South Africa is approaching the end of the National Development Plan: Vision 2030. This is more than the end of a planning horizon. It is an opportunity to ask whether we have been planning sufficiently for the conditions that determine whether our ambitions can become reality.

SA does not lack plans. We have strategies, frameworks, policies, targets and implementation plans. But when these fail to translate into jobs, functioning infrastructure, reliable services and economic opportunity, the cost is not borne by a planning document. It is borne by people.

The National Development Plan (NDP) gave SA a long-term vision of a country that is more prosperous, inclusive and capable of overcoming poverty and inequality. Yet its 10-year review found that the country was not on track to meet important targets, particularly on poverty, inequality and unemployment.

The lesson should not simply be that implementation needs to improve.

We should also ask whether our approach to planning sufficiently accounts for the conditions under which implementation succeeds or fails.

From interventions to constraints

SAâs developmental challenges do not exist in silos. Weak governance affects infrastructure delivery, public finances and service quality. Poor educational outcomes affect employability and productivity. Inadequate infrastructure limits economic participation. Spatial inequality separates people from jobs and services. Fiscal constraints limit investment, while weak economic performance reduces the resources available to address these problems.

Yet the government still often approaches these challenges through departmental, sectoral and institutional boundaries. Implementation-driven planning should begin somewhere different: with the constraints that prevent development from happening. Before asking what the government should do, planning should ask what must be true for an intervention to work.

Does the institution responsible have the capability to implement it? Are the necessary skills available? Is the infrastructure in place? Is the intervention funded for its full implementation period? Can procurement systems deliver? Which institutions depend on one another for the intervention to succeed? These are not technical questions to be answered after a plan is approved. They are planning questions.

Consider governance. The Auditor-General reported R42.58-billion in irregular expenditure by national and provincial government institutions in 2024/25, with procurement and contract-management weaknesses among the factors contributing to poor outcomes.

Irregular expenditure should not automatically be described as money that has been lost. It is, however, a warning about weaknesses in the systems responsible for converting public resources into public value. The more important planning question is therefore not simply how much irregular expenditure occurred.

It is: What institutional weaknesses produced it, who bears the consequences, and what would it take to prevent those weaknesses from recurring? The cost of implementation failure is often much larger than the number appearing in a budget.

Plan for the young people entering the economy

The labour market provides another reason to think differently about planning. SA must address the millions of people who are already unemployed. But we must also anticipate those who will enter the labour market tomorrow.

The latest labour-market figures make the urgency difficult to ignore. In the second quarter of 2026, the number of unemployed young people aged 15-34 increased by 264,000 to five million. Youth employment fell by 40,000 to 5.6 million, pushing the youth unemployment rate to 47.4%.

These are not merely statistics describing todayâs crisis. They are signals about the future.

Every year, new cohorts enter the labour market. National planning should therefore ask: How many people will enter the labour force in the coming years, where will they live, what skills will they bring, which sectors can absorb them, and what productive capacity and infrastructure will exist to employ them?

Different economic growth and industrial-development scenarios imply different levels of labour absorption. Education and skills outcomes affect the characteristics of new entrants. Infrastructure and spatial development affect where opportunities emerge. These should be variables in national planning, not statistics reported only after the outcome has occurred.

This does not mean shifting attention away from those who are already unemployed. It means tackling todayâs unemployment while preventing new cohorts from continuously being added to it. We should anticipate tomorrowâs unemployment before it becomes tomorrowâs statistic.

Make the pathway visible

This is where theory of change should become more central to national planning. We often assume that governance reform will improve service delivery, economic growth will create employment, infrastructure investment will stimulate economic activity, and skills development will improve employability.

But what connects the intervention to the outcome?

A serious planning process should force us to answer: What constraint are we addressing? What intervention changes it? What resources and capabilities are required? Who must act? What changes first? Who benefits? And what longer-term outcome should follow? Making this pathway explicit exposes weak assumptions before implementation begins.

It also allows us to think differently about the future.

Instead of planning around a single desired destination, SA should examine alternative trajectories: What happens if current constraints persist, and what becomes possible if they are successfully addressed? The difference between these futures is the potential gain from changing course.

It could mean more employment, stronger productive capacity, better infrastructure, improved public services and greater household welfare. It also makes visible the cost of doing nothing â and, importantly, who bears that cost.

The next plan must be different

As SA considers what comes after Vision 2030, there is an opportunity to strengthen the national planning architecture.

The next National Development Plan should not only describe the SA we want. It should identify what stands in the way, what must change first, which institutions must act, what resources and capabilities are required, and what happens if implementation succeeds or fails.

The Third National Planning Commissionâs mandate has already highlighted the importance of evidence, monitoring, foresight and scenario planning. The next phase should build on these functions by making the conditions for implementation an explicit part of national planning.

Implementation should not be treated as something that begins when planning ends.

The conditions for implementation must become part of the plan itself.

SA already knows many of the things it needs to do. The harder question is why they have not happened at the required scale, speed and quality, and whether our planning system is sufficiently designed to confront those constraints?

A genuinely implementable national plan should make visible the costs of remaining on the current trajectory, the gains from changing it, and the pathway that connects the two.

Ultimately, national planning is not only about deciding what the government should do. It is about making sure that the people who stand to benefit from development are not left waiting for the plan to become reality.

That is not planning after implementation. It is planning for implementation. DM