This section begins with a sweeping overview of the radically changed South African political landscape post-Polokwane. It is followed by three chapters looking at different aspects of that landscape that either bedevil or deeply affect the state's priority to deliver a better life to all South Africans. Closing the section is the only chapter in the entire volume with a foreign policy dimension, a void which we intend to fill in the next edition of the Review. This void does, however, speak to the much lower foreign policy profile of the Zuma administration in contrast to the hectic jet-setting years of the two Mbeki governments. That was a time when the actual physical presence of the president in the country sometimes evoked comment, and it would not be far-fetched to suggest that the priority Thabo Mbeki accorded to South Africa's diplomatic role in Africa and the wider world cost him dear at home. Only someone with his eye ‘off the ball’ could have failed to notice how, by his second term, he had alienated his once adoring party constituency and even imagined that they would amend the party's rules and grant him a third term as its leader.

By stark contrast, to Jacob Zuma and his government the domestic terrain comes first. It is the political coal face, the frontline. He and his political team understand all too well that its political fate will be determined not at the African Union or in the UN Security Council but in the dusty and pot-holed township streets occupied by an increasingly impatient lumpen army of the poor. To distort the slogan once employed by former US President Bill Clinton, ‘it's delivery, stupid’; hence the quote at the head of this chapter.