Handpicked Mbeki Replaces Mandela in ANC

President Nelson Mandela relinquished control Wednesday of the ruling African National Congress to his handpicked successor, Thabo Mbeki, virtually assuring the Communist revolutionary turned free marketeer will in 1999 become South Africa’s second black president.

Already in command of most day-to-day activities of the federal government--Mandela this week described Mbeki, his deputy president, as the country’s de facto president--the 55-year-old career ANC official promised to stay the course charted by Mandela as ANC leader over the past six years.

“We have been in the ANC for many, many years and have been party to all of the processes that have been going on,” said Mbeki, flanked at a news conference by several new ANC officials. “And so what will happen is a continuation of what we have been doing for very many years.”

The long anticipated hand-over of power was followed by cheers, dancing and singing throughout the convention center, a college sports hall in the rural North West province where the ANC is holding its 50th national conference.

A beaming Mandela, who said his formal goodbyes to the party faithful Tuesday, raised Mbeki’s arm in a victory salute. Also on hand was Govan Mbeki, the new ANC president’s father and an elder statesman of the anti-apartheid struggle. The elder Mbeki was sentenced to prison with Mandela in 1963.

“It is all very exciting because he is so committed to the organization,” said Yoliswa Zondani, one of more than 3,000 delegates from across South Africa who unanimously endorsed Thabo Mbeki’s election. “People value his loyalty and qualities as a leader.”

Shortly after taking over his powerful new post, Mbeki was handed an unexpected but welcome gift by one of the ANC’s most unpredictable and combative members. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela abruptly abandoned her bid for the party’s No. 2 job, ending fears of a divisive clash between the mainstream party leadership and her more radical supporters.

Madikizela-Mandela was nominated on the convention floor for the post of deputy president as an alternative to provincial ANC leader Jacob Zuma, who was the unanimous choice of the regional branches, Mbeki’s personal favorite for the job and the eventual winner.

Although it was doubtful that Madikizela-Mandela had enough support to defeat Zuma, some ANC officials feared that her bid would focus attention on the party’s divisions and steal the limelight from Mbeki. But as an early show of hands gave only scattered support for her nomination, Mandela’s former wife withdrew her name from contention. She gave no explanation for her decision.

The swift and uneventful departure of Madikizela-Mandela--the biggest wild card of the five-day convention--ensured that Mbeki will have his way in assembling a team of ANC leaders to prepare for the 1999 elections. Although opinion polls show the ANC has a lock on the vote, the retirement of Mandela--a highly trusted and bigger-than-life figure among all races--means the party will have to work harder to rally supporters impatient with the slow pace of South Africa’s transformation.

Unlike Mandela, Mbeki takes the helm of a party whose record can be tracked and scrutinized, not always with flattering results. At the same time, the party remains torn between its revolutionary calling and the sobering reality of day-to-day governance, which has often meant cutting budgets and breaking promises rather than turning the world upside down.

That difficult balancing act, some analysts said, was largely responsible for Mandela’s hard-hitting address to the convention Tuesday, which attacked opponents of the ANC as enemies of the country’s new democratic order.

“The revolution has not been completed,” Mbeki told delegates after winning the nomination Wednesday. “We still need to organize ourselves to ensure that we achieve those things for which our movement was established. The struggle continues.”

After wearing an ANC T-shirt at the start of the convention and looking awkward and out of sorts, Mbeki returned to a more familiar white dress shirt on Wednesday. The change in wardrobe reflected more than the new party leader’s fashion sense.

Although he received military training in the Soviet Union, was a longtime member of the Communist Party and joined the ANC as a boy, Mbeki cuts the figure of armchair liberal more than roadside rebel. Bearded with short cropped hair, he has a fondness for pipes, academic debate, formal clothes and a good turn of phrase. Married with two children, he is described by friends as charming and personable.

Twenty-seven years in exile, Mbeki spent most of the apartheid years drumming up support for the ANC at cocktail parties and diplomatic gatherings abroad, not among struggling residents in South Africa’s black townships. During the 1980s, he was top advisor to Oliver Tambo, then the ANC’s leader in exile. Mbeki returned to South Africa in 1990 for the so-called Groote Schuur talks, which laid the foundation for negotiations to end the apartheid system of white minority rule.

Supporters say Mbeki’s broad international experience and honed diplomatic skills make him a good choice to run the country, particularly at a time when South Africa needs foreign investment and international support for its economic and social transformation. Mbeki is known as an able administrator and technocrat, and, despite his Communist past, is one of the government’s leading proponents of free-market economics.

But his years abroad also work against him. Despite his high profile--he has been deputy president since 1994--he remains a puzzle to many South Africans, who see him as aloof and stiff. He is not a rousing orator, and he lacks a steady, grass-roots following that can serve as a core of support, in both good times and bad.

“He doesn’t have the independent image and really, I suppose, the transcendent authority of Mandela, with the result that he has to be much more responsive to the pressures and expectations within the party structures,” said political consultant Lawrence Schlemmer. “He has a far more complex balancing act than Mandela.”

Mbeki bristles at the suggestion that he must prove himself worthy of following in Mandela’s footsteps. At a recent meeting with foreign journalists, he responded with sarcasm when asked if he could fill Mandela’s shoes, which are literally and figuratively oversized.

“Well, I don’t imagine that there’s any such requirement. I mean, he’s got very big feet. The shoes will be too big,” Mbeki said. “What does that mean? Does it mean we start off by going to jail for 27 years and then sort of graduate from there, grow taller, wear strange shirts? It’s not a rational expectation.”

Fairly or unfairly, analysts say, Mbeki will always be measured against Mandela, and for some in the ANC, Madikizela-Mandela as well.

“Nelson Mandela was a myth while he was in prison, and Winnie Mandela lived here through it all,” said Sheila Meintjes, a professor of political science at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. “Both of them are hard acts to follow.”

Asked on Wednesday if he found his new task daunting, Mbeki first joked and then answered soberly.

“There is a particular strength in the ANC . . . of a very strong, very capable collective of leaders,” he said. “That helps.”