Everyone knows that the logic of democratic politics is the struggle to occupy the middle ground. For this reason the history of right-wing breakaways is not one that boasts many successes. So, you might say, the current ANC splinterists, with Mosiuoa Lekota as their fill-in figurehead, are doing themselves no political favours; they are walking away from the centre of power.

Or are they?

Watching the slow-motion fragmentation of the African National Congress is like looking into one of those old-fashioned kaleidoscopes - right now the old pattern is in mid-shatter, and the pieces are still groping for their new arrangement.

But what will it be? For a while now, the answer has seemed as apparent to me as, I assume, to everyone else: the Mbeki faction has been ... is being ... shafted by a loose front emanating from the left of the governing alliance. The left is moving into the centre ground because in an electorate made up in greatest part of the poor, the unemployed and those who feel disowned by the New Society, nothing else makes sense. And Jacob Zuma stands at the pinnacle of all this.

Yet, I am not sure the machinery of politics, driving the emerging pattern of politics, quite bears it out. Not right now, anyway.

I'll try to describe what I mean by that - but I can do little more than sketch some of the issues that nag away at the back of the mind, and raise some questions. I have no answers. This may be a good thing, because in a long(ish) career in this field I have been wrong more times than I care to dwell on. But the questions don't go away.

Little more than 10 years ago I tried to look over the horizon to see what was coming. I saw one thing clearly: the ANC - or, more accurately, the alliance - had to split. The forces driving SA politics could not for ever be contained within one political body, and I put these thoughts into a book called When Mandela Goes (Doubleday, 1997).

I knew, in the euphoria of the new SA, this was political heresy and I steeled myself for the fallout, which came. In buckets.

Now we see it happening. We are in mid-split. But I am denied the private satisfaction I feel entitled to - because it isn't happening the way I thought (and - damn - said) it would.

I thought, according to the notion that the centre of gravity of SA politics would move left, that the left wing of the alliance would break away. It never struck me that the left would stage a palace coup and expel the right. (It's a pity I didn't, because I did understand that the winning faction would be the one that retained the core asset of the movement - its history, its ethos and, almost definitely, its name ... in some form or another.)

Much of this has now happened, or is happening.  The coup has taken place ... but where is the centre of power? Who has got their hands on the wheel and foot on the pedal? And where is the political vehicle going?

To try to get some clarity, let's recap, in baby steps.

At Polokwane in December, Mbeki was ousted from leadership of the party. The impetus came from a broad front emanating from the left of the alliance. 

Although it was a party conference, the push clearly reflected the desires of the alliance partners, the SACP and Cosatu. In addition to these big beasts, the front included lesser political fauna such as the ANC's youth league, the women's league, and others.

The two outstanding features of the push were that it was clamorous and intemperate, and that it was overtly Zuma-supporting. In fact, there was no disguising the fact that it was the first big, open move to get Mr Zuma into power. Sooner rather than later. (The haste is in itself telling, since there was little need for it, since Mr Mbeki was not going to be eligible for the presidency of the country next year - but to follow this line of dissection would obscure the path we need to follow here.)

In the afterwash of Polokwane it became a generally accepted observation that the main strategic hand, and chief political energy, behind the move was the Communists Party. It harboured - by tradition, in part - the thinkers and the plotters. It became common cause that the politics of South Africa was going to take on a new, populist flavour and direction.

Then the push gave another lurch and shoved Mr Mbeki out of government.

It was broadly assumed that the same plotters and activists - the same broad front from the left - were behind this move, too.

Yet at this point things become curious. The unbroken line of ascendancy of influence breaks. The SACP and the clamouring ones seem no longer to be calling the shots.

The discontinuity reveals itself like this. It is decided that the party will place a caretaker president in Mr Mbeki's place. Not Mr Zuma, mark you, even though it would have been perfectly plausible. The courts had just dismissed the corruption case against him and it would have caused waves smaller than those already ridden for Mr Zuma to simply ‘do a Berlusconi'. (The Italian prime minister has at various times introduced legislation that indemnified him from prosecution for fraud while in office ... and shortened the statute of limitations for fraud prosecutions.)

Not too many eyebrows were raised at this point, though, because there could have been many reasons for the broad front and the party deciding not ‘to deploy' (to use its discomforting terminology) Mr Zuma at this stage.

Yet things became decidedly more curious when the caretaker, Kgalema  Motlanthe settled in to govern. First, he remonstrated publicly with the wilder of the clamouring ones, upbraiding them for their inflammatory speech. Then he signalled, via his own mouth or of those he gathered around him, that the new government accepted the seriousness of two issues of fire consuming SA society, up to now largely denied: Aids and crime.

To be sure, this distinguished Mr Motlanthe's government from Mr Mbeki's fantasy-denialist regime ... but it didn't exactly strike the populist gong. Nor did the retention of the finance minister, Trevor Manuel, who, competent though he has proved to be, nevertheless embodies the elite-empowering policies of the outgoing order. With the choice of an opening play to his putative constituency, and a play to a more moderate spread of the political spectrum, Motlanthe chose the latter.

And here's where the strangest of all events didn't take place: Mr Motlanthe signally failed to reward the broad front that had put him there with any political office. Of the 28 Mbeki ministers, he kept on 22 ... fully half of whom didn't make the cut at the Polokwane revolution onto the new national executive of the party. Four of the six new appointees didn't come from that new, Zuma-left-leaning executive and the two who did are virtual unknowns and way down on the executive list (which is ranked by votes cast).

More glaringly, Mr Motlanthe included not one ... yes, not one ... new SACP central committee member, and not one from his own political wellspring, the upper ranks of Cosatu.

The sole exception to this, surely, astonishing disregard of his perceived internal constituency is Mr Charles "Sleepy" Nqakula, an old communist who served in the Mbeki cabinet but was shunted by Motlanthe to outside the critical policy ring - to defence.

Assuming that Mr Motlanthe, on the face of it a mere seat-warmer, was not acting alone, why would the Zuma power stream so singularly fail to begin consolidating the grip on power it risked so much for - including South Africa's good name - so far?

Unless, of course, it wasn't the Zuma power stream.

Here, now, a reader alert: up to this point I have rested chiefly on observation; but from hereon I veer into unfettered speculation.

If not the Zuma power stream, pulling the SACP et al in its wake; and with the emasculated Mbeki faction packing its bags, who, then, could be fiddling with the inner workings of the party at top level? Who would have the means, political and otherwise?

Here, I believe, we might usefully follow the doyen of deduction, Sherlock Holmes, and seek the dog that didn't bark in the night. There is a cabal of influence that has been suspiciously silent throughout all the ructions. This is all the more notable since it is a cabal that possesses, in rich abundance, the two most precious political assets: popular support (going by ranking in the Polokwane votes) and almost limitless financial resources. At the core of the cabal are two men: Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa.

Around them cluster, loosely, a group whose political ambitions, like their own, have been effectively, often cruelly, often mysteriously, thwarted. I would be greatly surprised if men like Sexwale and Ramaphosa do not relish a day of reckoning. And I would not be surprised if they have seen in the current turmoil and opportunity to make their move.

Perhaps they, for reasons too numerous, too obvious, and also too obscure to go into now, see, as others do, that a Zuma presidency falls very short of what South Africa deserves. Perhaps they have been able to deploy their assets, and the like-mindedness of others, to install Mr Motlanthe as a bulwark against a Zuma accession.

Is all this remotely plausible? I don't know. I said I didn't have any answers.

Click here to sign up to receive the Politicsweb headlines in your inbox every morning