Crouching expert, hidden authority

Lesson 1:
When acting through political proxies, always ensure that the legitimacy of your proxies cannot be called into question. Ensure that at no time do any of your proxies refer to you or accredit you as the source of their mandate, their agenda, their authority or their power. Further, ensure that none of the statements which you make in public are repeated in a manner which can be directly correlated to your proxies’ later statements.

Lesson 2:
When pronouncing on areas of governance that are regulated by statutory councils, ensure that the rules and regulations as promulgated by the relevant ministers — for those councils and their subsidiary persons — do not preclude you from making such pronouncements as a person who is not entitled, in terms of the rules and regulations, to make such pronouncements.

Lesson 3:
When you want to censor the media’s coverage on any one issue or on any issues related to your campaign, ensure that you declare every sordid detail about this issue or these issues to every journalist and person associated with the media as this produces rumours of scandal rather than an actual mediated scandal. Provided that the story is perceived to be bilaterally tainted and provided that the sordidness all makes for better coffee break conversation than for copy, the media will completely ignore your story in respect of these issues.

Lesson 4:
When hijacking the political mandate of those in power, ensure that you feign approach as though from the opposition, as this will induce the opposition to clasp you to their collective political bosoms and provide those in power with a reason to be aware of your presence. Seek instead of gain the mechanism of insinuation, which says that your proxies and not you will begin to advise the ruling elite as to how to utilise your “opposing ideas” without giving you (or the opposition) any credit for these ideas.

Lesson 5:
The only reason to break a strike is to sabotage a secret deal between organised labour and the ruling elite. When breaking a strike, always ensure that you are not speaking to the people who are directly connected to the activities, that your proxies are instructed by other persons (the initial intermediaries) and that your rationale for returning to work is compelling in and by itself.

Lesson 6:
When proposing your grand alternative, ensure that you do not deliver the message in a serious manner and ensure that your proxies do not agree with you in public. Enable the decision makers to talk about the ludicrous things that you say, and let your ideas percolate through their consciousnesses, as they seek to justify their own positions against your new ideas. What you are looking for is a situation where they want to be able to say that all of your ideas are already covered by their agenda, so that there is no reason to give you any decision making power.

Lesson 7:
Naturally having thus seized control of the agenda, be wary that in seeking to derive political capital from exercises as illustrated above, that the very claims which you will make will be contested by all, and that in the end your proxies will be awarded your medals and honour. This does not mean that you will not benefit from this, as your proxies, via your intermediaries are now all, very securely, in your pocket.