After Mbeki

PRESIDENT Thabo Mbeki's resignation Sunday is the culmination of a fierce power struggle within South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress. The party voted to ask Mbeki to resign after a judge dismissed a corruption case against his ANC rival Jacob Zuma on a technicality. Mbeki was done in by the judge's voicing his belief that Mbeki's government exerted improper political influence on the prosecutors who brought the charges against Zuma.

It was a sign of South Africa's attachment to democracy that Mbeki heeded the request of the party he had belonged to for more than a half century. But speculation in the aftermath of his resignation that some of Mbeki's supporters may bolt the ANC to form a new party points up an increasingly troublesome aspect of South African democracy.

Unity was a key virtue for the ANC during the struggle against apartheid. But since the creation of a one-person, one-vote democracy in 1994, the rationale for unity has become more and more dubious.

Mbeki said he was leaving office for the sake of party unity. But his own internecine feud with Zuma reflects the reality of factionalism within the ANC. Sadly, South Africa's drift toward a virtual one-party state has allowed ANC leaders in power to become less and less accountable to the populace.

Mbeki himself indirectly alluded to the effects of this syndrome in his farewell address Sunday. "Despite the economic advances we have made, I would be the first to say that the fruits of the positive results are still not fully and equitably shared among our people," he said. "Hence the abject poverty we still find coexisting side by side with extraordinary opulence."

This is a fair description of the way South Africa's post-liberation successes are intertwined with its failures. Mbeki's pro-business policies have opened the country to foreign investment, and in a time of soaring commodity prices there has been a flood of foreign investment pouring into South Africa's mines and banks. Some of the ANC luminaries and their friends and families have grown wealthy in this new era, benefitting from the connections that come with political influence. But at the same time, more than half the population suffers from the abject poverty Mbeki described.

If the ANC divided into competing political parties, those in power would be obliged to become more accountable - and more responsive - to South Africa's impoverished majority. The best thing to come of Mbeki's fall from power could turn out to be the end of ANC "unity" and the birth of a genuine multiparty political system.