Johannesburg — PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma 's government has been in office for 100 days and we have a sense now of the shape of the future administration and its challenges. Right off the bat, you have to say Zuma himself is playing a bit of a blinder. As president, he is turning out to be much better than my, admittedly low, expectations.

I was particularly impressed with his take at the weekend on the desirability of nonracialism within the African National Congress (ANC) and within the country. What a welcome contrast to the hyper-racialism of the Mbeki administration where every problem seemed to be only recognisable through a racial prism. Race will of course always be a central issue in SA, a terrible divide and a lasting blot on the structure of our society.

Yet there is a subtle difference between an approach that recognises humanity first and sees race as a problem to be solved, as opposed to one that sees it as a platform on which to articulate a broader vision. Look at it this way, the racial divide becomes not only unsolvable but, oddly, creates an incentive for its prolongation.

Zuma obviously gets that difference, and he was clearly speaking from the heart when he expressed a desire to return to the values of the Mandela era.

On other issues of delicacy, Zuma has also played his cards with care and insight. Like it or dislike it, there is an overall balance to the make-up of the personnel within the government which accurately reflects the nature of the party. Zuma has neither pandered to the left nor has he ignored them, although it must be said that much of the inclusivity has been achieved by simply drafting in all comers.

Yet there is a sense in which excellence and attention to detail have returned to some extent as core values of government, as opposed to loyalty and partisanship which seemed to be the guiding principles of the Mbeki government. The ANC deployment committee still exists and is still a major headache for several bodies and institutions. But you sense perhaps that it might be pared back to what might be called normal political chicanery.

In many ways, Zuma is shaping his government as a kind of mirror image to the way Mbeki handled things. Hence, openness, feedback and inclusivity are hallmarks of the new administration.

This is all welcome. In some ways it's surprising, but in others it's exactly what we expected of Zuma. Nevertheless, it's a relief to see our expectations fulfilled.

But, but, but ... it's not simply out of a sense of pessimism that you get a feeling that problems are being bottled up. Where Zuma and his administration generally have been weakest is in the conceptualisation and putting into effect new and realistic measures to solve existing problems.

Where new ideas have been proposed, many seem outlandish and hopelessly overambitious. Economist Mike Schüssler has put together some interesting numbers where he suggests that the three big ambitions of government, the National Security Savings Fund, national health insurance, and the basic income grant will together absorb an extra R210bn a year.

This would increase government expenditure from about 31% to more than 40% of gross domestic product (GDP), which would be an unbearable burden on the country's very small tax base. There are only 5,3-million taxpayers and 1,2-million of these pay 75% of all personal and company tax collected, he pointed out.

To be fair, his numbers on the National Security Savings Fund are disputed by government spokesm en, who claim the additional burden on existing taxpayers will not increase substantially after initial implementation costs because the net will be cast wider. But this is the same government that at one time claimed it was targeting taking no more than 25% of GDP out of the economy.

In some ways the sheer difficulty of implementing such ambitious schemes might keep them off the statute books. But the deeper problem is that an element of the ideological heartland of the ANC still lies in the former Soviet countries where many of its leading lights spent their formative years.

These outdated and destructive ideas that brought such hardship to millions around the world are a notable blind spot in the ANC's ideological makeup, a blind spot that may be fostered by the affection leading members feel for the countries that provided them sanctuary in their hour of need.

This blind spot has always existed, but it has become so much more visible now since the Youth League has been unleashed and the South African Communist Party has cemented its position as a powerhouse lobby group within the government, providing "education" particularly for the young and most impressionable. The departure of the Congress of the People (COPE) members, many of whom were the most business-orientated members of the party, has also contributed. When COPE members left, they took with them some of the forces of renewal and stabilisation. Since then, the ANC has become a much more difficult ship to steer.

The lack of a clear and undisputed set of core economic ideas within the ANC poses real problems for SA's future. Even after the economic crisis has subsided, and the fans have departed the soccer stadiums next year, we will still have a government lacking in the conceptual certainty required for decisive action.

That decisive action might require changes to the labour relations acts, more action to support investment, more government support for innovation, a different education agenda -- in short, more imitation of countries that have succeeded rather than sentimentality over countries that have failed.

Yet, SA is a distinctly more hopeful place than it was 100 days ago. The thing to remember is that although the 100 days have been successfully negotiated, less than 1750 remain in this phase.