Jacob Zuma's years in command of the ANC have irrevocably changed the party as organisation – and the South African state. The ANC is captured as a tide gradually receding towards a point that marks the end of its hegemony, its fate linked to, but not solely determined by, President Zuma. The power of Zuma is formidable, but also contested. While factions are battling out the succession, the damages that the Zuma era has inflicted on the ANC pose two questions. Would the ANC recover from the wounds inflicted by Zuma? Could the ANC reposition itself to rise above the party that installed, retained and protected Zuma?

Some of the changes to the ANC organisationally in the course of Zuma's two presidential terms have resulted specifically from his presidency, his style of leadership and the way in which he rules over the ANC and the government. Other organisational changes might have materialised no matter which ANC leader was in power – many were due to the organisation's own continuous metamorphosis from liberation movement to a powerful majoritarian and dominant party that fused with the state. It was a particular type of organisation that allowed Zuma to become and to remain its president for two terms. But Zuma and those close to him in the organisation also have agency – they shape events rather than experience them passively. They fostered the ANC's integration with the state and they allowed an ANC in which the president rules. As a result, there is more emphasis on a party that sees state institutions as personal (and, occasionally, organisational) fiefdoms. Under this tutelage the ANC has become even more of an organisation that readily submits to the top leadership, plays extensively in succession politics and excels at factional mobilisation. In such an orgy of power there is little time to contemplate accountability to the public who had put the party in power – except in the narrow sense of reporting to ANC structures and events and roughly abiding by state-institutional processes.

The intra-ANC wrangle is about the extent to which the Zuma band of leaders – forcefully but ambiguously because of uncertain succession outcomes – will create openings for a post-Zuma order that will dare to diverge from the dictates of the Zuma era.