Two of the world’s most enduring political literary satires, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World were published in uncomfortable circumstances. In an attempt to peer over the parapet of the threatening present (1931 in the case of Huxley and 1949 in the case of Orwell) into the future, both authors predicted a rather dystopic destiny for humankind.

Researchers, however, are less creative, albeit not less ideologically driven, and try not to provide literary predictions. They crunch numbers and statistics and use pie charts to forecast what may come to pass. There’s been a fair amount of bleak predicting of late. Historian R W Johnson, in his latest book How Long Will South Africa Survive?, has given the country two years before we will be needing a bail-out from the International Monetary Fund.

In 2014, ahead of the country’s May general election, the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) published a paper, South African futures 2030, which set out three scenarios for 2030 (the timeline as set out the by the government’s National Development Plan (NDP), which was adopted as policy in 2012). The scenarios were titled Bafana Bafana, A Nation Divided and Mandela Magic.

Last week Jackie Cilliers, executive director of the ISS and head of the African Futures and Innovation section, published a follow-up study, South African Futures 2035: Can Bafana Still Score?

But first a quick rewind. In the 2014 paper, the Bafana Bafana “pathway” is “the story of the perennial underachiever in which South Africa tries to break free from its current cycle of inequality and unrest, but never quite manages to … The (crisis) clock is firmly stuck at one minute before midnight in discussions around dinner tables in upper-class suburbs.”

However, suggested the study, in this scenario the country did “relatively well, despite a lack of clear policy direction or leadership and little more than nominal commitment to the NDP”. “Little time is spent looking ahead while policy proposals do not appear to be subject to sufficient cost-benefit analysis.”

Because of these short-term political considerations growth is slow, the country divided, unhappy and increasingly corrupt “with its growth potential hampered by contradictory and ever-changing government policy”.

The Mandela Magic scenario sketched a country with a clear economic and developmental vision that succeeded in implementing the NDP and where an African National Congress (ANC) emerges from the 2019 elections reinvigorated with new leadership and a rise in multi-party democracy and competitive politics which drives improved service delivery.

Finally the Nation Divided projection saw a South Africa that still grew, albeit slowly, due to a competition for resources in the ANC which fuelled factional politics.

“Without the necessary experience or qualifications, chief executive officers soon fall foul of the law (or another faction) and, after an expensive golden handshake, a new executive is parachuted in to (re)direct decisions on procurement to his/her connections.”

The reality of course was that at the end of 2014 the disaster of the electricity crisis and its impact on the country’s growth became apparent. This on the back of a weaker than expected global economic recovery – particularly with Europe a key trading partner for South Africa – coupled with continued contradictory policies, poor leadership and a lack of vision have resulted, in the short term, in the country growing at a rate below that foreseen in the Bafana Bafana scenario.

Cilliers writes: “A number of characteristics of the Nation Divided scenario are also evident. Most ominous is the possibility that the country could have its international credit rating reduced from investment grade to junk status with a debilitating impact on growth prospects. Modern economies cannot succeed if they are not plugged into the global capital market.”

The latest ISS paper released last week used updated population forecasts to present alternative growth scenarios for South Africa up to 2035 and the implications of these for employment, politics and poverty.

The Bafana Bafana Redux scenario, writes Cilliers, is the expected current trajectory for the country and takes into account the impact of policy incoherence and the Eskom crisis for South Africa’s long-term prospects.

However “with concerted effort and much greater focus,” opines Cillliers, “an improved future dubbed Mandela Magic Lite is possible”.

However, the bad news according to the paper, is that neither will have a significant impact on structural unemployment.

By 2035 South Africa’s population is expected to rise to 67.3-million, much higher than the NDP’s estimate of 54.7-million while remaining significantly lower than that of most other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Hearteningly, Cilliers writes: “While there is little doubt that the country faces leadership challenges and requires a comprehensive resetting of key social, economic and political systems, the perennial sense of crisis discernible in the news media is not borne out by deeper analysis of the structural conditions. In reality, South Africa’s structural growth prospects are quite healthy.”

Contextualising this view, the paper reflects that “when it assumed power in 1994, the ANC inherited a country with bare coffers but with high expectations from its majority black support base, who believed that political change would rapidly redress the neglect that they had suffered over generations”.

These expectations were not unmet and South Africa’s economic fortunes changed with the end of financial sanctions and its readmission into the global community.

“Improved foreign perceptions of the attractiveness of doing business in South Africa translated into significant amounts of foreign financial inflows (at least, by South African standards), amounting to R639-billion between 1994 and 2009”.

However, the decline in South Africa’s industrial base has had a knock-on effect on other sectors including mining, agriculture and services.

“At the heart of the economic failures lay the inability of government, labour and business to cohere around a common growth vision for the country. This setback was significantly driven by the divisive racial policies first espoused by Thabo Mbeki and accelerated by his successor,” writes Cilliers.

Jacob Zuma’s presidency coincided with the global recession and a legacy of poor management and decision-making – the most important relating to the country’s energy supply and education – that both pre-dated his term of office.

“The decision to delay investment in new electricity-generating capacity, despite repeated, consistent warnings from Eskom since 1998, has proven the most disastrous constraint to growth in the short to medium term. At the time of writing, 17 years after the first warning, the country continues to lack a cohesive energy policy, with the government alternating between the 2010 Integrated Resource Plan and the 2013 update of the plan (subsequently rejected by the government). Since the end of 2007, South Africa has experienced intermittent load-shedding, which, by 2014, had become an ongoing feature of daily life, placing a direct cap on economic growth. Water-supply challenges will also begin to be felt in about a decade should current trends in demand and supply continue.”

In short, says Cilliers, many of the country’s constraints are self-inflicted.

He says South Africa will achieve only modest gross domestic product growth for several years into the future, a view shared by Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene who informed an ANC internal planning meeting that the country was unlikely to achieve more than 2% growth a year before the electricity supply improves – which is still several years off.

“Given the medium-term energy constraint, and building on the analysis done for South African Futures 2030, the likelihood is that South Africa’s pathway to the future currently lies somewhere between the original Bafana Bafana and Nation Divided scenarios set out in the earlier ISS paper, South African Futures 2030.”

One of the most significant factors that will have an impact on South Africa’s future is the emergence of a younger generation of citizens, the “born frees”, who are expected to “exhibit different voting behaviour from that of their parents” and who will “no longer vote in solidarity with the ANC’s struggle credentials”.

“Whereas, in 2014, only 3-million born-frees were of voting age, by the time of the 2019 elections this number will have increased to 7.9-million and this cohort increases with each election thereafter. By 2029 the number of voters in the born-free cohort is only slightly less than the total in the other two voting cohorts. And by 2034 the number of born-free voters outnumbers the combined total of the other voting cohorts. The impact of this large increase in the number of born-free voters will therefore already be felt in the 2019 national elections and the impact will increase with each subsequent election.”

These new voters will demand the effective implementation of policies that deliver jobs, education and services, the paper says. These voters would also be more willing to switch parties than older voters, offering potential for “volatility in voting behaviour”.

The rural-urban divide, writes Cilliers, will also become a significant feature of future South African politics coupled with education and urbanisation.

“By 2035 up to 74% of South Africans are expected to live in urban areas. The result is that parties that appeal to a rural support base, espouse traditional values and emphasise social conservative practices may struggle to remain relevant in an increasingly urban-orientated, connected and consumer-based culture.”

This is also evidenced in Zuma’s current wooing of traditional leaders, increasing salaries by 28.4% in 2015 ahead of the 2016 local elections as well as the ruling party’s successive efforts to push the Traditional Courts Bill.

However, levels of education, which will steadily increase, might also “work against parties that rely on family socialisation for continued voter support”.

Cilliers writes that while “the impact of investments in education takes almost a generation to realise”, the country will reap this in time “despite the wastage and inefficiencies that accompanied the roll-out of education for all of the country’s citizens”.

“Other things being equal, voters with higher levels of education should be expected to be more critical of a government that fails to improve the livelihoods of its citizens in accordance with its policy programmes and promises. Using International Futures, it is forecast that the average length of education at 15 years of age will have increased from 8.6 years during the 2014 elections to almost 10 years at the time of the national elections in 2034,” writes Cilliers.

While it is possible that a “reinvigorated ANC” might retain its current levels of support “it is unlikely to be the case if the current trend of public dissatisfaction and perception of corruption and nepotism among top political leaders remains”.

While it is also evident that “steady” progress has been made with regard to income redistribution “a long road lies ahead”.

“Income is not the same as wealth, however, since wealth is created cumulatively from income and inheritance and the like over time. The current debate has therefore increasingly become focused on the distribution of wealth between race groups, including ownership of land, such as farms.”

A particular feature of the debate is how much of the market capitalisation on the JSE is owned by black South Africans, with figures ranging between 3% and 23% ownership of the top 100 companies.

“This is a complex subject, since more than 90% of shares are owned by institutions rather than by natural persons. It is realistic to assume that the vast proportion of wealth is vested in institutions that still largely benefit the white population, such as pension benefits paid out to (mostly white) retired civil servants. As other population groups contribute to pension funds, for example, the benefits that accrue to them will naturally reach a tipping point after which a rapid transfer of assets to the black segment of the population will occur.”

The Mandela Magic Lite scenario for 2035 is dependent, he suggests, on “the development of a social consensus in support of growth that cuts across race and the public/private sectors”. It also depends on improvements in governance, investment in infrastructure, broadband and access to information and communications technology, more spending on research and development, a reduction in crime and violence, education outcomes, access to safe water, better sanitation and increases in social grants.

“The scales of these interventions are all relatively modest and achievable but they will not be realised without clear vision and strong leadership in each area,” says Cilliers.

“By 2035 the Mandela Magic Lite version of the South African economy is expected to be $71-billion larger than would be the case with the Bafana Bafana Redux. South Africa would therefore be able to claw back some of the losses induced by the electricity crisis and policy incoherence (the latter trajectory is presented as the Bafana Bafana scenario).”

The current leadership of the ruling party, writes Cilliers, “speaks left, walks right and sometimes trips over itself in its stop-start catalogue of changing policies, reflected in the composition of the large cabinet with overlapping mandates and lack of cohesion”.

What the country needs most, he concludes, is jobs and an incentive for the private sector – which accounts for 80% of production and employment in the country, to invest their “large positive balance sheets” which are currently being withheld.

Growing jobs “can only happen if the economy grows much more rapidly than currently and if efforts are made to improve employment intensity. the latter requires that the high barriers to entry into the labour market need to be relaxed – a difficult task for a governing party in alliance with Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions). in effect, a highly political labour movement serves to protect those in employment but at the cost of growing employment more broadly.”

Also the large differentials in remuneration between workers and executives in South Africa – which are excessive even by international standards  – “breeds resentment and undermines the potential for social compacts”.

The country, Cilliers forecasts, does not necessarily face a crisis despite high levels of crime, unemployment and inequality which have been characteristic of South African society for decades.

“The analysis presented here would indicate that they are likely to remain characteristic of the country for decades to come. Steady growth at the mediocre (but accelerating) rates forecast in this paper will improve human development and eventually ease the pressures on South African politics, society and the economy.”

There was, said Cilliers, potential good news, “but it will take time in coming” and it will arrive when the youth of South Africa begin to take centre stage and take control of their/our destiny.

For now, the greatest threat is “undoubtedly an ANC leadership that responds to populist politics in kind” which would be a reversal of the prospects for greater pluralism and non-racialism. DM

Photo: Mine workers listen to Zwelinzima Vavi, COSATU General Secretary (not in picture), during his address at the Impala Platinum mine in Rustenburg, 120 km (74.6 miles) northwest of Johannesburg February 21, 2012. REUTERS/Sipiwe Sibeko