Western politicians about the dangers of protectionist trade policies, and forecasts suggest that over the next three decades its middle class may grow to exceed the population of the United States.
There will seldom be any clear warning long before the fact of the timing and direction of these transitions. Advance warning can best be obtained by reading the embryonic trends and extrapolating from these how things are likely to play out. Many people will resist the suggestion of profound imminent change based on embryonic trends alone and will demand harder evidence. But the evidence they seek is only going to appear during the process of change itself, by which stage it is too late to position oneself and respond to it. A common mistake is to underestimate the pace and extent of change and to plan instead for a number of slight permutations to the status quo – only to be caught off guard by real change when it happens. Very few companies or individuals are well positioned to anticipate and take advantage of change, and hence they experience a high degree of inertia that has its origins in a fear of the unknown and a craving for certainty. Sometimes it is too difficult to accept predictions of change because the future world being described is just too different from the one we inhabit today.
Even foreign powers with significant interests in the Middle East had little advance warning of just how unstable that region was about to become. Israeli analysts, who are very good at this sort of thing, did not anticipate the timing and complete extent of what they referred to from early on, quite incisively as things turned out, as the Arab Winter. Sometimes the bigger the organisation the more difficult it is to get it to accept the certainty of change.
But from the examples of the Arab Spring, to the American civil rights movement, China and our own history, massive change does happen, often against the grain of history and in conflict with once-dominant trends. Sometimes the change is for the better and other times it is for the worse. But when it comes it happens very rapidly and moves the society in which it happens into a totally different paradigm. The lesson is to be deeply sceptical about the longevity of the status quo, or about the belief that short-term trends are indicative of long-term futures. To be well positioned in a future South Africa, understand that change will occur faster, have deeper implications, and move the environment in which you live further than most analysts presently believe could possibly be the case.
The knowledge that a profound degree of political and economic change is on the way does not need to be intimidating or paralyse us with uncertainty. If we are willing to accept the inevitability of profound change, there are methodologies by means of which it is possible to develop a degree of certainty about what will happen tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and to push that horizon out well beyond the next decade. These are tested methodologies that work, and in this book we will apply them so as to move past all the fear and uncertainty and understand what is going to happen between now and 2030.
If you read the first book in this series (A Time Traveller’s Guide to Our Next Ten Years), published in 2014, you will already have some idea of how the process of getting to grips with the future works. In that book we set out four possible futures for South Africa for the morning after the 2024 election. In the first of these, the Wide Road, we suggested that, despite the odds, the ANC would stage an internal reformation and win massive popular support as the party turned the South African economy around. In the second scenario, the Narrow Road, we suggested that to survive politically, the ANC would be forced into a series of unpopular pro-capitalist reforms in a desperate bid to stage an economic recovery and would force those reforms onto the country against the wishes of a rebellious and hostile public. In the third scenario, the ANC would reject the need for economic reform and rather turn to destroying South Africa’s democracy in a bid to cling to power. The fourth scenario suggested that the ANC would fail to introduce economic reforms and also fail in destroying democratic institutions, meaning that it would lose the election of 2024 and take South Africa into a new era of coalition politics.
Those scenarios were initially drawn with a stick in the sand during a long walk with South Africa’s top scenario developer, Clem Sunter, along a Cape Town beach. He might not remember, but I asked him which scenario would materialise, and his answer was that one of them would happen a lot sooner than I expected. At that time the ANC governed every major metropolitan municipality other than Cape Town. Just over two years later the ANC had lost political control of almost all the Gauteng metros to the Democratic Alliance (DA), which meant the opposition was in some respects governing over more than 50% of South Africa’s GDP, and South Africa was well on its way to a new era of coalition politics.
In the first book we stopped at the point of the scenarios and did not venture a view of which one would materialise. There were good, sound reasons for that decision − most importantly, that complex systems theory (explained in chapter 2) shows that small changes in the present conditions of a system will trigger massive shifts in its future, a concept popularised as the ‘butterfly effect’. In retrospect, however, it proved to be a mistake not to make a call on which scenario would materialise, since almost every audience we have addressed over the past three years has asked us to single out which scenario we believe it will be. On most occasions this was the first question asked. This happened with such regularity that it prompted some amateur research into people and their craving for certainty. The results, which are briefly discussed in the introduction to chapter 2, were compelling enough to warrant that in this book we will go further, and despite the considerable risks, say which scenario it will be and what life will be like under that scenario. This will include answering tough questions, such as whether that scenario will offer us a prosperous future. Will South Africa be successful and peaceful? Will people get on with each other, and will black and white South Africans pull off the remarkable reconciliation that happened between English-speaking whites and the Afrikaners in the decades after the Anglo-Boer War? Or will it all just go wrong and, if so, how wrong? If it does ‘go wrong’, does that mean that we will simply remain poor and unequal – much as we are today? Or is that a naïve expectation, and will the creeping sense of foreboding that so many people now feel about the country be a precursor of something worse than any of us dares to imagine?
In getting to those answers, we are going to follow a series of steps. The first (in chapter 2) will be to look at how and why the world changes. That is important because it explains why scenario planning works and also explains the theory behind why a seemingly random act – such as that of Mohamed Bouazizi in a place as otherwise insignificant as Sidi Bouzid − can in fact change the world. If you don’t understand the reasons for change and the theoretical underpinnings of scenario planning, then it is very difficult to believe that some of the conclusions that will be reached in this book could possibly play themselves out in a future South Africa.
Then in chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 we take a deep dive into the socio-economic circumstances that South Africans live in, the standing of the economy, the true state of race relations, and how political trends are evolving. We will be looking for indicators of direction or pieces of information that may give us a good sense of where our country is headed. With that information in hand we will (in chapter 7) set out to craft a fresh set of scenarios for South Africa, each of which will describe a plausible future we may encounter – one year after the 2029 national elections.
Each of chapters 8, 9, 10 and 11 will take one of those scenarios and describe it in a great degree of detail. Those descriptions will be narratives written about the future. Think of them as reports, written in 2030, looking back at what has changed in South Africa and why it changed. Through all of this, piece by piece, and page by page, what will happen in our country in the period between now and 2030 will become apparent.
1 http://m.news24.com/news24/SouthAfrica/News/its-painful-what-they-did-to-me-evicted-hammanskraal-resident-20160524.
Chapter 2: Seeing very far ahead
Humans do not like uncertainty, and medical researchers have discovered the reasons why. In his book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins (inventor of the
