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The scenarios have been produced in association with the advisory firm Frans Cronje Private Clients. Frans Cronje told The Common Sense that whilst his firm had been confident in making explicit forecasts about South Africa’s political and economic future for much of the past several years the extent of uncertainty around the future has now risen to where the firm was forced to fall back into its origins in scenario planning.

Forecasting involves saying that a single point in future space and time will occur. Scenario planning becomes necessary when the political environment becomes so uncertain that series of plausible alternative futures need to be sketched with probabilities assigned to each one.

Cronje told The Common Sense that for much of the recent past it was easy enough to forecast South Africa. Cyril Ramaphosa would succeed Jacob Zuma, Ramaphosa was however not a reformer and would not lift the investment rate, the African National Congress (ANC) would lose an election, and the party would decide to go into government with the Democratic Alliance (DA). Serious analysts knew that, and were confident in knowing it.

Now, however, he says things have changed. It is unclear who will succeed Ramaphosa. The DA is not making the move needed to supplant the ANC at a national level. And South Africa is fracturing into enclaves.

From that three scenarios for South Africa’s next decade have been published each of which is plausible but each of which is attached to a different degree of probability.

At their simplest the benchmark scenario assumes continued coalition governance and limited reform capacity. The upside scenario assumes a reform-oriented political shift that restores investment confidence and accelerates growth. The downside scenario assumes political fragmentation and a more interventionist, populist policy direction that weakens economic performance.

The framework therefore reflects a broader reality: South Africa is no longer operating in a predictable single-path political environment. Instead, it is moving through a phase where small political shifts can generate materially different economic outcomes.

Each scenario is associated with markers and data points unique to it. By developing a dashboard of these it becomes possible to develop considerable advance warning on the likely direction of travel of the society and thereby to take advantage of investment opportunities and safely navigate around risk.

In that context, scenario planning is much more than a forecasting tool, but a way of understanding risk, opportunity, and transition in a system where the range of possible futures has widened significantly.