaged to fall under thresholds.

Disclosure also encourages donors to divert funds to political foundations or other party-aligned institutions in civil society: interest groups, NGOs and partisan newspapers.

Such practices encourage intrusive regulation of targeted political parties and civil society organisations. Factions within governing parties, moreover, inevitably try to penetrate regulatory institutions — even those deemed independent, such as the electoral commission.

Regulation must be nondiscretionary to reduce partisan and factional bias.

Second, it is desirable to ban donations from state and foreign corporations, but such controls can be circumvented fairly easily. Transfers from parastatals to ANC vehicles — for example from Eskom to Chancellor House — demonstrates just how simple this can be if a party is sufficiently brazen.

Third, state elections are often dwarfed by intraparty elections. Money should not be allowed simply to migrate from regulated contests to unregulated ones within parties. But how can this be done without destroying party independence?

Fourth, most parties in SA oblige their elected representatives to donate a share of their salaries to the party — ANC treasurer-general Zweli Mkhize has tried to extend this “tithing” to purportedly nonpartisan directors-general. This practice is widespread in provincial governments and provides a major advantage to governing parties.

Finally, public funding increases are no panacea. There is already more than R1bn of public funding in SA annually. The Represented Political Parties’ Fund distributes more than R135m, and Parliament appropriates R530m to support ill-defined caucus and constituency activities.

Some ANC-governed provinces dole out R630m for party and constituency activities. Order should be brought to this chaos before increases in public funding are even considered.

Opposition parties and the ANC have an interest in bringing monetised politics under better control. There is a need for a regulatory and legal framework that is fair, robust, and resistant to manipulation.

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

THERE is nothing more sinister than people with umbrellas. Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who defected to the West in 1969, poured scorn from exile on the regime that once persecuted him. On September 7 1978, at a bus stop close to London’s Waterloo Bridge, Markov felt a sting in his leg. He turned to see a man hurrying away with an umbrella. A micro-engineered pellet, containing the poison ricin, had been injected into his thigh from the umbrella’s tip. Within three days, he was dead.

Fictional villains have added to the umbrella’s ghoulish reputation.

Batman’s long-standing adversary, the Penguin, was a wobbling, waddling, hoodlum, who never left his lair without an umbrella. The Penguin’s umbrella was more than a rain-repelling accessory: it could fire bullets, double as a bullet-proof shield, or expel toxic gases. It could even serve as a parachute.

A more sympathetic parasol-wielding vigilante featured as the arch-villain in a long-running Thabo Mbeki-era miniseries, Fiscal Judge Dredd (recently revived as Planning Man).

Portrayed by Bollywood heartthrob Trevor Manuel, this imposing “Master of the Future” was an adversary of, well, more or less everybody. He also nursed inner demons. In a notorious 2007 horror flick called Polokwane!, Fiscal Judge Dredd ran amok, berating photographers and trying to attack a journalist with his neo-liberal golfing umbrella.

Now South African opposition politicians have “umbrella fever” once again as a result of Saturday’s launch by Mamphela Ramphele of a fictional political party called Agang SA.

Democratic Alliance (DA) activists believe that apartheid was wrong; but they also believe that somebody else was responsible for it. (They are not quite sure who.) Meanwhile, African citizens are disinclined to vote for a party that is willfully forgetful about history. DA leaders therefore need shielding from the black historical chickens that may come home to roost on election day. Could Ramphele, they wonder, pull a chicken-repellent umbrella out from under one of her hats?

The need for such an accessory was first identified by United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa, who observed long ago that only an opposition “umbrella body” could counter a dominant African National Congress.

Two clues about the umbrella’s potential size and pattern were revealed in Ramphele’s address to the Cape Town Press Club on Wednesday.

First, her promise to “unveil” her policy platform during Saturday’s launch said a lot about the so-called party’s character.

Unlike real political parties — which argue about policy, fight over candidate lists, and elect leaders — Agang (according to its website) wants to put “citizens … at the centre of public life” by “having conversations across the country, to understand people’s needs and expectations for the future”.

Ramphele’s soon to be “unveiled” leadership team is probably made up of Mbeki acolytes. Associates of Moeletsi Mbeki’s Foundation for Global Dialogue helped set up the party. Pro-Mbeki intellectuals, and businesspeople who made money doing business with the Mbeki-era state, are likely to become funders. Agang will aim to cannibalise the electoral carcass of the Mbeki-aligned Congress of the People.

Second, Ramphele told the Press Club that, in certain petitions to the Independent Electoral Commission, her party would be “working as a team” with the DA. “Working as a team”, of course, could go much further than this.

The Agang life-president claimed earlier this year that the DA and Agang could form a “mutual umbrella”. As a result of her close personal relationship with DA leader Helen Zille, an informal deal might already have been struck.

Perhaps Ramphele has consented to serve as the black front for a DA-controlled opposition alliance? Such an agreement might look like a clever way to dig the DA out of its racial hole; but it is unlikely, in the end, to win over many African voters.

• Butler teaches politics at the University of Cape Town.

We have reached that time of year when boys and girls across the land dream about a visit by an overweight man dressed in a red suit. This jolly visitor brings a sack full of presents for all the little children who have been really, really good all year (which isn’t very many of them, to be honest).

This year, however, Santa Zuma is in a pickle.

He used to be guided by a classic management text, Leadership Secrets of Santa Claus, which provided him with a reliable guide to the challenges of gift delivery.

After all, Santa is in charge of a complex operation. He has to increase productivity in the “workshop”, manage the “elves” that make the presents, and choose a cabinet of reindeer to deliver millions of gifts to apparently impossible deadlines.

The book advises “choosing your reindeer wisely … hiring tough so you can manage easy”. But Zuma has appointed a recruitment agency, Saxonwold Consulting, and it has made some terrible decisions.

“Hire me new reindeer,” Santa Zuma told Ajay, Atul and Tony, the three garden gnomes who run the headhunting company. “We will find small-timers in small towns,” said the Ajay gnome, “where the only restaurant is Nandos or Kentucky Fried Chicken. We do not want anyone who has been to Cyril’s fancy McDonalds, and may talk back.”

A year ago to this day, Santa Zuma fired the much-loved Keeper of the Golden Chest, and replaced him with a small town night-club singer and comedian called Des.

But this created a storm that threatened to destroy Santa’s workshop. He was forced to bring Pravin Goblin back from the rural forest to which he had been banished. This legendary creature — a brawler with the face of a baby — turned out to be far too clever by half for old Santa to control.

The honest dwarves that live under Constitution Hill began to ask if Zuma was really Father Christmas at all. “Santa,” they observed on one of their sacred scrolls, should be “a national pathfinder, the quintessential commander-in-chief of state affairs and the personification of this nation’s constitutional project”.

Leadership Secrets advised Zuma to “listen to the elves!” But his bedpan nurse, Sister Dlamini, drove the ogre Shrek to a city by the sea, where the Zombies and Ghouls of the Deathly Alliance now rule.

In his prime, Santa Zuma was a merry gift-giver, dressed in socialist red, leaving presents (and offspring) behind him, everywhere he went.

Now Father Christmas has fallen out with his old friends with red noses: Thulas the Ogre, Blade the Abominable, and Jeremy “Pointy Ears” Cronin.

He has stopped saying “Ho! Ho! Ho!” to little boys and girls, and started cackling “He he he!”

In short, he has fallen under a “state of capture”. The little children do not want Vlad the Impaler to have all of their pocket money to build a new generator for the workshop. Now Vladimir is going to be very cross with Santa!

“Quack quack!” Santa Zuma’s erstwhile friends laugh, ridiculing his lame duck status. But who can become the new father of the magical kingdom?

Santa must by tradition be very round, bearded, and jolly. Just like ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, you might think, only jolly.

But Santa also has to squeeze down chimneys bearing a sack full of gifts; this is not something Mr Mantashe should attempt, not even in an emergency.

Little boys and girls such as Floydinia and Mbuyiseni want their friend, Julius, to be Santa. “He is sometimes fat, dresses in red, and promises gifts, tenders, and land for everyone,” wrote little Mbuyiseni, who is the clever one, with his red crayon. “Julius will go back to the ANC once Zuma is gone — then they will have to make him Santa!”

Nkosazana could come home from the African Union in the Sky. “I have already made the continent better by 2063,” she observed, pointing to Agenda 2063, her singular and miraculous achievement in office.

“She could conceivably be parachuted in by 2017 wearing a false beard,” one sceptical ANC Bogeyman claimed. “But she is the very opposite of jolly, and it will be hard to find a political parachute strong enough to give her an easy landing.”

Happy Cyril also wants to be Father Christmas. “Yo ho ho!”, he said to the elves just the other day. “I will pay you more money so that unemployment will go down!”

“But isn’t there a trade-off,” a wise goblin asked? “Yes,” Cyril explained, “it is between the level I choose for the minimum wage and the political support I will get from the Congress of SA Elves!”

Leadership Secrets reminds us that an ANC Santa exists only because the little children think that he does. If Santa continues to be naughty — or if the ANC chooses another naughty Santa — the little boys and girls across the land will stop believing in him. Then Santa, and the ANC, will simply disappear.

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