Jacob Zuma, the leader of South Africa's African National Congress (ANC), was in the US yesterday to meet top officials of the Bush administration. He has just won a political battle that led to former president Thabo Mbeki's downfall and to his near-certainty of becoming president next year.

How different things are today from that morning 18 years ago, when tens of thousands of Americans lined the streets of New York to greet Nelson Mandela and his wife, Winnie, on a triumphant victory parade - when Mandela's ANC was a moral beacon that inspired ordinary people all over the world.

Now, as Mandela recedes into the twilight, his country is just another troubled developing democracy suffering from a deepening recession and a plummeting currency. Now, too, no one holds any illusions that the ANC is a cathedral of morality. Rather, it has been revealed as a rowdy town hall of competing interests, grubby with politics; a mess of factionalism, cynical self-interest and vituperative litigation. Even Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that other icon of the struggle, has declared his disgust and said he will not vote in the polls.

The most recent evidence of all this was the ousting of Mbeki by his own party in September. Mbeki is responsible for the political and economic stability that characterised the last decade. Mbeki, a complex and somewhat tragic figure, stood accused of not tolerating dissent and of using the organs of the state to fight his own political battles.

One of his battles appears to have been against Zuma, a longtime comrade. After Zuma was implicated in a corruption case in 2005, Mbeki fired him. Zuma, who subsequently was charged, believed that there was a political conspiracy against him; in September, a judge threw his case out. This gave the ANC grounds to 'recall' and replace Mbeki.

Affirmative action

Mbeki's programme for the transformation of South African society was called "black economic empowerment" - aggressive affirmative action and the transfer of assets to well-connected members of the black majority. This benefited the black middle class, which grew exponentially - as did the gap between rich blacks and poor ones. Zuma has exploited this, casting himself as the representative of all those who feel excluded from the banquet of victory.

Whereas Mbeki is a descendant of the class of 'black Englishmen' who have run the ANC since it was founded a century ago, Zuma is the unschooled rural son of a domestic worker. He is a traditionalist from the Zulu tribe, with several wives and children.

The architects of Zuma's victory over Mbeki are the ANC's left-wing allies, who feel Mbeki betrayed the ANC's roots with his "neo-liberal" policies of fiscal austerity and with his focus on the black middle class. Zuma has no discernible ideology and will go out of his way to tell his American hosts that South Africa's economic policies will remain unchanged. His leftist supporters, however, see payback time: They embrace deficit spending and are keen on nationalising key industries. Not surprisingly, they are not among his US team.

Zuma has debts to the businessmen who have bankrolled him through his legal travails, and one of his big challenges will be to forge compromise among all the people to whom he has made promises. Already he has shown himself unequal to the task: In the interest of stability, he wanted Mbeki to see out his term, which was to have expired next April.

As Zuma feared might happen, a group of dissatisfied ANC members has emerged in the wake of Mbeki's removal, providing the first real threat to the party since it came to power in 1994. This group is made up of ANC leaders who support Mbeki.

On the one hand, this is a positive development: the prospect of a black-led opposition to the ANC and the end of the kind of de facto, one-party state that has been the graveyard of democracy in Africa. But there is no indication yet of any significant policy contention.

There is no evidence yet that Zuma has authoritarian tendencies himself. And even if he does, these will be kept in check by South Africa's robust civil society. Certainly there is an atavistic passion for a 'chief' who finds expression in the personality cult around him. But there is a stronger hunger for accountability: A society that fought so hard and sacrificed so much is not going to let democracy slip from its grasp.

- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

Gevisser, is the author of "A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream," to be published in the US in spring