Four bleak visions of our region in the year 2020. And one of hope — given the right leaders and policies. This is the thrust of the major scenario exercise by the Institute for Global Dialogue, funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the aid arm of Germany’s Social Democratic Party.
Set in a ”base scenario” that identifies the region’s enduring features, the scenarios are not meant to be read as literal predictions. Rather, they are ways of dramatising and helping to ”re-perceive” the present — reaching a better understanding of the key dynamics currently at work in the region, and where they might lead.
Essentially they try to answer the question: what must happen if the lofty words of the Southern African Development Community’s founding treaty — pledging to build a stable and prosperous region — are to be made flesh?
With associated policy implications, the five scenarios are as follows:
”Danger!”
A scenario driven by conflict
By 2020 spiralling regional conflicts have created ”an arc of crisis” of weak or collapsed states, torn by endemic lawlessness and violence, from Angola to Mozambique.
South Africa and its neighbours, including a breakaway southern Mozambique, have formed an enclave, ”the Federation of iGoli”, run by authoritarian securocrats and separated from ”the arc” by an electrified fence. It remains relatively well-off, but its economy is running down. International business and aid donors have largely withdrawn.
In much of the federation democratic institutions have been ”temporarily” suspended because of ”extraordinary security risks”. In some states there are permanent states of emergency.
How did this happen? Newly democratic countries failed to consolidate democratic reforms, defuse conflict and meet development challenges, spawning increasingly inchoate social pressures that further undermined the state. The Democratic Republic of Congo finally fragmented; Zimbabwe fell prey to low-level civil war; Angola became a battleground for criminal consortia.
A few cartels based in the iGoli enclave, run by a multiracial ”Randlord” elite, control mining through- out the region and enjoy a global monopoly over certain minerals. They are symbiotic with the securocrats.
The enclave state exercises heavy-handed control over the private sector. Public policy aims to line the pockets of the elite, stifle opposition and contain spillover from the arc, including a tidal wave of economic refugees.
Commercial agriculture flourishes under state protection, but subsistence farming is neglected, deepening rural poverty and driving the majority to huge, poorly serviced urban shantytowns. Xenophobia spirals. A small, well-heeled elite is surrounded by a sea of poverty.
In the ”arc” there is little formal economic activity outside the garrisoned operations of enclave conglomerates. The enclave undertakes high-risk operations to secure strategic resources, including water, in the arc. Private armies known as ”water rangers” guard watercourses, dams and hydroelectric installations. They help secure the lower Congo cataracts and key points along the Zambezi on behalf of a consortium that holds the largest share in the enclave’s privatised municipal water supplies.
Agriculture in the arc folds under flood and drought. Families and clans under warlords struggle for scarce resources.
Regional cooperation is abandoned, together with attempts to set up a regional power pool.
The key implication is the region’s interconnectedness, and the impossibility of buffering wealthier states, like South Africa, from general entropy. Effective regional dispute resolution and economic cooperation are seen as high priorities.
Market madness
A scenario driven by globalisation
By 2020 business is boss. The region is the playground of a runaway private sector linked to global free markets, with many state functions privatised and a government dedicated to promoting private profit. Wealthy elites call the shots.
The masses are grindingly poor, labour is cheap and growth, though high, is largely jobless. Formal democracy remains, but popular participation and opposition parties decline. State pandering to big business erodes environmental standards and sustainable development.
Driving these trends are the growing impact of global trade regimes, unbridled privatisation and public-private partnerships, and the relocation of ”dirty” industries from the more stringent North.
In 2003 a new World Trade Organisation (WTO) round scraps tariff and other trade barriers. Lome trade agreements preferential to the region are phased out, rendering a SADC free trade protocol obsolete.
Venture capital and manufactured goods — much from Asia — swamp the region, forcing the collapse of some domestic industries, with heavy job losses. Adherence to the WTO’s multilateral investment agreement allows foreign investors to enter on the same footing as their domestic counter-parts. They come to dominate the metal, minerals, chemical and agro-industrial sectors, and become rampant polluters. High-input agriculture taints the region’s fresh water supply.
South Africa’s second and third democratic governments cut the public service and privatise development and service functions. Welfare spending falls, and a heavier burden falls on municipalities. However, from 2003 local government largely disintegrates, leaving services — delivered on strict commercial principles — in private hands.
After offering initial resistance, trade unions are sapped by globalisation pressures on industry and co-opted into ”survival pacts”. In 2012 the right to strike is curbed and minimum wages are slashed.
Industry is concentrated in a few core areas and random industrial development reinforces the ”hub and spoke” pattern.
Small-scale and subsistence agriculture wither without state backing and as private financial institutions focus on shielding commercial farmers against drought and floods. Food security worsens, with starvation in some areas.
Private interests also control regional political institutions, and the SADC does little but promote regional trade. A regional power grid, under private management, services business and moves to electrify poor settlements are ditched. Water resources largely support industry and big farmers.
With public health care cut to the bone, Aids mortality remains high.
The role of markets as economic motors and the potential value of privatisation are not disputed. But the implication is that the state cannot shrug off overall responsibility for development and services. Unregulated, globalisation will deepen inequality and want.
The slow slide
A scenario driven by decay
It is 2020, and the heyday of the Wabenzi. The region is in the grip of corrupt and tyrannical leaders avid for wealth and power. Behind a veneer of democracy, civil liberties are white-anted, opponents hounded, the electronic media strictly controlled and independent media under siege.
The economies of the region, based on oil and minerals extraction, are sluggish. Many people eke out an existence in the informal sector; social security is threadbare and jobs scarce. National economies are isolated from each other, and cooperation between states boils down to intelligence-sharing and an undertaking not to interfere in each other’s affairs.
Debt — the fruit of reckless state borrowing — and the subornation of officials fuel the depletion of key natural resources. Most African cats and antelopes are on the Red List of Endangered Species as wildlife reserves are left unpatrolled and prey to land invasions. A brown haze permanently mars the Cape Town skyline and Johannesburg’s pollution levels match those of Mexico City.
Underlying these developments is ”neo-patrimonialism” — the traditional politics of patron and client, using the resources of the modern state. It has been reinforced by the tendency of liberation movements, once installed in power, to reward old comrades and loyalists — and overlook their corrupt practices.
The idea that the ruling party personifies the nation feeds political intolerance, and reformist parties are legally obstructed on grounds that they threaten the national interest. Ruling groups tamper with constitutions and use the state machine for their own ends. Parties degenerate into unprincipled electoral machines.
The goal of public policy is to enforce conformity and co-opt troublesome individuals and groups, spawning a bloated and pampered public service.
In Zambia the ruling clique increasingly deviates from the Constitution. Amid mounting despotism, power in Zimbabwe passes to a civilian-military cabal. After a promising start, South Africa’s rulers increasingly pander to sectional interests, hand state and parastatal jobs to comrades and wink at corruption.
Economic growth lags behind rising population and, in the teeth of erratic world commodity prices, inflation and low rates of investment, economies become progressively more state-centred and commandist.
Agriculture is in deep recession because of abortive land reforms and a failure to anticipate drought and floods, with disastrous spin-offs for food security.
With health services biased towards favoured groups and areas, weak regional institutions and indifferent elites, Aids takes a heavy toll.
The rot at the top seeps down to society at large, where crime is rife, education instils subservience to the state and a sycophantic intelligentsia rationalises attacks on democracy in the name of ”culture” and ”tradition”.
Clearly implied are the dangers of patronage politics and the abuse of the state for party advantage. Accountability and free expression, indispensable to democracy, must be nurtured.
Poor but proud
A scenario driven by survival
Overwhelmed by colossal challenges, the central state falls back exhausted, and most of the region’s people live in a parallel society beyond its reach. Communities retreat into themselves and provide a setting for informal economic activity. Community law enforcement delivers comparative peace and stability.
Foreign aid, reverting to basic humanitarian aid and poverty relief, starts to flow straight to the grass roots, but the barest survival is the norm. Regional cooperation has broken down.
How could this happen in two decades? At the turn of the 20th century most states in the region were already fragile, with inept bureaucracies, meagre finances and leaders engrossed in power poli- tics. Trade liberalisation and public sector shake-outs — a response to intense world pressure — merely decimated domestic industry and enfeebled the state, without the promised economic spin-offs.
Growth rates are negative or low and debt relief has had no lasting regenerative effect on the poorest countries. A vicious cycle — sliding revenues, state debility, economic decline — has been entrenched, progressively undermining the capacity to tackle a nightmare complex of drought, epidemic, joblessness, migration and urban drift.
Most local governments fold as payments in townships and squatter areas, and bail-outs by the central state, fade away. Some middle-class communities take over aspects of service provision.
As conditions in the towns and cities worsen, urbanisation tails off and people try to build a new subsistence base in large and relatively stable settlements, mainly in the countryside. Reinforcing this is a slump in formal agriculture, besieged by spiralling production costs and harsh exposure to world markets. Subsistence farming, now backed by foreign donors, is on the rise.
National political systems persist, but on a dwindling electoral base. Community leaders, some with traditional authority, command more loyalty than formally elected politicians.
Isolated and static, the communities are far from rural utopias. Subsistence farming depletes the soil, pastures and forests. Voluntary ”green brigades”, some armed, protect peasant farmers in certain areas, guard stressed water sources and patrol wildlife reserves, where these still exist. In the virtual absence of public health care, communities use donor finance to hire and train ”barefoot” health workers.
Aid organisations promote alternative technologies, including small renewable energy projects aimed at offsetting the decayed regional electricity grid.
Though highlighting the resilience of local communities, the scenario suggests there is no realistic alternative to strong developmental states and inter-state cooperation. Also implied is the need to shield domestic enterprise from precipitous exposure to world markets.
Regional renaissance
A scenario driven by visionary leadership
The region is a beacon of hope, despite persisting poverty and inequality. It is peaceful and stable. Multiparty, constitutional democracies have struck root in most countries, and in some, civil society formations — particularly trade unions — help shape public policy.
Revenues from natural resources have been prudently channelled to diversify the economy and build a more competitive industrial base. Growth hits or tops 6%, the level needed to absorb new entrants to the labour market.
MPs from across the subcontinent trade verbal blows in a regional parliament. Regional policy directorates and joint industry councils manage a regional trade, investment and industrial policy and a reconstruction and development programme, working closely with business and aid donors.
Negotiated protocols sanction the cross-border movement of migrant workers and traders, and allow citizens to work anywhere in the region for a specified term. Goods, services and capital also move freely, and industries are spread across the region with an eye to costs and competitiveness. Scarce essentials like water and energy fall exclusively under regional jurisdiction, and a regional hydroelectric grid feeds cheap, clean power to much of the area. Solar energy is generated on a large scale in semi-desert inland locations.
Regional security is also managed via a directorate. Trained in conflict management, this runs an early warning system, and monitors human rights, elections and state bodies. A new regional consciousness is being born.
Driving this progress is a new generation of young, go-ahead leaders and state officials, in part thrown up by newly emergent political parties and movements that are now winning elections.
They act swiftly to settle conflicts, goading Angola’s warring factions to the negotiating table and forcing fresh, supervised elections in Zimbabwe, which unseat the ruling party. Mozambique, which has suffered civil strife, is the target of a concerted regional reconstruction drive that includes the lifting of thousands of landmines and the rehabilitation of farmland.
After midwifing a broader Eastern and Southern African Development Community, the leaders use it to strike debt-development swap deals with foreign creditors, releasing funds for welfare, education, health and public works in the poorest states.
Lured by a harmonised regional investment regime, foreign and domestic capital starts to pour into telecommunications, transport and specialised education. Private business is also increasingly drawn to development corridors, where the region’s governments have earmarked areas of high return. State and donor support for indigenous business boosts domestic investment and savings.
Social goods aside, the private sector is the main service provider and corporate tax the main source of state revenue. Water, energy and public transport services are supplied by public-private partnerships based on strict contracts that set service targets for poor communities.
The central goal of state intervention in the regional economy is to foster economic equality between states and groups. Equality is buttressed by economic regulations — including a requirement that large firms source from local suppliers, where possible, and reserve some output for the regional market. Trade regimes have been relaxed in line with WTO stipulations, but most states retain the power to shield strategic domestic industries behind targeted trade barriers.
The region is better equipped to deal with water scarcity and the vagaries of climate. Tougher water restrictions now cover all smaller municipalities, while public works has sealed urban water leaks, with 50% savings in some cities.
Support to small farmers has improved, while states have encouraged a shift from non-food crops, like tobacco, towards domestic staples. These measures, together with the more effective storage and distribution of grain, mean fewer go hungry.
Higher growth also has implications for the management of HIV/Aids, and infection rates are dropping. Anti-retrovirals are available from most public health services, while strong and credible leaders drive prevention campaigns. Some Aids programmes are regionally coordinated.
The emerging regional culture emphasises the values of consensus-building, tolerance and cooperation. It incorporates traditional values that include respect for elders, concern for the community, protection of the weak and prudent interaction with nature.
”It is the combination of the modern and the traditional that unites the populations of the region in a common consensus,” runs the scenario. ”Similar political cultures, free economic interaction, common modes of socialisation, and the free movement of people are the pillars of a regional citizenship.”