Today's South African websites aren't reporting much that isn't reported in one way or another by allAfrica's news partners or bloggers - except perhaps for the Mail & Guardian's piece - pertinent, since the same question is being asked by alarmed party elders - "who is the ANC?"
The ANC is a party that's grown from 416,000 members in 2002 to 620,000 today, the M&G reports. It continues with the most extensive "vox pop" of conference delegates we've seen on the web.
Abroad, the Financial Times of London has done the job its readers would expect, which is to report on the business implications of the widely-anticipated election of Jacob Zuma as party president, and it's done it by securing an important if alarming interview.
The FT's correspondent, Alec Russell, is relatively new to South Africa in that capacity, but he's been in the country before for Britain's Daily Telegraph and his reporting demonstrates his contacts and knowledge. He and the FT's Africa editor, William Wallis, interviewed Sakumzi "Saki" Macozoma, ex-Robben Island prisoner widely known to journalists since the 1990s, when he did the press work for Frank Chikane, now Thabo Mbeki's director-general (effectively chief of staff for South Africa's Presidency), when Chikane headed the SA Council of Churches.
Macozoma is now one of South Africa's top business leaders, notably a director of Standard Bank, one of the country's big four banks (and the one in which China's biggest bank is buying a large share). Macozoma, seen as an Mbeki ally, echoes finance minister Trevor Manuel's anxiety about a Zuma victory, telling Russell it was a potential "calamity":
In a report published yesterday, Russell writes:
It would not be "Armageddon" for South Africa, he [Macozoma] said, but the pronouncements and personalities of many of Mr Zuma's leading allies were cause for worry. His [Macozoma's] comments reflected widespread concerns in the business community.
"Look at who are the prominent people around him [Zuma]," he said. "If some of the things they say come to pass then we will be facing a calamity, such as, 'We need free education' [which Mr Zuma called for last week]. How are you going to pay for it without nationalising the mines?"
The FT also publishes the full text of the interview. [Free registration required]
In a separate story, Russell reviews a recent book, written by a former ANC parliamentarian, which has had the party floundering in recent weeks, unable to come up with a convincing counter-attack. The book catalogues the scandal which has caused all the trouble - not only for Jacob Zuma but for Mbeki and his allies too: that around the arms deal of the late 1990s.
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...[I]t is [the writer's] recollections of Mr Zuma which are the more absorbing. As so many of his colleagues say, he is a charming and conciliatory leader, but he will also find it hard to shed the controversies of his past. He is, [Andrew] Feinstein [the writer] muses, "a pleasant and often friendly man; the man who had initially supported our attempt to investigate the arms deal but then abandoned us to our political fate. Was he a man who out of legitimate need while in exile had got involved with Schabir Shaik [Zuma's jailed financial advisor] who in turn had used and abused Zuma's name for his own nefarious ends? Or was he corrupt?"
These are the questions that hang over South Africa. Anyone seeking to understand the challenges facing the party's new leaders and the saga that may paralyse government next year if Mr Zuma is charged should read this book.
However, it would appear from today's Business Day (Johannesburg) that Zuma's election has already been discounted - in the stock market sense, which is literally, by investors. Business Day's economics editor, Mariam Isa, writes that although the election fight is one of the factors that may unnerve local markets this week, a London-based trader said overseas investors had already "priced in" the assumption that Zuma would win.
