2018: More challenges, bigger opportunities and anxiety

The year 2017 has ended. Major global stories were led by the rise of Donald Trump and a conservative muscular anti-intellectualism to the White House. Trump has knocked off congeniality as a leadership quality and upended many conventions, written and unwritten.
In 2018, Trump will continue this streak backed by a relatively healthy US economy, which grew in all four quarters of 2017 and falling unemployment. Rising interest rates are likely to lift the dollar against its rivals.
Year 2017 also marked a reorganisation at the top. India displaced the United Kingdom and France to become the world’s fifth largest economy. China is already the second largest economy and is due to overtake the United States as the largest economy in 2030. This date has only been delayed by relatively healthy US growth and sluggish Chinese growth.
Year 2018 will likely be marked by deterioration on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea has been slapped by the UN with more stringent sanctions. Ballistic missile tests are likely to continue over the Sea of Japan aiming at the US territory Guam. Korean leader Kim Jong Un is facing even fewer global allies as most are bound by UN sanctions depriving him of vital markets for small arms.
The fall of leaders like Robert Mugabe is likely to increase financial pressures on the hermit kingdom that has rattled its two giant neighbours, Russia and China.
The Middle East has been quieter in 2017. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has forged closer ties with many African countries, including Kenya, which he visited in November during the swearing-in of Uhuru Kenyatta. Syria, Kurdistan, Yemen, Somalia are still trouble spots.
Leading oil producer Saudi Arabia is battling diminishing influence in a more affluent neighbourhood and attempts to intimidate its neighbours like Qatar fell flat in 2017. A new breed of leadership is keen to cut ties to the past, on the back of hosting Donald Trump himself, things may be looking up again as oil prices are starting to rise slowly, but are unlikely to hit 2010 highs until 2023.
President Trump has mostly ignored Libya even though the US is more active in Africa than ever before, a decision that has benefited an odd basket of rivals and allies.
The AU has new leadership after the early exit of Nkosazana Zuma, who returned to South Africa to contest for the leadership of the ANC. In Nigeria, the Buhari administration is still battling separatists, oil pirates and Boko Haram in the north while a dip in oil prices has prolonged a recession in Africa’s biggest economy.
Europe remained largely tilted to the right, a product of immigration phobia turning Germany, France, Austria, Hungary rightward. The United Kingdom turned left barely, the June 2017 elections left the country with a hung parliament.
In Germany, the new Bundestag drifted rightwards with the return of the FDP and seating of the Party of the Right in Parliament for the first time.
Angela Merkel after shedding a record 90 seats, is still negotiating to be Chancellor this time at the helm of a traffic stop coalition; combining forces with SPD. France has a non-conventional president elected as a new force from the centre right.
Latin America also has new leadership. It drifted rightwards with elections in Chile and in 2016 in Argentina. The ouster of Dilma Roussef in Brazil also handed the presidency to the right. In Peru, the far right scored with the release of Alberto Fujimori from a life sentence for crimes against humanity.
In 2018, the global economy is expected to grow faster than in 2017. This cycle is also expected to attract new resources in “soft sectors” like tourism, services and agriculture, which is grappling with climate change. Less attention will be paid to natural resources, oil, gas, mining all in more mature phases of the investment cycle. It is the year of euphoric stuff like bitcoin.

Mr Ssemogerere is an Attorney-at-Law
and an Advocate. [email protected]