What is the point of the president’s state of the nation address (Sona)? Constitutionally, it’s a grand coming together of two arms of the state — the executive and the legislature.

Add in some fancy outfits, a red carpet and a glorious building (Cape Town’s city hall rather than parliament, for reasons we need not dwell on, but at least it’s not a tent), and it’s a big deal.

The content of the president’s speech is always pored over endlessly. We’ve been given some humdingers in the past — the “Tintswalo” meme, for instance, the consensus being that it came across as patronising. Either way, it did little to arrest the ANC’s electoral decline.

The problem generally is that a well-crafted set of initial drafts out of the presidency ends up being crowd-written by a cabinet committee and turned into fudge at best and a set of contradictions at worst.

This will be President Cyril Ramaphosa’s penultimate Sona, if not his final one (brace yourselves for a Paul Mashatile’s Sona) and so is more important than usual. A government of national unity love-fest like last year would be too low a bar, though there is no reason to expect things to change. After all, many DA ministers are simply implementing the reform policies of the previous Ramaphosa administration (albeit more successfully than their ANC predecessors).

Where should we set the bar then? There are some key tests. The first is whether the president can keep a firm grip on what he wants to say. This means a credible two-year agenda and having the resources and political capital to be able to see it through. This is easier said than done. In the post-match commentary we are likely to hear again and again that “we want to see action, not words” and “the proof is in the pudding”.

Which brings us to the second test — whether political capital is deployed to sweep contradictions in the government aside and have a singular and cohesive view. This is especially challenging in industrial policy, in which the ANC has been championing some odd, short-sighted positions lately — electricity subsidies for heavy industry, for example.

This also applies to foreign policy, where there are serious divides within the government on strategy and substance. Put simply, is the president prepared to annoy certain parts of his administration or not? That sounds like an odd metric to judge a Sona on, but it is the unfortunate reality.

Some issues require choices and actual decisions, which by definition will cause fallout. There has been a growing consensus over the past year that the sector education & training authorities (Setas) are crying out for change, but this is unfortunately politically contentious (for vested rent extraction interests). However, if the president is to focus on youth unemployment and skills development as promised, this is a Rubicon that will have to be crossed. Two years is just enough time to effect meaningful change to the Setas, though the payoff will take longer.

Another pressing issue that must be resolved on Thursday is Eskom’s unbundling. People across the government underestimate how damaging the present contradictory statements are, with Eskom and the department of electricity & energy on one side and the rest of the government on the other. The fact that a shift in implementation and design of Eskom’s future could be announced in December that was contrary to the president’s own stated agenda and what he has stated in previous Sonas is of serious concern.

Linked to this, the president’s largest communications problem is that investors are impatient for reforms. We are deep in the weeds on design and implementation minutiae across different elements of the Operation Vulindlela plan. These are complex and technical, and often involve small groups of people who have full expert knowledge across a number of players. The broad lack of capacity in the state makes it a challenge for many departments, agencies and ministries to have the bandwidth or depth to be able to grab such detail by the scruff of the neck, which often either leads to delays and listlessness or, as we have seen with Eskom, some off-piste skiing. The president cannot directly communicate much of this detail, but he must show that there is credible capacity and involvement around him to keep investors along for the ride.

The hardest part of all is that Ramaphosa must moderate expectations about timelines. Most of the positive growth impact from electricity and logistical reforms will not hit fully until 2029-32 — after he has left. Even then, this assumes everything goes to plan.

The procurement timelines on transmission, logistics, public-private partnerships and other similar projects are long even without considering potential (likely?) design issues or other spanners in the works. There is only so much tiding over one can do with ratings upgrades and greylist exits when unemployment isn’t falling and the environment for doing business is improving so slowly, particularly due to wider contradictions in industrial policy.

All of this sounds impossibly difficult, and redemption can only come from the debate in parliament next week when the ministers can fill in the blanks. Will they stick to what the president says in the Sona and the finance minister puts in next Wednesday’s budget, for instance? It will be a chance for ministers to shine. Or put spokes in the wheels.

The Sona is a moment of fanfare that could be the cherry on the cake of a national budget that sticks the course and keeps yields falling and investors engaged, but the risk of disappointment is high.

• Peter Attard Montalto leads on political economy, markets and the just energy transition at Krutham, a SA research-led consulting company.

This article first appeared in Business Day.

Image Credit: President Cyril Ramaphosa by GovernmentZA licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.