Analysts, columnists, consultants, pundits and crystal ball gazers all spend vast amounts of time discussing the year ahead around this time of year.

Much of this is random, timing wise — most of the work I do with boards and C-suites works on different cycles. People have different financial years, and planning for long-term investment generally happens at odd times through the year — not suddenly in opening weeks of the new calendar year. Much of the decision-making for 2025 was already locked in during the second half of 2024.

Perhaps more so than in the past, it feels like we are in one long arc of narrative as a country, between last year’s elections at the end of May and the 2029 elections, with key markers along the way. What then can we say that is interesting? Perhaps it is that we need to separate the noise from the real events and real risks.

The Basic Education Laws Amendment Act has been a case in point, where we’ve got through the politician histrionics and people in markets fretting that this would end the government of national unity, and have ended up where we would always have been — a fully commenced act with the norms and standards in focus, but in the long grass taking a year or so to write up and agree. The 2024 Basic Education Laws Amendment Act story was basically just noise.

National Health Insurance (NHI) is interesting to consider in this regard. Most of the interparty jousting is also just noise. The real issue with NHI isn’t between DA and ANC, but within the ANC between those in the party who know the current model is unaffordable and unimplementable, and those that won’t accept that. The noise will be between the parties, the real issues will be inside the ANC caucus in government — especially between the National Treasury and the department of health.

This again is ripe for the long grass. The question is how much people will get distracted by it. Unfortunately, the private sector has been far too late in offering viable alternatives, but the focus and effort must now be on the fact the country needs an NHI, just not this NHI. For too much of 2023 and 2024 the noise distracted from this central issue, and the court cases that will advance and multiply in the year ahead will do the same.

Foreign policy is likely to be just as full of noise. Most of the G20 year is performative — panjandrums sitting in large rooms reading prepared statements into little microphones. Still, the real issues are SA showing seriousness, through both bilateral relations and the G20, of its “reset” from the madness of the last administration. There are also a few important global policy trends the Treasury is trying to advance, including multilateral reforms from previous Global South G20 presidencies, and of course the ability to showcase SA.

The G20 is actually a distraction from the serious work of navigating a narrow path with the US under a new administration, which is likely to involve (let’s call a spade a spade) a fair amount of transactional diplomacy with the Trump administration and those near it, like Elon Musk. This will be hard, but is possible. Tweets about farm murders and the like will be the distraction (some already started on Fox News just before the new year).

Sometimes it requires a bit of a kick up the backside to realise the difference between noise and what really matters. The announcement this week from ArcelorMittal SA (Amsa) that it is shuttering its long steel business at a time when there is theoretically a huge amount of reform-related investment on the horizon is one such kick to the government.

Despite much noise last year on efforts to prevent this from happening, the simple fact was that for all the department of trade, industry & competition’s new leadership’s oomph, SA simply does not have a coherent industrial policy (in general). Specifically, the steel sector policy was beyond a mess, and contributed to the risks around Amsa (alongside other factors like low demand).

The department’s new leadership could never have moved fast enough to correct the car crash of industrial policy inherited from the Ebrahim Patel era. The way forward is now clear — an urgent need to bring calm clarity to industrial policy, in particular for steel but also more broadly, ironing out the conflicts and perverse drivers of outcomes and inconsistencies. This is the hard work, below the noise of unions and others chomping at the bit.

Unfortunately, the move means reforms are likely to be more import intensive and so reinforce the fact we are likely to see a capital- and labour-intensive recovery. This remains the burning platform for the year ahead.

The upcoming state of the nation address must cut through the political noise and posturing and actually lay out some difficult choices and difficult pathways — on foreign policy, industrial policy, reforms and the NHI. The speech needn’t be longer than 30 minutes if the extraneous waffle is cut.

The clock is ticking towards 2029, after all, with 2025 a key year for real and not performative action.

• Peter Attard Montalto leads on political economy, markets and the just energy transition at Krutham, a SA research-led consulting company.

This article first appeared in Business Day.