During the campaign, Jacob Zuma mastered the art of telling audiences what they wanted to hear. He would appear before Afrikaans farm communities, black township residents, left-wing university students and business-owning investors, assuring each group equally that their interests would be looked-after by the new government. Zuma was also notoriously reluctant to talk about policy, generally dismissing policy questions as issues that would be “decided by the ANC as a collective”. It was therefore interesting to see how Zuma would handle his first State of the Nation address, a situation where a) he has to talk to everyone at the same time, and b) talking about policy is not just expected, but mandatory.

As it turns out, Zuma’s playbook remains largely unchanged. This was a speech with something for everyone: Zuma told liberals that he “will reduce the regulatory burden on small businesses”; trade unions that “creation of decent work will be at the centre of our economic policies”; socialists that “grants remain the most effective form of poverty alleviation”; and conservatives that “[we] need to link the social grants to jobs or economic activity in order to encourage self-reliance amongst the able-bodied”. He praised South Africa’s sports teams without mentioning the debate over quotas, and promised a “common national approach” to changing place names without explaining what this approach will entail.

When Zuma did get around to talking policy, the result was a mixed bag. New infrastructure spending is good - South Africa desperately needs more roads, railways, power stations and telecommunications networks - and it comes at a time when Keynesian spending makes sense as a matter of macroeconomic policy. Performance targets for cabinet ministers are good, provided they are enforced. Creating an agency to deal with border security is long overdue, given the country’s problems with transnational crime and illegal immigration. Shifting foreign policy away from the grandiose principles of the Mbeki-era towards a more pragmatic pursuit of South Africa’s national interest is very good. (Zuma even said that South Africa will engage with Zimbabwe “until free and fair elections are held”, implicitly conceding that Zimbabwean elections until now have not been free and fair.)

On the other hand, many of his proposals raised more questions than answers. Zuma spoke of the need to “boost human resource capacity” in healthcare, without acknowledging that many of the problems that make the healthcare profession less attractive were created by the state. On crime, he advocated an “integrated” criminal justice system, when in reality South Africa needs a decentralised system of policing that allows for specialisation and community policing.

Most depressing of all were Zuma’s comments on education. He said that “[t]eachers should be in school, in class, on time, teaching, with no neglect of duty and no abuse of pupils!” Considering that the Education Department swallows up R127 billion annually - more than any other government department - we should probably be aiming somewhat higher than simply getting teachers to show up for work and not have sex with their pupils. The fact that we have yet to achieve even these meagre goals is evidence of fundamental problems in the Education Department, which will not be solved without waging war against the Department’s entrenched and self-interested bureaucracy. Zuma’s successful political battle against Thabo Mbeki indicates that he may have a talent for winning these internecine fights; but whether he has the inclination to pursue them remains to be seen.

On economic policy, the most revealing statements were the ones that Zuma did not make. He did not describe the private sector as the engine of economic growth and job creation. He did not discuss the importance of increasing productivity, improving the competitiveness of South Africa’s exports, or making South Africa an attractive destination for trade and investment. The underlying assumption behind all his statements on the economy is that growth will be driven by government. Government will employ millions of people, “fund companies in distress”, stimulate aggregate demand, and carry out unprecedented “industrial interventions” in the “automobile, chemicals, metal fabrication, tourism, clothing, textiles [and] forestry” sectors. I wish I could be confident that the government has enough information, foresight and talent to allocate resources on this scale, and do it in a way that will not infringe on individual freedom or harm the country’s long-term prospects. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous.