The ANC circa 2014–2015 is all but the strident, confident party and movement-in-power of even five years before, and the state in these times matches it. The ANC under Jacob Zuma entrenched itself in state power at exactly the time of persistently ineffectual local government, lack of credibility of policing and public security, and lapses in the legal system. It was overseeing the subjugation of several of the institutions of democracy to the will of a faction of the ruling party.

Earlier in the Zuma period South Africa had lived the hype of the pending reinvigorated, reconnected and more caring ANC state and government under redeemer Jacob Zuma. Instead, South Africa entered a time of unparalleled presidential controversy, which affected the state. There were morbid symptoms of compromised state capacity that merged with ‘gross manifestations of corruption at the local level’, while ‘public discourse is replete with cases of the abuse of state resources’ and ‘patronage on a grand scale in state-owned enterprises’, ‘shoddy responses to the injunctions of the public protector’, ‘strange shenanigans in critical state agencies’, and infighting and top-order political agendas in security agencies.

The ANC is not a party to sit back passively watching poor fortune enfolding it. It intervenes, and state action is a useful part of its repertoire. This ANC, strategically shrewd, works to change public perceptions and limit public expressions of dissent and critique. It issues public statements, engages in the media, disseminates history lessons that remind citizens of the ongoing struggle for liberation, and sets out to undermine if not demonise the sources of challenge. The ANC believes it retains the historical mission to fully liberate South Africa from apartheid and its structural legacies – even if it has to recast the struggle and the role of the current leadership ten times over. The ANC does not imagine itself as an ordinary political party: it works to preserve a sense of being special, a party in a distinctive relationship with the people. It equally believes it has the right (if not obligation) to act out its electoral majority in the state.

Many of the ANC's acts of recasting and reinvention rest on compliance, and both the ANC and ANC-as-government use state institutions to manufacture it. Chapter 2 unpacked the major, presidency-centred aspects of this, and showed that the president is in control of a vast construct of state power.