A major scenario exercise has painted a grim picture of the Southern African region in two decades, suggesting that only a new generation of visionary leaders and an economic growth spurt can reverse the region’s fortunes.
Four of the five scenarios highlight the dire consequences of allowing negative forces already at work — violent conflict, corruption and patronage, authoritarian rule, uncontrolled globalisation and ineffectual governance — to continue unchecked.
Most are marked by extreme poverty and inequality and, in several, drought and economic mismanagement lead to widespread starvation. Massive urban agglomerations form, marred by very poor conditions.
However, one scenario offers an implied recipe for regional renaissance, driven by enlightened leaders committed to building strong but democratic states and fully exploiting the economic possibilities of regional cooperation and integration.
Southern Africa 2020: Five Scenarios is the product of four years’ work by a Johannesburg-based foreign relations think-tank, the Institute for Global Dialogue (IGD), backed by the development assistance arm of Germany’s social democrats, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES).
The scenarios were developed by a core team assembled by the IGD and FES comprising analysts from both organisations and academics and experts from South and Southern Africa. They were assisted by two multi-disciplinary reference groups drawn from all over the region.
IGD executive director Garth le Pere stresses that the scenarios are not intended as literal predictions, rather as “stories about the way the world may turn out tomorrow … that help us recognise and adapt to changing aspects of our present environment”.
They seek to inform “decision-makers’ perceptions of the region and its underlying dynamics”.
The five scenarios — escalating conflict, rampant globalisation, socio-economic decay through corruption and autocracy, impoverished survival and regional renaissance under visionary leaders — were formulated before the launch of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) and the African Union (AU).
However, their implied call for strong regional cooperation can be seen as complementary to the AU/ Nepad initiative. They also serve as a sobering corrective to the pomp and rhetoric surrounding the AU launch, by underscoring the powerful forces of entropy that have to be countered.
They ask what must be done, given existing dynamics, to realise the key goal of the Southern African Development Community’s founding treaty, the creation of a stable and prosperous Southern Africa.
Setting the context for the five imaginative projections is a “base scenario” which identifies long-term forces certain to shape history over the next two decades.
This indicates that the odds are heavily stacked against the region and that a sustained growth rate of 6%, translating into 2% to 3% rise in per capita gross domestic product (GDP) growth, is a pre-condition for renaissance.
The base scenario emphasises that employment growth is trailing both economic growth and the annual expansion of the labour force — 2,4% a year. Regional GDP growth has been dropping since 1985, when it averaged 5%.
However, it argues that with the successful reconstruction of post-conflict societies, debt relief and sound macro-economic management, the required growth could be achieved. Above all, investment rates would have to rise to between 25% and 30% of GDP.
Among the negative dynamics isolated by the base scenario are:
” Cyclical droughts, which will continue to undermine food security. The region’s ability to confront these will demand better infrastructure, per capita income increases, expanded agricultural production, higher export earnings and well-maintained strategic food reserves.
” Growing water scarcity, with Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe becoming water-stressed, South Africa and Lesotho water-scarce and Malawi moving beyond the present water barrier by 2025.
” Rampant urban drift, with more than half the populations of several countries concentrated in agglomerations like the Zambian copper belt, Gauteng, Durban-Pietermaritzburg and the Western Cape by 2010. This, the base scenario suggests, demands urban, rather than rural land release.
” Growing economic migration to South Africa from the rest of the region, leading to mounting conflict around access to jobs. Slow growth in South Africa may, in fact, exacerbate such movement, because of the ripple effect on its neighbours.
” Continued educational backlogs and a poor skills base. The base scenario underscores the fact that Southern African learners attend school for an average of 1,6 years and that South Africa is the only regional state with more than 1 000 female tertiary students per 100 000.
” Continued economic inequalities. The base scenario points out that that Zambia’s rating in terms of the United Nations’s human development index has fallen since 1975, while Zimbabwe’s is lower than in 1980 and South Africa’s than in 1990. South Africa’s score on the Gini index — which measures income inequality — is the second highest in the world, after Swaziland.
Many of these trends will be exacerbated by HIV/Aids, which confronts the region with an “unprecedented” developmental threat, the base scenario says.
It predicts that the epidemic’s impact on the health sector over the coming decade will be greater than in the two previous decades combined. GDP may decline by up to 2% a year in countries with a prevalence rate of 20% or more.