The ANC coming apart
IN THE STRUGGLE against apartheid, unity in South Africa's African National Congress was an indispensable virtue. But after wallowing for 14 years in the corruption and sclerosis intrinsic to a one-party system, the ANC's vestigial unity has become a costly vice. That's why this fall's intramural power struggle between ousted President Thabo Mbeki and his would-be successor, Jacob Zuma - and the ANC's ensuing fragmentation - were both inevitable and a boon.
It is a good thing that former Mbeki loyalists held a convention last weekend in Johannesburg to form a new political party. Whatever their motives, and whatever their political ideology, their action holds the promise of giving South Africa's politics qualities that have been lacking.
Among these are limits on shady dealing that come only with a constant competition for power; a prod to make those who govern responsive to the needs of the governed; and a path for criticism of the ANC for invoking the glorious past to distract attention from its failure to relieve the poverty and unemployment of the present.
One rousing moment in a convention speech by a former vice-chancellor of the University of South Africa, Barney Pityana, caught the 6,000 delegates' hunger for a completely different kind of politics. They stomped and cheered when he said, "Change is not just something that is dreamed of in America by Barack Obama."
In 1994, when the ANC first came to power in epochal one-man, one-vote democratic elections, South Africa needed the majority rule that Nelson Mandela's party incarnated. Today, South Africa needs the accountability in government that comes only with true political pluralism. 