Public participation is a cause of frequent celebration, evidence of the extension and deepening of democracy beyond the rituals of electoral participation, also in South Africa. Public engagement and collaboration equally extended the ANC's reach and helped it secure power in government and for the movement as the custodian of government.

Public participation was not just a constitutional imperative and government's well-intentioned platform for continuous engagement with the people of South Africa. It was the ANC government's way of co-opting both elites and ‘ordinary’ people into governance projects and ensuring the minimisation and delegitimation of public dissent or expressed resentment. Public participation in government projects helped build, sustain and regenerate ANC power. It helped government bring people into positions of co-responsibility, while sharing information about government achievements and listening to people's complaints. Both ANC electoral and ANC government slogans reiterated that ‘together we can do more’. However, structured opportunities often faltered due to elitist co-optation, insufficient access, people failing to see the benefit of participation in the government's preferred structures, the ANC's ‘hijacking’ of participatory mechanisms and the transfer of intra-party factional interest s into public structures. The ANC's diverse participatory power project is widely diffused and continuously revisited and re-engineered. The ANC's strong people foundations substantially contribute to its continuous power. The proximity – sometimes fusion – of state and party under the ANC has facilitated the creation of hegemony.

Public participation likewise delivers evidence that the dream of democracy has been inadequately fulfilled: that politicians use public participation to help ensure co-optation and, through processes that channel participation, effectively maintain a distance between the rulers and the ruled. The ANC in government faces hurdles in engaging the people in its governance projects. The opportunities are insufficiently diffused, people are often inadequately empowered to claim available spaces away from the local power mongers, and there is insufficient feedback to reassure participants of the meaningfulness of their inputs. Beliefs in the sincerity of government's intentions falter.