The Chavez of South Africa

UPDATE: As predicted by all, Zuma wins.

ORIGINAL POST: South African President Thabo Mbeki appears disgusting in the West. He has supported Zimbabwe’s Mugabe without apology, and over the years has made a number of conspiratorial comments on the origins and nature of AIDS. Even so, in the spectrum of South African politicians, he is arguably a favorable choice to the alternative. I’m thinking now of Jacob Zuma. Zuma, originally famous as an anti-apartheid fighter, has seen his international reputation destroyed by a string of scandals—accepting bribes from a French arms company, a political corruption prosecution, and most notoriously the sensational rape trial in 2006 (in which he was acquitted) where he had admitted knowingly having unprotected sex with his HIV-positive accuser but wasn’t worried because he “took a shower afterwards.”

Yet Mbeki is on the verge of losing the party chairmanship to Zuma at the current ANC conference. Big time. Mbeki opened the conference with a speech that mixed what he considers his achievements—running a stable economy, poverty alleviation—and alluded that the ANC has “gravitated away from its moral axis.” But Mbeki was jeered as Zuma supporters, who dominated attendance, and who were on their feet singing for Zuma and demanding that Mbeki go, while the president’s supporters, clearly in the minority, sat in silence.

Zuma’s background is cause enough for concern. His power bases makes it look even worse. He is backed overwhelmingly by the left wing of the ANC, including many in the ANC Youth League, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Even the ANC Women’s League has publicly backed Zuma, effectively condoning his dubious record on crucial gender issues.

Nelson Mandela has stayed out of all ANC internal conflicts since stepping down as president, and without calling for anything, denounced the current divisions in the party. Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu was not so quiet, urging the ANC not to elect Zuma, pleading with delegates to “not choose someone of whom most of us would be ashamed.”

Assuming Zuma wins the party chairmanship at the conference this week, he is lined up for being a candidate in the next presidential election and stands a strong chance of winning. And it’s hard to see any silver lining in that cloud, no matter how hard you look.