President Jacob Zuma is expected to promise to shift delivery and restructuring programmes up a gear in his state of the nation address on Thursday as he seeks to rekindle trust in his administration.

The presidency has hinted that he will lean heavily on liberation history to provide a feel-good moment when he opens Parliament, with a frail former president Nelson Mandela looking down from the gallery 20 years after his release from prison.

However, analysts say Zuma cannot avoid the harsh truth of the job crisis and delivery service protests, which his government has failed to stem in the first nine months of its mandate.

Susan Booysens, of the University of the Witwatersrand, said the speech found the African National Congress "in a bit of a corner because they are in danger of losing the momentum of the sense of new hope" that marked Zuma's election last April.

With local government elections early next year, and with the setting up of new government structures taking as long as predicted in a worst case scenario, the president was under pressure to regain it.

"South African politics is seriously in need of more doing, of turning things around. There is a legitimate expectation," Booysens said.

'Maximum mileage'

If Zuma hoped to get maximum mileage out of the historical context of his speech, this had been undermined by the scandal over his love child and he would have to compensate with more substance, she said.

"The Mandela release comes in very handy, but the hint of scandal will cast a shadow on the link between the two presidents... It is going to place strain on the content in that in terms of delivery he has to compensate."

Trade union federation and restive ally the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu), drew up a list of demands ahead of the speech.

Topped with "the creation of decent work", it and urged Zuma to explain and remedy the state's failure to create the half a million jobs he promised last year.

"We expect the president to outline the reasons for this failure and to point a way forward to explain how this will be reversed in the coming period. We shall pay particular attention to the president's policies to reverse the catastrophic loss of 959 000 jobs in the first nine months of 2009."

Cosatu also urged Zuma to commit to an overhaul of the economy.

"We hope the president will announce the dates when the growth path will be announced, together with the date for the publication of the industrial policy strategy."

Aubrey Matshiqi, a senior associate at the Centre for Policy Studies, said Zuma would deal with the pressure by setting targets for government departments and letting them take the blame for failing to deliver.

"I think the best thing to do not just on job creation but on delivery of all public goods is to keep a 'presidential distance' by saying this is what my government will do in the course of the next 12 months.

"At the end of the day, we might not be able to come back to him with the deficits that may emerge."

Zuma set to lay the blame

South Africans would see some of this on Thursday evening already, with Zuma almost certain to blame the global economic crisis for the missed target of half a million jobs, although the extent of the meltdown was already manifest in May when he made that promise, predicted University of Johannesburg deputy vice chancellor of research, innovation and advancement Adam Habib.

He expected that Zuma would be "reluctant to settle on targets this time", and prudently be more "programmatic that [quantitative]" in his pronouncement on service delivery.

It would confirm the break with the tradition of former president Thabo Mbeki of reporting back to the nation in the precise tones of a chief executive officer briefing a boardroom, said Habib.

He said Zuma, with his greater sensitivity to public opinion, had understood that his task was to inspire the nation and would draw on the victory over apartheid and the country's readiness to host the 2010 World Cup to do so.

Analysts agreed that the speech found Zuma compromised by the revelations over his love life, but the believed he was surviving the scandal.

"The inauspicious circumstances in which he was elected means he must protect this political capital of at all cost because alternatively he will lose political authority in the context of the ANC," said Matshiqi.

"That's why I say the ANC is one apology away from a leadership crisis.

"But those who are writing him off are being hasty. The balance of forces in the alliance and the ANC still favours him because there are many individuals who will not want to compromise the level of political interest they have acquired since Polokwane."