This is nothing new, many have been warning about this for years - forget the man, look at what is happening to institutions, governance, take ANC ideology seriously and look at the ANC governance record. This institutional decay and patronage culture has been ignored in large part because our commentariat, academics and politicians cannot think outside of the ANC / ANC-lite narrative (some mythical ANC first in terms of the official post 1994 narrative and now a "reformist" ANC). A lot of this have its roots in official ANC policy (NDR, cadre deployment, intelligence/security culture and history), government policies uncritically embraced by large parts of the intellectual class (BEE, SOE / economic centralisation, ANC is the state culture) and precedes Zuma.  The so-called reactionaries are looking more prophetic by the day - RSA can be a liberal industrialised democracy or it can be ruled by the ANC...