Gwynne Dyer, Contributor

It was widely believed of South Africa's outgoing president, Thabo Mbeki, that the only time when he was not plotting was when he was asleep. More than his bizarre views on AIDS or even his failure to do much for South Africa's poor, it was that reputation as an inveterate plotter that finally brought him down.

Mbeki's humiliation has been very great. First, the governing African National Congress (ANC) refused to re-elect him as its leader last year, which dashed his hopes of winning a third term in next year's election.

But he would still have remained president until early 2009, until last weekend, when the ANC leadership, convinced that Mbeki was using the courts to pursue a private vendetta against his rival Jacob Zuma, ordered him to resign early.

Mbeki's immediate replacement as president is Kgalema Motlanthe, deputy leader of the ANC, but Zuma is universally expected to be elected president of South Africa in the election due early next year.

Hardly surprising

Mbeki's fall from grace has been spectacular but hardly surprising. He was Nelson Mandela's chosen successor, but his style was very different - aloof, intellectual — and endlessly scheming against real and imagined rivals: the upper ranks of the ANC are full of men and women who have been sidelined or betrayed by Mbeki.

He also didn't pay much attention to the opinions of the broader public, particularly in two areas that are vital for South Africa: curbing the AIDS epidemic, and creating jobs for the black poor.

Ongoing feud

What ultimately brought Mbeki down was his feud with Jacob Zuma, which was a self-inflicted wound.

Zuma is the antithesis of Mbeki - he's a left-leaning populist with little formal education and a record of financial and sexual indiscretions - so it's natural that the two men should dislike and mistrust each other.

But the party had forced Mbeki to accept Zuma as his vice-president, and a wiser politician than Mbeki would have gone along with that typical ANC compromise. Mbeki didn't, and he seized the opportunity of a corruption charge against Zuma in 2005 to dismiss the latter from the vice-presidency.

It was an error that finally brought Mbeki down, for it made Zuma the rallying point for all the elements in the party that could not stand either Mbeki's policies or his personality.

Every time, the government prosecutors reinstated the charges or appealed the judgement, and to many Zuma supporters within the ANC it began to look like Mbeki's private vendetta against their man.

Two weeks ago, the Constitutional Court dismissed the case against Zuma on the same technicality, and Judge Chris Nicholson openly voiced his suspicion that it was pressure from Mbeki that was keeping it alive.

When government prosecutors appealed the case yet again, the party's patience with Mbeki snapped, and within days he was gone.

So now, Jacob Zuma, who is, to put it bluntly, much closer to the popular stereotype of an African politician than either Mandela or Mbeki, is coming to power in South Africa.

But corruption is nothing new in South Africa (it was rife under the apartheid regime) and neither is populism. The country has a free press, independent courts, a modern economy, and a good deal of political sophis-tication. The left had to get a turn in power some time, and there is some reason to hope that Zuma's worst instincts will be curbed by his allies.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.