The old certainties are gone. Trade rules are fragmenting, technology is accelerating faster than institutions can adapt, and politics — domestic and international — is becoming more volatile. The danger is to treat these shifts as temporary disruptions. They are not. They are structural.
Against this backdrop, the next three years are likely to be decisive. Not because South Africa lacks plans or policy frameworks, but because it must decide which questions it is serious about answering, and align state capacity, capital and public trust accordingly.
Let me name three:
First: how do we earn foreign exchange in a world that is derisking, reshoring and politicising trade? The global trading system is no longer organised around neutral rules and comparative advantage alone. Industrial policy, subsidy races and geopolitical alignment are back, from Washington and Brussels. Capital is increasingly sensitive to political risk, supply-chain resilience and regulatory predictability.
This puts pressure on a growth model that remains heavily dependent on commodity exports, logistics arbitrage and episodic capital inflows. The issue is not export promotion in the abstract, but where the country sits in emerging value chains linked to energy systems, advanced manufacturing and digital infrastructure.
The promise of the African Continental Free Trade Area will not be realised through tariff schedules alone. It depends on whether South Africa can anchor production networks, logistics corridors and industrial capabilities that allow firms to scale across borders. This requires strategic selectivity. Fewer sectors, deeper support, treating ports, rail and energy reliability as trade policy. Aligning industrial strategy with geopolitical reality as it is, not as we once imagined it would be.
Second: can South Africa manage the technological transition without deepening inequality and economic concentration? AI, automation and platformisation are reshaping labour markets, firm structures and bargaining power. In a country with high unemployment, extreme inequality and concentrated markets, unmanaged technological change will raise productivity while entrenching exclusion.
Who captures the gains, and whether the state has the regulatory and procurement capacity to shape outcomes rather than merely react to them is the real question. Technology policy is inseparable from competition policy and public procurement. Without coordination, new technologies will reinforce incumbency. Incumbents understand this. The question is whether the state does. If it does, it would update competition policy for platform economics, and use the state’s purchasing power to shape markets, not only source services.
Third: can we stabilise democracy and social cohesion in an era of transnational political stress? Democracy is under pressure everywhere, and the pressure is contagious. Disinformation, declining trust in institutions, migration pressures and political polarisation circulate transnationally through digital platforms, regional labour markets and climate-induced instability.
For South Africa this is not a moral abstraction. Domestic social cohesion is increasingly affected by regional instability, while democratic backsliding elsewhere in Africa reshapes diplomatic leverage, investor confidence and migration dynamics at home. South Africa remains one of the few African states with economic weight and constitutional credibility.
Democracy support, mediation and election credibility are key elements of regional economic stability. At home, the challenge is legitimacy under material pressure. Democracy remains a competitive advantage only if it delivers. That requires investing in social protection so economic stress does not metastasise into xenophobia or populism. The distance between economic desperation and scapegoating is shorter than most policymakers want to admit.
Prioritisation under conditions of global disorder is what the next three years will be defined by. The countries that navigate this will not be those that cling to old rules, but those that adapt without losing legitimacy.
South Africa’s task is to decide, quickly and credibly, which questions it is prepared to answer, and which costs it is willing to bear to do so. Delay is itself a choice, and not a neutral one.
• Timcke is senior research associate with the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change and an affiliate of the Centre for Information, Technology & Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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