Malusi Gigaba, a member of the ANC's National Executive Council and the country's Deputy Minister of Home Affairs has an article in the Mail & Guardian calling for South Africans, and especially the ANC rank and file, to give Jacob Zuma a chance to be a successful party leader and presidential successor.:
[Zuma's] election represents change — it is the first experience of the ANC since democracy was attained in 1994 that a sitting president of the ANC and the country is unseated as party president while he will remain the country's president for a period of more than a year. Zuma represents a new experience in leadership. He must introduce freshness in leading the ANC, the tripartite alliance and South Africa. He must do things anew, while not departing from how his predecessors have led the ANC and held its banner aloft.
This is all well and good. Perfectly reasonable, even. But South African skittishness is the result of the inherently unstable position that Zuma holds as both the party's anointed leader and as a potential prison inmate. It would be strange indeed for ANC members not to be making some alternative plans on the off chance that Zuma ends up looking less viable as the country's next president than his supporters might hope. I’ve said it often, but it bears repeating: The decisions made at Polokwane in December almost inevitably represents just the beginning of heated political machinations in South Africa, not their culmination.
