The ANC's troubles started long before the tenure of Jacob Zuma as president, but reached their zenith with him at the helm. ‘We admit the organisation is in trouble,’ said Zuma, famously, to the ANC Youth League. In this book, the phrase bears witness to the party-movement's electoral decline, organisational decay, weakened people's bond, and institutions of state and government sagging under the burden of factional-political abuse. Implicit in Zuma's statement was that much had gone right for the ANC, and because of the ANC, in its first two decades and more in power. The analysis in this book, equally, acknowledges the substantial change that took root, and specifically investigates the extent to which the ANC in the time of Zuma has been responsible for undermining itself.

Zuma's admission was an unsurpassed confession of the condition of party-and-state that came to be in his time. Contradictory behaviour was more usual – for example, to weaken the Tripartite Alliance but issue statements on how ‘sacrosanct’ it was, as in the mid-2015 NEC statement that ‘the unity and cohesion of the Alliance is sacrosanct and … determined action should be taken to preserve, continue to build and strengthen the Alliance's capacity’ to lead society’. The weakness was substantially brought on by Zuma, but the president was the product of the ANC, placed in power by an ANC that re-elected him as the best person for the job. The ANC does not entirely deny the deficits and lapses under its watch, but it portrays these as externally caused, as levelled by oppositionist, counter-revolutionary and hostile forces. The vanguard Zuma-ists, in full flight between the cover pages of the special edition of Umrabulo, containing the National General Council's 2015 discussion documents, write away their own culpability and prepare for a warlike and state-anchored offence on their attackers.

This book has synthesised those troubles, how the ANC's difficulties have expanded in the time of Zuma, roughly in the decade from 2005 to 2015 with four more Zuma years likely to follow. Zuma-ANC acolytes have assured the country that Zuma will serve out his term as president of South Africa, up to 2019. There has been a lobby to extend his term as ANC president by another two years, from 2017 (when his term as ANC president is set to end) to 2019 (to coincide with his term as president of South Africa).