The Zuma administration entered into state power at a time when the ceilings on delivery had become manifest. Phenomenal achievements had been posted. There were, however, bottlenecks and obstructions in effecting delivery to narrow the inequality gap and capture elusive prosperity. The ANC was under substantial pressure to get more of the fundamentals in order, for example, in education, health, local government, and integrity in governance. Substantial and continuous deficits, combined with beliefs that the ANC had not done its best, threatened to undermine the ANC's people relations.

To limit such undermined relationships the ANC would have to maintain a tight hold over state power, ensuring that state power works to reinforce both tiers of ‘parallel democracy’ in which the ANC operates – the electoral and comparative party power world, on the one hand, and the ANC in its own world of relations with the people, its organisational world, and the alliance world, on the other hand. The ANC had to use state institutions2 to leverage policy implementation and delivery. The ANC's task was vastly complicated by the fact that parts of its organisational struggles and wars for intra-ANC strategic advantage over rivals were playing out in exactly the state-institution al domain where it had to invest in its own political future. It was no iron law, but its own battles beyond the earlier capture of state institutions from the apartheid ancien régime frequently disrupted and paralysed, rather than facilitated and leveraged, improved state-institutional performance (and realisation of policies). In due course, the ‘first transitions’ were partnered by a triptych of interdependent new battles that would undermine the ANC's hold over state-institutional power – political factionalism and contestation for positions, corruption, and deficient state capacity. Some of the latter was due to poor institutional design and deficient associated processes; other parts could be traced back to negotiations and constitutional design.