South Africa’s main business group fears the country will be stuck in political limbo if infighting causes the ruling party’s elective conference in December not to go ahead.

The race to succeed President Jacob Zuma as leader of the African National Congress (ANC) is widely seen as a head-to-head contest between his deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the leader’s ex-wife and former chairperson of the African Union Commission. The battle has grown fractious and the ANC is working to resolve its internal differences to ensure the conference goes ahead as planned and avoid a repetition of previous splits that spawned three opposition parties, treasurer-general Zweli Mkhize, who is also a candidate, said on October 10.

The task of uniting the ANC after the damage to the party’s image caused by Zuma’s scandal-ridden Presidency is daunting. A bitter split in KwaZulu-Natal has effectively left the eastern province without a party leadership, and allies such as the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the Communist Party are openly calling for the President to go. The economy staged a weak recovery from the second recession in less than a decade in the three months to June 30, and business confidence is near its lowest level in more than 30 years.

“What begins to worry us now is the congress not happening at all, because the branches are so disorganised,” Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) CEO Bonang Mohale said in an interview in Johannesburg . “I can’t think of a [worse] scenario.” BLSA represents about 80 of the country’s biggest companies.

Concerns about policy and political uncertainty, along with weak domestic demand, weigh heavily on business and consumer confidence, deterring investment and job creation, the National Treasury said in its Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement on October 25. Taxpayer compliance is also deteriorating, it said, with allegations of corruption and mismanagement of State resources affecting collections.

BLSA members have pledged to implement anticorruption measures such as protecting whistleblowers. “There’s the realisation that government on its own is not going to take this country out of this morass,” Mohale said.

South Africa’s rand slid to its lowest level in about a year, after the Treasury almost halved its economic growth forecast for this year to 0.7% and said debt was predicted to rise. The deteriorating trajectory threatens to trigger a downgrade of the rand-denominated securities’ assessment to ‘junk’ by S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service. Fitch Ratings already assesses the local-currency debt as subinvestment.

“A real example of how bad the Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement has been is that we’ve now moved from a downgrade being probable to a downgrade being certain,” Mohale said. “You wanted to give hope, and yet you don’t come up with an emergency economic plan,” he said, referring to Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba.