Scenario Building
Key to taking the right actions to produce economic growth and social advancement is understanding the political and economic environment and its future trajectory.
Building on a methodology used to produce ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ scenarios for South Africa, this process involves understanding the key ‘trigger points’ that will determine outcomes and then working on the possible actions that could be taken to alter those outcomes. In South Africa’s case, for example, a key trigger point was the 2024 general election, where the ANC was expected to (and did) fall below 50% of the vote.
The campaign for a coalition binding the ‘centre’ in South African politics, aimed at avoiding a populist ‘doomsday coalition’, resulted in the formation of the Government of National Unity.
Such scenarios should be data-driven and based on real, rather than imagined, dynamics in the political economy.
This scenario-building methodology applied to South Africa’s next ten years shows that we are heading for new trigger points as the ANC’s grip is further weakened resulting in uncertainty over how it will approach coalitions in the future.
The GMA team’s scenario building capacity is complemented by its ability to structure polls to empirically back up these predictions.