Johannesburg — A CRISIS is a good thing to be in if you're planning to think about the future. It infuses any thinking that might occur with a purpose it might otherwise lack.

The Dinokeng scenario process began last year, months before the global credit crunch truly hit home. Underwritten by Nedbank and Old Mutual, Dinokeng has become a model of active corporate intellectual leadership, and the group should be congratulated and encouraged to stay with the scenarios as they are introduced -- as they must be -- to the wider South African public. It will not be cheap.

The spur behind the scenarios, rather than economic collapse, was a sort of moral or, perhaps, morale, disintegration under Thabo Mbeki. So while, yesterday, the Dinokeng authors were liberal with their references to "the crisis", social rather than economic policies and concerns dominate the three scenarios.

That is not a bad thing. The main ingredient missing from our lives in SA today is trust, not money. What has to be fixed in SA cannot be bought, or at least not all of it. As Mamphela Ramphele noted when she introduced the scenarios, healthcare has become so bad here now that many rural people are too afraid to visit clinics for fear of never leaving alive. How do you fix that? Half, half! , of young South Africans between the ages of 20 and 24 are unemployed.

Everything seems broken. About 74000 out of 79000 land claims have been settled, but half the beneficiaries have not benefited. We have built 2,6-million houses since 1994 but there are still another 2-million to go. Only 20% of matriculants get grades necessary for university entrance. We have the highest rate of TB infection in the world and South African life expectancy is falling.

There is, it turns out so far, no "better life for all".

Leadership, the Dinokeng authors write, is weak in all sectors of society. Business has adopted the view that "what is good for business is good for the country", but that is debatable. Business, they write, has by and large treated transformation as a cost rather than an investment, and trade unions "have no sense of the common good beyond their membership".

From this gloomy start, the three scenarios spring. Briefly and roughly described, they are pessimistic, realistic and optimistic.

The first, the pessimistic scenario called Walk Apart has the ANC winning this election just past but running immediately into falling investment, growth and tax revenue. Forced to expand public works programmes and welfare payments as health and education continue to fail, the party wins again in 2014 but with a smaller majority. By 2020 the country is a sorry mess with huge budget deficits, protests and a state of emergency.

The second scenario, arguably the most realistic, they call Walk Behind. It is a version of what, initially at least, we might expect from the incoming Zuma administration. The state is interventionist and sees itself as a driver of growth. The ANC wins again in 2014 and sees this as a mandate for even deeper intervention in the economy. It backs state-owned "champion" companies and forces the markets to invest in prescribed assets. This alienates investors and forces the government to borrow from the IMF, which insists on sharp cutbacks in expenditure. This, of course, brings people out onto the streets as in the first scenario.

This final scenario is the one we are all meant to root for -- Walk Together. Here, the incoming administration faces immediate economic problems but its inability to fix them galvanises citizens into action. "Healthcare and parent associations spread throughout the country," the scenario promises. Jolted into action, the government improves service delivery and though it wins the next election it is forced to form alliances with other parties. Citizens and business take on greater roles. Unions come to the party, backing measures to combat unemployment among the youth. Investment rises and, lo, the electoral system is changed so politicians become directly accountable to voters.

Pull the other one, you might say, but there is much merit in describing Utopia to South Africans. Other countries are already there and there is no reason we can't be too.

They key to success, though, is trust. It is the creation of a general social consensus about what is right and wrong and no section of our society has a monopoly on either. Dinokeng, provided it is taken to all corners of SA and discussed in detail in the smallest villages, can help make that consensus. But it'll be a hard slog.

The main ingredient missing from our lives today is trust, not money. What has to be fixed in SA cannot be bought.