The African National Congress (ANC), more than 17 years after political liberation, is hard at work to ensure that it rules ‘until Jesus comes again’. It is working hard to make the ‘heaven’ of persistent ANC power happen. It works to continuously regenerate its power, thereby ensuring that post-liberation South Africans continue believing that their future and fortunes lie with the liberation movement-party. Without such processes, the ANC's still-formidable power base is likely to suffer far-reaching erosion. As this book argues, the ANC de facto or systematically by design has been working to contain its post-peak losses of power.

In the 2011-12 conjuncture the ANC has retained the bulk of its liberation movement appeal. South Africans carry deep scars inflicted by apartheid, racism and colonialism. The ANC is the symbol of their liberation. Opposition parties might have rationally-valid appeals, highlighting alternatives to ANC lapses and ANC government deficits. However, the people still retain a deeper linkage to the ANC, one that is cultivated both in the form of an electoral majority and through the ANC nurturing direct and powerful bonds with the people.

There is no guarantee that this deep and presently still pervasive ANC-people bond will persist. The ANC works to avoid a Zimbabwe-like situation at all costs, one where the popularity of the former liberation movement is eclipsed by new alternatives. In this the ANC has been acting pre-emptively to avoid a situation where there is a dangerously narrow margin between the governing liberation movement-party and any opposition party. To do so it works continuously on all fronts to regenerate political power peacefully, by all means legally and constitutionally available. Its democratic integrity is unlikely to allow it to turn to Zimbabwe style violence on its own citizens. Its insurance is precisely to work systematically to defend and nurture popular support, and the power that such support leverages.

Through this carefully steered project the ANC has largely managed to reproduce its power-status across the four domains – ‘faces’ of political power:

The result hitherto is that the ANC has been largely unchallenged by other political parties. Yet the period since 1994 bears testimony to modest threats to this position and flaws in the ANC's armour.