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In a note over the weekend, advisory firm Frans Cronje Private Clients sketched three scenarios for how the impeachment crisis may now unfold and assigned probabilities to these.

Speaking to The Common Sense, Cronje said the crisis is certainly the end of President Cyril Ramaphosa insofar as he represented “the idea” that the African National Congress (ANC) had a viable path to recovery. “That phase of his Presidency and career is now over”.

Cronje said that “all his party can do now is to manage the extent of the fallout both for itself, the unity government, and South Africa’s economy and the odds of the country remaining politically stable”.

The only prospect, he said, to get the ANC back onto an at all viable recovery track would be to buy enough time to install Patrice Motsepe as Ramaphosa’s successor – which the third of his three scenarios held was at a stretch still within reach for the ANC but only as a very must last gasp “roll of the dice”.

“What must be understood is that ‘the idea’ of Mr Ramaphosa, as a reformer, was the only thing that held the ANC together and that idea is now being torn down and will be further torn down through the impeachment process, leaving behind only Ramaphosa ‘the man’ who now has three options open to him to manage how bad the next months and weeks for him, the ANC, and the country are going to be”.

The first is resignation. In this scenario, Ramaphosa would leave office before the impeachment process consumes his presidency and damages the ANC further. The immediate successor would likely be Paul Mashatile. Around him, a new governing arrangement could form, drawing in the South African Communist Party, the Economic Freedom Fighters, uMkhonto weSizwe, and ANC factions.

The Common Sense has reported on that process here.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) would remain technically inside the Government of National Unity at first, but such an arrangement would likely either force it out or cause it to walk away.

The market consequences would be severe. Investors would price in a sharper leftward policy turn, weaker fiscal discipline, and greater instability inside the state. The rand and bonds would sell off. Credit downgrades would follow. Investment would weaken further, living standards would slip, and protest levels would rise. A recession before the 2029 election would become a plausible risk.

If the new governing arrangement chose to launch an assault on property rights, the free press, the judiciary, and the rule of law, such an assault may succeed to a significant degree, since those institutions are not as solid as many assume.

For “SA Inc”, the consequences would be macro-level collapse, although the middle-class enclaves in which many of South Africa’s skilled entrepreneurs exist would continue, some quite successfully, and as a consequence South Africa would retain more of its capital and skills base than might otherwise be the case, although that may not be enough to avoid recession. Some of these enclaves might remain quite successful, many would remain sustainable, and networked together they would represent an exciting emerging market of their own, but within a broadly collapsing South African state.

The second scenario is that Ramaphosa allows the impeachment process to unfold.

In this version, he stays in office, accepts the process, and appears before the impeachment committee. That carries severe political risk. Testifying before the committee could become deeply damaging, exposing him not only to impeachment but also to criminal prosecution. It could also dislodge other scandals from within the ANC and the state.

Even if Ramaphosa survived the final two-thirds impeachment vote Parliament could still pursue a motion of no confidence, which has a lower threshold than an impeachment vote

This scenario would expose Ramaphosa to months of public questioning, leaks, legal argument, parliamentary theatre, and opposition attacks. The damage would be cumulative. The ANC would be dragged through the process day after day, while Ramaphosa would increasingly take on the image of a man “pursued by a pack of wolves from which all those watching suspect he cannot ultimately escape”.

The risk in this case is less immediate removal than a ballooning scandal that lays waste to the ANC’s reputation. Vote losses could spike. The party could fragment further into rival factions. The longer the process runs, the more uncertainty would build around South Africa’s political future.

That uncertainty would trigger a proportional dip in sentiment and a sell-off of South African assets, while investment levels would remain weak.

The third scenario is that Ramaphosa formally welcomes the process while doing everything possible to stall and undermine it in order to cling to office, as the best of his colleagues try desperately to develop a Motsepe succession plan, very much “as a last roll of the dice” – a plan which may also protect Ramaphosa from longer-term prosecution.

Cronje says this third option is what his firm expects Ramaphosa and the better parts of the ANC to try and do.

Under this path, Ramaphosa would publicly accept the court’s ruling and present himself as respectful of constitutional processes. Behind that public posture, he would use every available legal and procedural mechanism to delay the impeachment process.

That could include appeals, stays, procedural objections, challenges, arguments about parliamentary timing, claims about preparation rights, and efforts to link the impeachment process to other legal proceedings, as well as desperate appeals to the DA for help. The purpose would be to make the process difficult to conclude quickly without appearing openly defiant.

Whilst based on nothing but legal sophistry the strategy could work politically.

Much of the business community and press could be persuaded that Ramaphosa is merely exercising his rights and defending due process. The DA would be pressured, quite unfairly, with the threat that if they allow Ramaphosa to go down, they carry the responsibility for the ensuing fallout. The result would still be severe reputational damage to the ANC, but it would be slower and more containable than the fallout from scenarios one and two.

Under this third scenario, the ANC’s November performance would still weaken. Markets would still reprice South African risk but more modestly than under scenarios one and two. However, any talk of macro-level recovery must be put aside and really only becomes plausible again after the 2029 election in the event that the ANC has managed a transition to a viable reform candidate who has in turn come to an understanding with the DA.

After canvassing widely, Cronje’s view is that the third scenario is the most likely path.

His firm assigns a 20% probability to resignation, a 25% probability to Ramaphosa willingly and openly going along with the process, and a 55% probability to him nominally accepting the process while working to sabotage or delay it.

The outcome will probably therefore become a hybrid of the second and third scenarios, although “resignation remains in play if events move badly against him which could happen very quickly”.