Johannesburg — A FRIEND of mine reckons the best outcome for the country would be Thabo Mbeki losing in Polokwane next week and Jacob Zuma being found guilty on corruption charges after a gruelling trial a few months later.

For the sake of peace, please can he have a lengthy jail sentence, suspended forever? Then neither could run the country. Like you, I'm sure, I have been all over the place on the succession issue these past months. I cheered when Zuma won the first round of votes. At last someone had given Mbeki a real fright. But I was then depressed at the thought of Zuma's political cohorts (this is pre-Tokyo) running SA, but, equally, delighted at the agony those results must have caused to Mbeki's many demented handlangers.

I am sure the subsequent merger of the Zuma and Sexwale camps will have mortally wounded Mbeki. I can't bring myself to cheer that, though. Mbeki is a genuinely enlightened man who has let us in society get on with it.

He has liberated us. We may not know what to do with that freedom but it has a quality only he can be credited with. Mandela freed SA from racial bondage but Mbeki has challenged us -- mainly by ignoring us -- to get on with it and grow up. Look at what a vibrant, argumentative in-your-face society we have become. It's healthy.

I know the Mbeki camp has a strong dislike of Business Day and our political editor, Karima Brown. She is, they say, biased towards Zuma. Mbeki's done a huge job for SA and we will miss him, but this is nevertheless the same camp whose boss doesn't think HIV causes AIDS (a virus can't cause a syndrome, remember?), who thinks Zimbabweans should sort Mugabe out by themselves, who thinks crime in SA is a perception problem and who, even now, can't find the courage to let prosecutors arrest his chief of police.

I'll stick with Brown.

But I hope Zuma appreciates what an awesome society he is inheriting from Mbeki. I wonder if he'll continue suing newspapers and cartoonists if he wins. There's a streak of intolerance and even cruelty behind the cheerful Zuma exterior that we have yet fully to appreciate.

His comments about how he was uncomfortable with lawyers defending rapists and murderers the other day were chilling. No doubt he was quoted out of context.

DON'T fret, though. Zuma will probably be okay. He's our Ronald Reagan, a good ol' boy, at home in a suit in the corridors of power or sipping home brew out of a paint tin with his cousins in the kraal at Nkandla. Reagan was arguably the most successful postwar US president. He didn't so much energise America as relax it. We could do with that here, too. n

THE thing I miss most about not writing this column is the housekeeping it allowed me to do. First, we shrink to our usual holiday single section from next week, until mid-January. Then, we are saying goodbye to some really special colleagues. Tim Cohen, easily the finest journalist working in SA today, is going freelance after 16 years on the staff. He'll still write his Monday column in BD and his Saturday comment in The Weekender. John Kaninda, our diplomatic editor, is off to public relations. Katherine Berchtold, our online producer, is going to work for a major accounting firm. And dear Khulu Phasiwe, who has covered the state-owned companies, is off to work for a bank. Jonny Steinberg, whose column has been an inspiration, is going to live in New York.

We, meanwhile, have some exciting plans for the paper next year and are preparing to welcome new (and some old) colleagues (back) onto the staff.

For myself, I never properly thanked the many readers who lamented the passing of my column and who were concerned about remarks I made about my health. The fact is that I had, after a bad period, my thyroid gland removed and I feel great now. Have a peaceful and happy holiday and hold your families tight.