Africa is a Country

So South Africa’s African National Congress is meeting in Polokwane, the capital of Limpopo province till Thursday, December 20th, for its national conference.

Not surprisingly policy differences are not dominating the conference, but rather the bitter public contest over who will lead the organization (after this conference) and the country (whoever becomes party president will probably become the ANC candidate in the 2009 general elections).

I will not recycle here all the conventional wisdom about the conference and the leadership race given that everyone knows by now that the ethically challenged Jacob Zuma, is the favorite to replace the incumbent Thabo Mbeki. Zuma was the country’s former deputy president until he was fired by the very unpopular Mbeki. Among others, Zuma was also accused of rape, has backward views on the position of women and gays and faces corruption charges. [It is astonishing how South African politics has been reduced to personalities, a horse race contest and more importantly, an epoch which high office is associated with personal wealth. The country has definitely arrived in the 'free world.']

News from the conference (and here the internet has been indispensable as well as from contacts attending it as observers) confirm that Zuma is on course to claim the big prize. It is also obvious that Mbeki is being publicly humiliated by the party membership and that the Zuma camp’s candidates are well placed to take key leadership positions (see here for example).

Should ‘JZ’ (as Zuma is affectionately known by his supporters) become party president, what kind of leader would he be? Of this there is not much reporting. Of course, Zuma is different in temperament than Mbeki, has less paranoia and does not pretend to be intellectual, but on the big questions of the day — (1) the massive inequality (South Africa has the distinction of being the most unequal country in the world; and (2) the massive unemployment (estimated at 40%) despite uninterrupted economic growth, both which still mirrors Apartheid — don’t expect much to change under Zuma.

Nevertheless, there’s been ample reporting and commentary in the Western press (South Africa rarely demands this kind of full court press in the international media anymore) on the meaning of the conference. These include articles by South African political journalist William Gumede (author of a very unflattering book analyzing how Mbeki transformed the ANC) in the New Statesman, the rightwing ‘commentator’ RW Johnson on the UK Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ webpage (Johnson spots a Communist plot in the anti-Mbeki sentiment expressed by callers into talk radio in South Africa and recycles innuendo and gossip from South Africa’s print media), the London Times (here), Sydney Morning Herald (here) and in the New York Times (here) and Washington Post (here) among others.

So we wait another day.

[NB: I won't blog about the conference again till its over]

* Umshini Wam is Zulu for ‘My Machine Gun.’