A Time Traveller's Guide to Our Next Ten Years. Frans Cronje

      Travelling in time with Frans Cronje is a truly educational experience. He journeys through the next ten years in South Africa using scenario planning as a vehicle to visualise the possibilities we may encounter as citizens.

      This method assumes that the future is too complex to reduce to a single prediction, particularly as you go further into it – and ten years is a long trip. Cronje also describes the ‘butterfly effect’, which is ‘the notion that, when a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world, it could cause a storm on the other side’. He gives an example of how a monstrous traffic jam is often caused by the breakdown of a single vehicle. Likewise, a small event can change the complete outcome of a complex system.

      Hence, as this book beautifully demonstrates, looking at the future is all about reducing the complexity inherent in it, but at the same time revealing the wide range of different paths it can take. This Cronje does by using a ten-step approach, which starts by deciding what you want to achieve. In this case, it is to give readers a feel for what it will be like to live in South Africa in 2024.

      To kick off the actual process, he describes the current environment we inhabit – political, social, and economic. He then moves on to analysing the major role players and various policy frameworks developed over recent years. Next, he makes a list of significant trends that are consolidated into a number of highways, each with its own road signs. Then, based on impact and uncertainty, he selects the two major driving forces that can be used to design a matrix. This matrix is used to develop four scenarios in the final section of the book. Crucially, for each scenario he paints a vivid picture of how you get from here to the 2024 world of there, fulfilling the aim of giving people a taste of what they will experience in every one of them.

      Without giving too much away – because the book is a thrilling read – I can reveal that the two key variables chosen by the author are on the one hand whether we remain an open, democratic society, or whether we turn into a more authoritarian state with restricted liberties; and on the other whether our economy is largely deregulated against the background of an improving education system, or whether it becomes centrally directed while education remains poor. The interaction between these two variables produces four scenarios: a ‘Wide Road’, a ‘Narrow Road’, a ‘Rocky Road’, and a ‘Toll Road’.

      Interestingly, when the Anglo American team did the High Road/Low Road scenario exercise in the mid-1980s, they maintained there were two crossroads ahead. The first was a political crossroads where South Africa either became a proper democracy or experienced rising levels of conflict, culminating in a wasteland. The second was an economic crossroads where we either developed an open, free and inclusive economy to match the democracy we had achieved, or continued with a closed, exclusive, and highly regulated economy that ran the risk of undoing all the good work resulting from taking the High Road politically.

      We are now at that second crossroads, and there can be no better time for a book of this nature to be published. It will enrich the debate on how we can convert the political miracle into an economic miracle as well. By drawing on his extensive experience at the South African Institute of Race Relations, Frans Cronje has ensured that South Africa will remain at the forefront in the field of scenario planning. More importantly, his scenarios may tip the odds in favour of the country, fulfilling the great potential that it currently possesses.

      Clem Sunter

      ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

      THE CURSE OF RISING EXPECTATIONS

      On 10 April

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