Botswana will be looking with intense curiosity at the aftermath of the change of guard at South Africa's ANC 52nd national conference.
The elections pitted reigning president of the country and the organisation, Thabo Mbeki, against his former deputy at their equivalent of State House, and at Albert Luthuli party headquarters, Jacob Zuma.
Both were revered heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle when they returned from exile on the eve of the 1994 election which for the first time recognised the 'Non-whites' as legitimate holders of the political franchise, side by side with women in the new democratic dispensation.
Mbeki wrested the presidency from preferred candidates in the likes of Cyril Ramaphosa, the architect of the legal framework that established the new 'democratic, non-racial and non-sexist' South Africa. First president Nelson Mandela confessed that he would have preferred Ramaphosa, not on account of his aversion to Mbeki, but rather in order to recognise the contribution of the cadres who fought at home.
Mbeki held the academic credentials which, like Botswana's Festus Mogae, made them most eligible to represent the countries of the underdeveloped South in the era of 'globalisation'.
He also exuded the kind of erudition that was not unfamiliar at the house of Govan Mbeki, who had himself written universally recognised works on the peasant uprisings of the Africans in the Cape.
All along, Jacob Zuma, stood by like the old faithful cadre. He had served with Mbeki on the ANC national executive in exile as head of the organisation's intelligence services.
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He was, comparatively, from more humble beginnings, burdened by a good measure of peasant naivite, which possibly accounts for his vulnerability to ordinary sexual and financial temptations.
A good and rigorous judicial system in South Africa - certainly far more independent than that of Botswana - bailed him out and he escaped jail for rape and abuse of office.
The ANC membership, perhaps just as prone to the psychological contradictions that plague the South African mentality, went with the less sophisticated, little educated underdog in Zuma, despite his financial and sexual scandals.
He took two thirds of the votes of the ANC delegates to capture the presidency of the ANC creating the strange situation in which there will be one president for the party and another for the country.
Strange, indeed, but not unlike South Africa!
Today's Thought
It is an indictment on the ruling party that they could find no better candidate than Jacob Zuma to lead them
- Helen Zille
