With just two days to go to the most divisive leadership race in the history of South Africa's ruling African National Congress (ANC), appeals for President Thabo Mbeki and party deputy leader Jacob Zuma to back away from an unseemly showdown appeared Friday to have come to naught, according to dpa. On Saturday around 4,000 ANC delegates will descend on the small town of Polokwane in the northern Limpopo province for the party's December 16-20 leadership and policy conference, held every five years. They will be joined by some 700 local and international journalists and 135 political observers, reflecting the immense interest in what is being described as the most significant political event in the country since the first democratic elections in 1994. At stake is the tenor of government policy for the next decade. After a decisive win at the party nominations level, Zuma, a former commander of the ANC's military wing who was sacked by Mbeki as deputy president in 2005 on suspicion of corruption, appears poised to become the next ANC leader. Given the huge support for the party of Nelson Mandela he would also likely become state president in 2009 elections. The centrist economic policies pursued by both Mandela and Mbeki are seen as vulnerable to a Zuma presidency. Zuma's biggest backers are leftist factions within the party as well as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), who have blasted government's prudent macroeconomic policy as overly cautious. His own stance is far from clear. The 65-year-old Zulu politician has talked left with the grassroots - promising free education for example - while telling investors "nothing will change." On social issues, the polygamist father of at least 18 children, who is reported to have at least four wives, is a conservative, who rails about the bad influence of American TV programmes, wants stiffer sentences for criminals and supports the banned Zulu custom of virginity testing. Although the leadership conference takes place against the backdrop of real frustration with high poverty levels and with Mbeki's centralization of power in the presidency there has been little in the way of exchange of new ideas. Instead, as Mbeki lamented in an interview published Friday, the campaign "seems to be fought around personalities, which is extremely unhealthy." In the personality stakes, Zuma wins, with most South Africans appearing to prefer his conciliatory style and renditions of old revolutionary songs to Mbeki's rambling speeches on the "national democratic revolution" and penchant for quoting Shakespeare. The contest has been characterized by negative campaigning, staple fare in a US presidential election, but completely unprecedented in ANC circles. Mbeki has urged ANC members not to vote for "criminals and rapists" in what was taken as a reference to Zuma's 2005 rape trial - he was acquitted of rape and the allegations of corruption that could still bar his march to top office. Zuma supporters on the other hand have denigrated the government's push for greater gender equity as "womanizing" and government propaganda as akin to that of Nazi Germany. As the torrent of insults thickened calls for the two to step back in favour of a compromise candidate flowered but quickly died on the vine. Tokyo Sexwale, an ANC businessman who had been campaigning for the post has thrown his support behind Zuma. And the man whom Mandela hoped would succeed him instead of Mbeki, the hugely popular former trade union leader and political negotiator Cyril Ramaphosa, has refused so far to enter the fray. Controversial ANC stalwart Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's attempt Friday to broker a truce between Mbeki and Zuma was not given much hope. "I can't find any sign of a compromise," Steven Friedman, associate researcher at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), said in an interview. "I think it's too late for that now." The same was being said of Mbeki's last-hour public relations offensive. In an interview with the Mail & Guardian the diminutive 65-year-old leader who spent many years in exile in London, asked, somewhat pathetically: "Do I look as if I've got horns?" At the Polokwane conference delegates will elect a six-member leadership and a National Executive Committee of 66 members. They will also discuss policy matters, including land reform, the structure of the police and the establishment of a media tribunal. The new president is expected to be known by Monday.
