Gauteng faces three possible future directions, according to the Finding Our Rhythm: Gauteng Scenarios 2035 produced by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection and the Gauteng City Region Observatory.
The scenario It’s About Time (Boom Shaka’s debut 1993 single) describes a province finding its footing despite frustrating stagnation. Homeless, the famous 1986 collaboration between Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Paul Simon, is about a province collapsing into authoritarian populism and structural ruin while Paradise Road, named after the 1980 uplifting song by the all-female band Joy, talks of a province that finally harnesses its extraordinary assets to build an inclusive, dynamic city-region.
Gauteng faces what the scenarios call a “fundamental dilemma”: its traditional economic pillars of mining and manufacturing have declined, and a clear replacement has not yet emerged. The province has lost more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs since 2008. Youth unemployment sits at 46% using the expanded definition.
The Gini coefficient hovers at 0.6-0.7 — one of the highest in the world. Water infrastructure is decaying, while spatial apartheid remains deeply entrenched, keeping the working class and unemployed locked in costly, time-consuming commutes that drain them financially.
Gauteng is a unique beast in South Africa: a mega-region of more than 20-million people, the most unequal urban space in one of the world’s most unequal countries, home to sprawling informal settlements, a vast and complex informal economy and chronic infrastructure crises that have been generations in the making. Yet it represents a third of the country’s GDP, towering above KwaZulu-Natal, which is at 16%, and the Western Cape, which stands at about 14%.
The scenarios take a sober view of the issues around governance. South Africa is in a period of fluid, coalition-based politics that will likely persist to 2035 and beyond. The scenarios correctly note that coalition governance, when it works, can strengthen intra- and intergovernmental relations and force parties to negotiate productively across ideological lines.
But it also warns that in its dysfunctional form, as in the It’s About Time scenario, coalition instability becomes the primary contributor to developmental failure.
Addressing these challenges requires active developmental statecraft: deliberate industrial policy, serious spatial transformation, redistributive social protection and the capacity to build coalitions across race and class, while involving business, labour, civil society and the state.
Gauteng needs precisely what the Paradise Road scenario describes.
The preferred Paradise Road scenario emphasises that township economies are not just tolerated at the margins but become mainstream. Such a future would see at least 30% of government procurement flowing to township businesses, the informal economy accounting for 42% of employment, and an effective universal basic income grant providing a safety net that encourages economic participation. In Paradise Road, special economic zones are not showpieces but engines of micro-manufacturing.
The Homeless scenario does not begin with an obviously bad actor seizing power. It begins with the slow weakening of the political centre, the fragmentation of party discipline, and the failure of any coalition to build a shared developmental vision for the province. Populist formations step into that vacuum of service delivery failure, rising crime, water crises and spatial disintegration, offering scapegoats where governance had offered nothing.
The scenario postulates that if governance consists primarily of fiscal discipline, crime statistics management and the celebration of uninterrupted service delivery in select nodes, while the structural questions of poverty, unemployment and spatial inequality are treated as national problems or ANC legacies to be patiently endured — the province will drift towards collapse.
Gauteng needs precisely what the Paradise Road scenario describes: a developmental pact that cuts across the political and social divides of the province; a state capable of implementing spatial transformation as infrastructure and land-use policy rather than as rhetoric; a creative sector supported as a genuine economic and social asset; education and health systems reformed with the urgency the statistics demand; and, above all, a government that understands the informal economy and the township economy not as problems to be forced to comply, but as foundations to be strengthened into prosperity.
The scenarios are not predictions. They are warnings of the dangers of going down the wrong pathways, and offer narratives that sketch pathways to a better future.
• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.
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