Trade & industry minister Ebrahim Patel made headlines shortly after his appointment by focusing attention on the ANC’s call for “prescribed assets”. Patel said pension funds “have a role to play in the development of SA through investment in real assets” such as Eskom, SAA and the SABC.

Investments in SA’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are high-risk bets; actually extremely high-risk. Yet still, the ANC wants the nation to bet its retirement on the belief that the SOEs are not imploding but are in fact sound “real assets”...