EDITOR’S NOTE: Hunker down and wait
Trump and Brexit almost killed the art of political prediction, but is everybody simply ‘too nervous because they’re nervous’?
The prospect of seeing the back of Jacob Zuma, you instinctively feel, is bound to lift the spirits of a country reeling from corruption, and improve its outlook for the new year. But whether Cyril Ramaphosa, the market favourite, or Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, pushing a populist line, emerges as ANC leader next week, the advice of our lineup of experts in this special report, SA in 2018, can be summed up in that old standby, "cautious optimism". Hunker down and wait, writes Peter Bruce in an absorbing overview in which he imagines the consequences of a victory under each of the two main candidates. Claire Bisseker says a Ramaphosa win would trigger a fairytale market rally, at least for the first half of the year, before it dawns that his room for reform is constrained, not least by his party. State-owned companies, for a start, face crippling debt, as Sikonathi Mantshantsha writes. Would a Ramaphosa government nonetheless manage to stave off a downgrade by the third of the ratings age...
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