Evaluating South Africa's various alternative futures via the AHP

Abstract

This paper describes a pilot study in which Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used to try and gain some insight into what form of society will prevail in South Africa in the foreseeable future. The problem is structured in a hierarchy in which the actors, or power-groups, are at the top and the alternative future scenarios are at the bottom. Panellists are used to establish the relative influences of the different actors as well as the preferences which each of the actors have for the different scenarios, by means of two-way matrices of paired comparisons. The results of the exercise are discussed, as is the use of this approach in a more serious attempt to forecast South Africa's future political, social and economic system.