The ANC's Strategy and Tactics documents remain the most explicit statements of the different liberation movements' goals of ‘capturing’ and ‘transforming’ the state. Central to the strategy is the policy of ‘deployment’ of party personnel to all key institutions of the state to enable the liberation movement to control the ‘levers of power’. ‘We place a high premium on the involvement of our cadres in all centres of power’, stated Jacob Zuma in his speech on the occasion of the ANC's 99th anniversary on 8 January 2011, involving their deployment ‘in key strategic positions in the state as well as the private sector’.

According to its proponents, political deployment takes place in virtually all political systems, democratic and despotic alike. In democracies, capture of the state through winning elections enables parties to appoint their own nominees to all major state positions. In South Africa deployment was particularly necessary, for the state inherited from apartheid was totally unfit to serve the needs of all South Africans. If no changes to personnel had been made, the civil service would have had the potential to undermine the elected government. The reform of the state therefore demanded ‘a value-driven constitutional approach to deployment’ which ‘included deploying historically disadvantaged groups and the employment of professional political experts’. Not all those from disadvantaged backgrounds who were to be employed in senior management levels were necessarily political deployees, yet ‘political deployment of professionals’ was a necessary phenomenon in the managing of the state.