There are five particularly strong cards that South Africa presently holds that could easily be played in a way that sees the country become really prosperous and successful over the next 15 years.

The first of those cards is its political system. South Africa’s democracy works. The country has completed two successful democratic transitions over the past 30 years. In each case the electoral system has done exactly what it should. If the country is badly governed and political and economic elites do little about that, ordinary people come together to force change. This is too easily overlooked and taken for granted.

Post-colonial emerging markets often transition governments violently and corruptly. South Africa is in the minority of those states that change peacefully and transparently.

A second card is that voter behaviour is motivated by the material circumstances of people and not by ideology. As job creation and services delivered soared in the decade after 1994, so did African National Congress (ANC) support as levels of political violence fell.

As living standards fell in the 15 years to today, ANC support came strongly off. If voting behaviour was chiefly ideological then fixing the country through the ballot box would be very difficult. In South Africa’s case all you need to do to win votes is to improve people’s material circumstances.

Centrist and pragmatic

A third card is that public opinion is centrist and pragmatic. This newspaper has published reams of poll results showing firstly that around 8-in-10 South Africans agree on what should be done to grow the economy and on the role of the state in the economy.

What they agree on will also work to make South Africa’s economy a success. If the government pressed ahead with the right reforms and put rail and port infrastructure under private management, reworked procurement policy to focus on value, reworked labour policy to price people into jobs, reworked empowerment policy to focus on poverty, and secured property rights, the government would be cheered by voters.

A fourth card is that South Africa does in practice not have an energy cap on economic growth. Use the power stations that already exist linked to the grid that already exists, and without building a single new station or a mile of grid South Africa could aspire to quadruple the economic growth rate over the next decade.

A fifth card is geopolitical. In a multipolar world South Africa sits astride one of the most influential maritime chokepoints that determine control of both the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific.

It is a simple matter to trade that asset for vast investment concessions from the world’s great powers. All it takes to do that is to sharpen the thinking of the foreign and trade ministries a bit.

Not many post-colonial societies were dealt such a strong hand following the fall their first post-colonial government. Play it well and at this newspaper we are confident in telling you that the economic growth rate will lift to between 4% and 5%. Hold it there for 20 years and the unemployment rate will fall to around 10%. That this is all easy to do is a reason for great optimism about what South Africa may become through the 2030s and 2040s – a good thought with which to start the week.