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Last night, The Common Sense received its largest and most comprehensive trove of polling data yet ahead of South Africa’s local government elections, now just under three weeks away. Our analysts are processing those data, and this will take some time. What we can already say is that the findings point towards political deadlock in several of the country’s major cities, with no clear or straightforward coalition arrangements emerging from the numbers. Scores of smaller municipalities may find themselves in similarly uncertain positions. For South Africans who had hoped that November's elections would produce decisive political change and scores of capable new governments, the implications may be both scary and disappointing, for the reason that many people remain conditioned to the idea that for the future to be okay, South Africa needs to be very well governed from Pretoria.

At this newspaper we have written at length that the Union of 1910 is unravelling as the authority of Pretoria, which had sustained the Union, itself unravels. In place of that South Africa is moving towards an enclave future in which the quality of people’s lives, the success of their businesses, and the prosperity of their communities will increasingly be determined by the competence of the private institutions immediately around them rather than the performance of the government.

That advice is sometimes received as a negative prediction that South Africans will be forced into a desperate fighting retreat of stockades within which to withstand the worst of the collapse of the state. That is not how we at this newspaper understand the enclave option. Far from being a last-gasp defensive response to political decline, the enclaves are an affirmative and exciting proposition that can liberate economic potential, strengthen individual freedom, improve living standards, and preserve the foundations of national prosperity and stability into the long term.

Across the country, businesses and communities are assuming responsibility for functions that the government has performed poorly or failed to perform at all. They are generating electricity, maintaining infrastructure, protecting neighbourhoods, managing commercial precincts, and supporting schools; and doing this at a macro scale, and to the advantage of all the country’s people. These developments are sometimes described as unfortunate necessities. But when citizens assume greater control over their affairs, they acquire greater freedom to determine their circumstances. They become less dependent on the ideology, incompetence, and the political calculations of distant officials. Resources can be directed towards practical problems. This is an advance towards a better society.

For South Africa's established middle classes, the prospects are particularly encouraging. South Africa remains one of the most attractive countries in the world in which a family with necessary skills and entrepreneurial talent can establish an exceptionally comfortable and fulfilling life. Spacious homes, excellent schools, private healthcare, amazing recreation, favourable weather, and strong social networks combine to produce standards of living that would be extraordinarily expensive to replicate in many developed countries.

Enclavisation allows families to protect these advantages against deteriorating public administration. Those who position themselves in capable communities, develop internationally competitive skills, diversify their incomes, and accumulate productive assets can secure significant prosperity and personal independence even while national politics remains dysfunctional.

The whole country should be grateful for that. Every successful enterprise that remains in South Africa sustains employment, supports suppliers, generates tax revenue, and preserves productive capacity. Every capable school, hospital, commercial precinct, and local institution represents skills and expertise that hold up the country. Successful enclaves attract investment and create opportunities extending well beyond their boundaries. They can become engines of economic growth and reservoirs of capital, entrepreneurship, and institutional strength. With specific reference to the poor, the enclaves will anchor a tax, employment, and entrepreneurial base that continues to generously cross-subsidise South African society.

If our read is right that the strength of future enclaves will be proportional to the weakness of the state, it means they likely cannot be overrun by events but will get stronger and stronger in the event that political circumstances become more turbulent. None of this means political deadlock is irrelevant, or that competent government is unnecessary. Millions of poorer South Africans remain victims of the idiotic policies advanced by business, media, and government elites over the past 20 years that have ground the economic growth rate down to just 1% and stalled the country’s employment engine.

But the enclaves will ensure that, unlike so many post-colonial emerging markets in Africa before it, South Africa will retain much of its skills and capital base even as it moves through a period when the consequences of that stupidity manifests more acutely in its politics. Unlike so many post-colonial emerging markets before it, South Africa will not on the balance of probabilities reach the kind of precipitous moment of capital and skills flight that crashes an emerging market into the hell of currency collapse and mad inflation. Rather, the country will likely get through the next period in much the same shape it is in now.

If future politicians get their act together, a reform-minded coalition may yet restore the old Union. If they don’t, the fragmentation of the Union of 1910 will deepen further into a de facto federation of essentially private entities, the middle-class manifestations of which may become one of the world’s most exciting emerging markets.