The colonization of discourses (Chilton & Schäffner, 2002) is a wide-spread phenomenon of globalization and naturally affects politics. The power of business-speak over politics and the media seems to be steadily increasing. Most vulnerable to that development, which the author calls businification, seem to be countries in transition that have to assert themselves rhetorically on a global scale while keeping traditional voters content at home. In an application of critical discourse analysis, the chapter seeks to trace this businification by comparing three presidential state-of-the-nation-addresses (SoNA) of three South African presidents after one year in office (1995, 2000, and 2010). Through contextualizing these texts with their media reception from a corpus of 15 newspaper articles reporting on the speeches, the outer influences on the core text become transparent. The findings suggest a parallelism between a growing professionalism in politics and the businification of political rhetoric whose development cannot be viewed as exclusively negative.