Rainbow's end? What 2009 will bring

With well-heeled South Africans dispersed for their summer-Christmas-New Year holidays to their magnificent beaches and game reserves, and the teeming poor off to their home villages, an unreal serenity cloaks the rainbow nation. It is only a calm before the biggest storm since the times of racial apartheid.

The ruling African National Congress (ANC), once the most iconic of all liberation movements, will go into the country's fourth general election since the demise of apartheid in the wake of a damaging split in the movement and under a leader of deeply questionable honesty and morality. The poll could happen as early as March, and no later than May.

It is almost as though it was a fairy tale that happened on May 10, 1994 - the day Nelson Mandela, perhaps the world's last secular saint, became the country's first black head of state after three centuries of white minority rule.

But now, after a year of turmoil which saw the Machiavellian Thabo Mbeki deposed as state president, here is what will unfold, according to South Africa's finest political analysts. They almost universally fear for the stability of their beloved country.

Interim state president Kgalema Motlanthe will further prove himself the poodle of Jacob Zuma, who became leader of the ANC a year ago in an ugly and unbrotherly internal election process, by appointing a Zuma loyalist early in the new year to become head of the National Prosecuting Authority, popularly known as the Scorpions.

Already this month Motlanthe has sacked Scorpions chief Vusi Pikoli, whose teams of crack investigators had begun prosecuting Zuma - on charges of corruption, fraud, racketeering, money laundering and tax evasion in connection with a highly contentious multi-billion-pound arms deal - and the country's national police chief, Commissioner Jackie Selebi, on several charges of corruption and defeating the ends of justice.

Motlanthe sacked Pikoli even though a government commission of inquiry had judged him a "person of unimpeachable integrity" who should be reinstated in his job.

Pikoli had been suspended by then president Mbeki when Pikoli's Scorpions laid charges against Selebi, Mbeki's close friend. Mbeki's thinly veiled excuse for the suspension was that Pikoli, whose Scorpions are meant to be independent of the executive arm of government, had not consulted sufficiently with the justice minister.

Pikoli has now effectively been sacked twice - first by Mbeki for prosecuting the police chief, and second by Motlanthe for daring to prosecute the man who gives Motlanthe his orders from outside parliament, Jacob Zuma.

"The new incumbent as National Prosecuting Authority chief, smitten with joy at his good fortune, will do a perfunctory assessment of the Zuma case, after which he will announce with a fanfare that Zuma has no case to answer," said Barney Mthombothi, the highly articulate editor of the Financial Mail, South Africa's equivalent of The Economist. "Case closed.

"It's a perfect opportunity to kill the case once and for all. They the ANC under Zuma's leadership are not going to let it pass. The Zanu fixation of the ANC is complete.

"It is time for good men and women in the ANC to either speak up or get out - for their own sanity, if not for the good of their country."

The reference to Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party, in deeply troubled Zimbabwe over the Limpopo River on South Africa's northern border, stems from the fact that that country's implosion began with an assault by the government on the judiciary and the whole justice system.

In South Africa, since Zuma became the ANC's leader - elected more on an anti-Mbeki rather than a pro-Zuma ticket - the party has been seeking a "political", that is a non-trial, solution to its chief's corruption problems.

As the ANC twists and turns and questions the integrity of state prosecutors and the guardians of the constitution in the much-admired Constitutional Court, set up during the negotiations for a democratic South Africa in the early 1990s, opponents of the ruling party accuse it of raping the judicial system.

Indeed, an entertaining libel case is on the 2009 agenda, in which Zuma will sue the brilliant cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro for a series of withering cartoons, including one in which the ANC leader is shown unzipping his trousers as four of his staunchest allies hold down a beautiful woman, labelled "Justice System", with one of them exhorting: "Go for it, boss."

Zuma was drawn with a shower nozzle sticking out of his head, as Shapiro often depicts him - a reference to a sensational trial in which Zuma was charged with raping an HIV-positive woman. He was acquitted, but provoked a mix of public hilarity and outrage by saying he took a post-coitus shower to prevent infection by the Aids virus.

The cartoon triggered a debate over the limits of free speech, and Zuma's lawyers are demanding half a million pounds in damages. Shapiro has responded with ever-sharper and more uncompromising cartoons, including his latest, of an ANC Christmas nativity in which party officials worship the Baby JayZee Zuma, complete with shower-head, in grovelling, sycophantic poses.

Hijacking Zuma on a radio talk show programme, Shapiro said: "Mr Zuma, you are a public figure. You are are the one with power, not me. And you just turn it on its head and act the victim."

The "political" solution to Zuma's problems will be unveiled early in the new year with the appointment of a pliant Scorpions boss. But that will also light the touchpaper to a political row of giant proportions, probable violence in the lead-up to the general election, and a period of prolonged instability. The coming mayhem could threaten the 2010 Fifa World Cup, scheduled to be held in South Africa.

The veteran South African journalist Allister Sparks has identified the arms deal in which British Aerospace is alleged to have paid countless bribes in order to sell supersonic planes to South Africa, which does not have pilots to fly them, as a bigger scandal than any of the corruption crimes that shamed apartheid-era governments.

Thanks to sustained investigative journalism, the prize-winning writer can say: "We know who the crooks are. We know who paid and who received bribes. We know just about everything, on the basis of 93,000 seized documents, about how it was done. But this time the revelation of all these wrongdoings is not leading, as we journalists always believed would happen, to investigation, exposure and ultimately justice.

"No. Never a conclusion. No charge. No trial. No judgment. No closure. A scandal without end."

Sparks went on: "The great crusade against the evil of apartheid is over, and we are now in the uncharted waters where the distinctions between opportunity and greed, between entitlement and avarice, recompense and reprisal, are more difficult to distinguish. And between crime and punishment."

Sparks, once the editor of the liberal Rand Daily Mail and later the courageous anti-apartheid South Africa correspondent of the Washington Post and The Observer during white rule, argues that the arms deal saga will go on for ever - "or at least until Jesus comes again", a satirical jibe at Zuma, who tells ANC rallies that the party will reign until Christ returns to Earth.

Sparks concluded: "I'm afraid our next president will have to go into the world naked. Defenceless. A tortoise without a shell. A man with a history that he cannot shake off and cannot defend himself against and cannot bring to closure. Who will have to live and rule under an ever-present cloud of suspicion and scandal."

But Zuma-gate, to the surprise of Zuma's followers, has not engendered the kind of supine, unquestioning support the ANC enjoyed in the difficult decades of the struggle against apartheid and during the first 15 years of democracy. Instead, it has split the ANC, with a new breakaway party being formed which accuses Zuma of corruption, racism and undermining the judicial system.

The new party has taken the historic name Congress of the People (Cope) after a gathering of thousands of people in 1955 in Kliptown, Johannesburg, which led to the creation of the ANC's Freedom Charter. In just three months of existence, it has threatened ANC hegemony. Cope, in a loose alliance with the official opposition, the Democratic Alliance, is forecast in early opinion polls to reduce the ANC majority from the current 70% to less than 60% in the next parliament.

The anti-ANC blasts are not coming solely from political parties. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa's iconic moral voice, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and long-time ANC supporter, said he would not be able to vote for the party at the next election. Having earlier said the ruling party risked turning South Africa into a "banana republic," he pleaded: "Please let us, the elders, not go to our graves with broken hearts."

Tutu, with impeccable anti-apartheid struggle credentials, said Zuma should not become head of state if corruption allegations continued to hang over him. The archbishop also encouraged the formation of a viable opposition, "one that gives the impression that it could become an alternative government".

He added: "At the moment there is very little accountability. They the ANC are accountable, as it were, to themselves, and only once in a while do they really have to account to the people. It's not healthy for everybody involved.

"Democracy flourishes where there is vigorous debate and people are actually careful of what they do, knowing that the electorate can take their revenge, that they can be kicked out of office at the next election."

On Christmas Eve, the archbishop resumed his attack on the ANC, lambasting it for deserting the high moral ground by failing to stand up to Zimbabwe's Mugabe. He said he was ashamed that South African diplomats had vetoed United Nations Security Council resolutions and action against Zimbabwe.

"I am deeply, deeply distressed that we should be found not on the side of the ones in Zimbabwe who are suffering,"he said. "We should have been the ones who for a very long time occupied the moral high ground. I'm afraid we have betrayed our legacy."

And so, as South Africa goes into an uncertain new year, the Zuma-led ANC will no longer be able to lay claim to being the only legitimate representative of black South Africans. It will have to compete in the open market of ideas that is democracy against an opposition coming from the same ANC roots.

At the same time the Zuma camp will have to manage its own fault lines - between extremists who say publicly they will "kill for Zuma" and those who backed him only to get rid of Mbeki, but now fear they are saddled with a candidate too compromised to run the country competently and who could, in the worst nightmare, turn it into a new Zimbabwe.