SOUTH AFRICA: Dissatisfaction with ruling party and its controversial leader Zuma builds
From Fred Bridgland in South Africa

JACOB Zuma, the leader of South Africa's African National Congress party, likes to assert that the ANC will rule "until Jesus comes again".

However, there is now a real possibility that the ANC - despite possible divine intervention - will not rule beyond March 25, when South Africans go to the polls in the country's fourth post-apartheid general election.

The ANC, whose National Executive Committee (NEC) is meeting in emergency session this weekend, appears to have called the election two to three months early in an attempt to wrong-foot a breakaway ANC party.

The schismatic organisation, adopting the name Congress of the People (Cope), is attracting large numbers of former supporters of the party which has ruled almost unopposed since Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa's first black state president nearly 15 years ago.

In his weekly Financial Mail column, political commentator Barney Mthombothi wrote: "There's panic in the ANC, absolute pandemonium, as it watches with horror a rickety new party, without policy or personality and until a few days ago without a name, threatening not only to steal its clothes but to eat its lunch as well."

Mthombothi, who is also the editor of the Mail, South Africa's equivalent of The Economist, went on: "Intolerance and entitlement have taken root, especially among those in the ANC who seem to believe that the monopoly of power is their God-given right. South Africa has been a de facto one-party state since 1994, and it shows: the ruling party has grown intolerant, arrogant and unaccountable; but more important, it has run out of ideas. It's tired."

The complete transformation in South Africa's political landscape has been breathtaking since the ANC toppled president Thabo Mbeki in September and replaced him with an interim head of state, Kgalema Motlanthe, the ANC's deputy leader. Mbeki was deeply unpopular and few people were sorry to see him go. Nevertheless, many were deeply alarmed by the Stalinist way in which just 80 members of the ruling party's highly centralised NEC, designed on Soviet-style Politburo lines, had the power to topple a head of state elected by millions of citizens.

Zuma intended replacing Motlanthe as president after what the ANC had expected to be yet another landslide triumph in next year's election. The party had expected to win a two-thirds majority, which, under the country's proportional representation system, would have allowed it to change South Africa's constitution.

Pundits are now saying the ANC will struggle to win 50% to 60% of the national vote and that it could even lose to a coalition of opposition forces featuring the Democratic Alliance, currently the small official opposition in parliament, Cope and other smaller parties. "This time parties will have to fight for every vote," said Mthombothi.

Zuma's elevation is now being seen increasingly as a means to implement a coup against Mbeki rather than as a surge of popular support for Zuma, whose many shortcomings are being highlighted in sharper focus than ever.

Despite a slew of complex court cases, Zuma still faces the possibility of being tried for corruption, fraud, racketeering and tax evasion in connection with the country's contentious £5 billion arms deal with European weapons manufacturers. The ANC is arguing for a "political solution" to Zuma's criminal trial problem - code for dropping the multiple charges - which would cause a public outcry.

Zuma is also making extraordinary statements as he stumps the country trying to sustain support for the ANC as the country follows the rest of the world into economic freefall. Among the most bizarre was an attack on the many young unmarried African girls who fall pregnant. He said these teenagers should be "rounded up" and sent to rural work camps for moral re-education.

This has provoked widespread outrage - not least among people who recall Zuma's rape trial two years ago, in which he said he felt obliged by Zulu custom to have unprotected sex with a young HIV-positive woman, and that he guarded against becoming HIV-positive by showering afterwards. Zuma was acquitted of rape.

His choice of political sidekick has also stoked anger and raised eyebrows. Julius Malema, president of the ANC Youth League, has said he is ready to "kill and die" for Zuma if the corruption trial goes ahead. Together, Zuma and Malema have branded the breakaway ANC leaders and supporters as "snakes", "dogs" (a particularly strong insult in southern African black culture), and "cockroaches," apparently oblivious to the fact that this is the insult popularised by Rwanda's Hutus in 1994 before they began the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis in just 100 days.

The Johannesburg Star newspaper said Zuma fails to project the kind of dignity and gravitas necessary for a head of state, and that his message is not consistent, depending entirely on the audience he is addressing - radically left-wing to his Communist Party and trade union allies, and "steady-as-she-goes" to businessmen.

"The ANC is no longer the party of Mandela and former ANC leader Oliver Tambo," said Mthombothi. "It is the tool of Malema and Zuma. And they're driving supporters into the embrace of the opposition."