While South Africa may not yet be facing a perfect economic storm, the nation needs a change in direction to stifle the impacts of a new slow-growth world and exposed home-grown challenges, and to set the flailing economy back on track.

South Africa was set to face a “difficult and uncertain” year in 2016, but the absence of four fundamental factors – inflationary and interest rate shocks, recession and mass job-shedding – kept the country from crashing, Old Mutual Investment Group chief economist Rian le Roux said in December.

Disseminating Old Mutual’s fourth-quarterly investment update for 2015, he said not much had changed over the past four months and growth – global and local – continued at a crawl, with South Africa narrowly missing a technical recession earlier this year.

The country’s economic growth remained poor, with expectations of 1.4% growth in 2015 and 2016 and improvements only set to be seen from 2017, as economic realities kept the economy in limbo.

The weak global environment, with low export demand and commodity prices, exacerbated the impacts of a lack of monetary or fiscal support, absent infrastructure develop- ment, electricity and water constraints, the mining and manufacturing structural decline, policy uncertainties and a rising regu-latory burden and lack of common vision and strategy between government, labour and business.

“On the whole . . . the global macroeconomic environment is not very supportive for South African growth, and local policy tightening and structural headwinds remain in place. “As such, we could be seeing significantly more political and social noise in 2016 as the pressure for growth-enhancing policy reforms is mounting relentlessly,” explained Le Roux.

While there were unquestionable pockets of good news and economic successes, with significant political, economic and social progress made since the inheritance of a structurally deficient economy in 1994, there were undeniably “many reasons” to be “deeply concerned”, he added, pointing out that the country currently held striking similarities to the Dinokeng downside scenarios.

Early in 2008, a group of 35 leaders from civil society and government, political parties, business, public administration, trade unions, religious groups, academia and the media mapped out three future scenarios for South Africa after considering the key accomplishments and failures of the nation since 1994.

The Dinokeng workshop introduced three scenarios, two of which were downside scenarios – ‘walk apart’ and ‘walk behind’ – depicting a polarised government, business and labour.

The ‘walk apart’ scenario resulted in a weak State of deteriorated services, undermined institutions and corruption and cronyism, with government taking a populist stance.

The ‘walk behind’ scenario saw government attempting to drive the economy with uncertain rules, regulations and policies that would end up stifling business and leading to higher taxes and wage/price controls.

Both circumstances resulted in protests and unrest, with government developing a “strongman” approach and clamping down, the mass exit of capital and skills and plummeting private-sector confidence and investment.

“What scares me about this is that South Africa contains many of these characteristics,” Le Roux noted.