One of Mandela's most skilful achievements was to initiate the post-Mandela era while still in office, ensuring a seamless political transition for South Africa as it moved into the twenty-first century. By the middle of Mandela's presidency, his deputy, Thabo Mbeki , had taken charge of the nuts-and-bolts running of the country, having already assumed the chairmanship of the ANC in 1993. At the 1997 ANC national congress he succeeded Mandela as the leader of the party and after the 1999 general election, which the ANC won by a landslide, he became president of South Africa.

 

Mbeki was never going to be another Mandela, and he knew it. Soon after taking over from the great man, Mbeki had joked that he had no intention of stepping into Mandela's shoes as they were "too ugly". Despite his formidable intellect - possibly because of it - Mbeki has failed endear himself to South Africa's citizens. He certainly lacks Mandela's common touch and most South Africans find him remote, an impression reinforced by the feeling that he jetsets around the world promoting Third World issues , rather than dealing with South Africa's domestic problems. But Mbeki believes South Africa's economic prospects are inextricably tied to those of the Third World. Part of this agenda entails pushing his cherished African Renaissance , a slightly vague idea that seems to bring together the promotion of black empowerment at home with an attempt to foster pride among the worldwide African diaspora.

At home Mbeki and his cabinet have followed a neo-Thatcherite economic policy , framed in the language of budget-deficit reduction, wage restraint and privatization. The unflinching implementation of the policy by the highly competent finance minister, Trevor Manuel , has won applause internationally and at home from most centrist and centre-right economists. However, it has also drawn a predictable barrage of fire from South Africa's left for a policy that they see as quite inappropriate to a country beset by one of the world's most inequitable distributions of wealth and growing unemployment. This has exposed tensions in the tripartite alliance - the ANC and its two junior partners: the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Although there are frequent rumblings about a split and the formation of a left-wing opposition party, this seems unlikely since, despite the yawning ideological divide, the three are painfully aware that they will probably have to sink or swim together.

It therefore seems probable that for the forseeable future, the most effective opposition to government policies will come from inside the governing alliance. This is reinforced by the weakness of the parliamentary opposition. In 2000, the official opposition in parliament, an alliance between the New National Party and the Democratic Party known as the Democratic Alliance (DA) split. The New National Party , led by Marthinus van Schalkwyk, was the reinvented National Party - the party of apartheid - which now drew most of its support from the coloureds it had formerly oppressed, as well as Afrikaans-speaking whites. The Democratic Party under Tony Leon was the successor to the liberal Progressive Party, which for decades had been the only party in parliament to oppose apartheid. After this unlikely marriage ended on the rocks, the NNP entered into an even more unlikely liaison with the ANC, the party whose members it had previously banned, murdered or imprisoned on Robben Island. What is left of the DA lacks broad electoral support, most notably among the vital constituency of Africans, and gets most of its votes from some coloureds and English-speaking and Afrikaner whites.

Mbeki's handling of the crisis in neighbouring Zimbabwe , in which President Robert Mugabe's government unrolled a barrage of laws to curtail civil rights and unleashed violence on its own citizens during the run-up to that country's 2002 presidential election, has also done little for Mbeki's reputation, particularly in the light of his patter about an "African Renaissance". In dealing with the recalcitrant Mugabe, Mbeki has insisted on following a policy of "quiet diplomacy" rather than confrontation, which has failed utterly to produce any positive results.

South Africa's rand crisis of 2001, which saw the South African currency lose forty percent of its value in less than a year against sterling and the dollar, was blamed by economists on events in Zimbabwe, Mbeki's failure to strongly condemn them and investor fears that a Zimbabwe-style situation could develop in South Africa. The economists kept predicting that the rand would soon stabilize since "the economic fundamentals were in place". When the currency continued to slide, these same economists blamed the rand's rapid decline on events in Argentina, amongst other factors. They eventually had to admit they had no idea why the rand continued to reach new record lows week after week. It did finally stabilize at around R11 to the dollar and R16 to the pound at the end of 2001.

But as South Africa faces the twenty-first century, no issue is more important or more divisive than Mbeki's stance on AIDS . According to South Africa's Medical Research Council, AIDS is the biggest killer in the country. It also threatens to undermine the gains achieved by the Mbeki government's economic successes. Despite pressure from the medical establishment, trade unions and opposition parties - as well from inside his own party - the president has stolidly clung to his unconventional ideas about the disease, and has rejected the provision of anti-retrovirals in state hospitals. Particularly emotive has been the withholding of drugs to AIDS-infected pregnant women to combat mother-to-child transmission, which is widespread in South Africa. Mbeki's greatest failure has been to treat AIDS as an intellectual conundrum rather than a human catastrophe. When asked in November 2000 by Time magazine whether he was prepared to acknowledge a link between HIV and AIDS, he replied: "No, I am saying that you cannot attribute immune deficiency solely and exclusively to a virus."

Mbeki's views on AIDS have seriously damaged his international reputation; the Mail & Guardian reported in 2001 that "he is known even in small-town United States as 'the African leader with funny views on AIDS'". When Mbeki convened a panel of scientists, comprising mainstream researchers and AIDS dissidents to look into the causes of AIDS, his detractors likened this to someone about to be consumed by a blazing fire setting up an enquiry into the causes of the conflagration rather than fighting it. In 2000, the DA-controlled provincial government of the Western Cape began dispensing anti-retrovirals in state hospitals; in 2002, KwaZulu-Natal followed suit, and it looked like a number of ANC-controlled provinces were going to defy their party's official policy and do likewise.

Perhaps the brighter side of all this is that it demonstrates that democratic debate is alive in South Africa, even in the ruling party. South Africa bears more resemblance to a liberal democracy like Britain than to a near-dictatorship like Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Despite the ANC's overwhelming political dominance, views opposing those of the president can be expressed freely. Although South Africa entered the twenty-first century laden with problems, it stands a better chance than virtually any country in sub-Saharan Africa of dealing with them.