The fight between Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma over the succession, and its repercussions, has dominated the South African media recently. This has naturally raised the question of when these two former friends, allies and comrades fell out. What accounts for the breach between the two men, and why does Zuma express such intensely felt accusations of victimisation?

In the Sunday Times in mid-2005 Mark Gevisser, who has great access to both Mbeki and Zuma, tepidly concluded that the fallout between the two men was a "consequence of mutual disappointment: Zuma at Mbeki for not having backed him up, and Mbeki at Zuma for not having listened to advice he gave years ago to his friend, to drop Schabir Shaik, and for having betrayed the revolution for the sake of a few hundred thousand rand."

What follows are some notes on the breakdown in relations between Mbeki and Zuma culled (mainly) from contemporaneous press reports. They are intended to put in some perspective Zuma's more recent travails.

The ANC had, quite willingly it seems, given Thabo Mbeki huge powers over both party and state. The idea was that he would use these to drive the movement's transformatory agenda. There were some ineffective attempts to make sure he did not have too much power. For instance, in late November 1996 the Mail & Guardian reported that Mandela was trying to block Jacob Zuma's ascension to the deputy-presidency on the basis that he was too close to Mbeki. It quoted a senior government official as stating: "Some time ago Mandela called in Mbeki and said, ‘Let's deal with the issue of the deputy presidency. I don't want it to be someone close to you, because - although it's untrue - there is this image that people get hired or fired because they are close to you.'" The ideal candidate would be someone independent of Mbeki and who would be young (and presumably, qualified) enough to take over from Mbeki after he had served out his term in office. The article reported that Zuma, "who has been very close to Mbeki during their shared years in exile, was disqualified on both counts."

However, these two qualities - his loyalty to Mbeki, and the fact that he was not seen as a credible successor (due mainly to his lack of formal education) - were precisely what made Zuma Mbeki's preferred choice. By this stage Mandela's authority was already draining away from him and the following year - after Joel Netshitenzhe decided not to run for the position - Zuma was elected deputy president of the ANC. At this stage Mbeki trusted Zuma implicitly and in late November 1998 he was made head of the ANC's national deployment committee-the body tasked with selecting and allocating ANC cadres to positions across party and state.

In June 1999 Jacob Zuma was made deputy president after Mangosuthu Buthelezi turned down the position (which would have required him to surrender Inkatha's premiership of Kwa-Zulu Natal to the ANC.) The relationship between Zuma and Mbeki seemed to have rapidly soured. In January 2001 Sam Sole wrote that "two independent sources" had alleged that "Zuma and Mbeki had been barely on speaking terms for some time. They said Zuma had been unhappy with the way Mbeki had treated him since he became deputy-president in 1999."

Zuma was not alone in this regard. Given almost dictatorial powers by the party, Mbeki had started behaving like a despot. One of his first actions as president was to ritually humiliate the entire cabinet by making them wait, like schoolchildren, into the early hours of the morning, before calling them in to tell them whether they had been re-hired or fired. There were soon many in the ANC, including Nelson Mandela, who now seethed at the disdainful way in which they had been treated. Not only was Zuma's loyalty being eroded, but those alienated by Mbeki's conduct as president began to look to him as a preferable party president.

In the light of his later travails it is worth remembering that Zuma played a crucial political role in allowing the launch of parliament's inquiry into SA's R43-billion arms deal. Indeed, without his support it is unlikely that it would ever have gotten off the ground in the first place. On the 12th of November 2000 the Sunday Tribune reported that Essop Pahad, Mbeki's enforcer, had attempted to scupper the public accounts committee's proposed investigation into the arms deal. In a meeting of the ANC's governance committee Pahad had, apparently, stated that the President had been named in the allegations and that to allow the probe to proceed could tarnish his image. According to the report "Pahad could have swayed the meeting - which was called to discuss the ANC's position on the arms probe - but was rebuffed by an intervention from Deputy President Jacob Zuma. Zuma also rebuffed an attack on ANC MP Andrew Feinstein." Earlier Zuma had also earlier protected Feinstein from an attempted intervention from ANC chief whip, Tony Yengeni.

It would take Mbeki's direct intervention the following year for the ANC to effectively quash the inquiry. The political capital that had to be expended was immense, as was the damage done to the reputation, not only of Mbeki, but also the heads of the various watchdog bodies involved (from the speaker of Parliament to the Auditor General). At around this time, it seems, the Mbeki-ites began to consider Zuma a threat. Sometime in November, it was later reported, both The Star and the SABC were given possession of a dossier of highly damaging allegations against Zuma.

If it had not already irreparably broken down, the relationship between Mbeki and Zuma was probably permanently done in by the leaking of "Winnie Mandela's amazing letter to Zuma" in January 2001. Winnie Mandela had often been by Mbeki's side in the ANC's 1999 election campaign. The two appeared to be on very good terms. Indeed, the Citizen ran a picture of Winnie passionately ‘congratulating' Mbeki at the party's victory celebrations. For whatever reason, this relationship too soon broke down. At a meeting of the NWC on the 15 May 2000 Mbeki, according to Winnie's later account, attacked her for spreading malicious gossip about his alleged philandering. At the time Winnie confided her "shock and hurt" to Zuma who, "very kindly undertook to take care of the matter".

Sometime after, Winnie wrote a letter to Zuma to find out what he had done about the matter. The letter was leaked to I-Net Bridge's parliamentary correspondent, Donwald Pressly, and the story was published on the front page of the Sunday Times on the 7th of January 2001. The specific allegations about Mbeki's private life were excised after police chief, Jackie Selebi, intervened in his "personal capacity".

These naughty bits were published soon after in the Mail & Guardian's Krisjan Lemmer column. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela had apparently claimed that Mbeki had accused her of telling Linda Zama that the president "had taken Comrade Shilowa's wife one evening and brought her back at 5am". In her letter Winnie also claimed that the City Press reporter, Richard Nkadana, was about to publish these allegations, but was persuaded not to do so. "Worse, Mr Nkadana had been given not only the name of Mrs Shilowa, but four other women, one of whom was Linda Zama, the others ministers and deputy ministers!"

The February 2001 edition of Noseweek proceeded to twist the knife, claiming: "The president's relationship with his wife, Zenzile, is widely perceived as formal only. He has, or has had, close relationships with several women who are either in his cabinet circle or who are married to top officials - which raises the old chicken-and-egg question. We have been told that Mrs Mbeki recently consulted a spiritual adviser about an all-night visit her husband made to the home of one of his female colleagues...Which raises another question: if his wife doesn't trust him, why should we?"

(The Presidency's fury at these anonymous allegations found an outlet when, in April, the columnist Max du Preez had the temerity to air them on radio. The ANC declared "war" on him and accused him of a "lack of respect and demonstration of hatred for the President, this country, and all the millions of people who by popular choice made President Mbeki, our President.")

These revelations were linked by journalists to a campaign within the ANC for Mbeki to be restricted to one term in office. The plan was that while Mbeki would remain state president, he would give up his position as ANC president to either Zuma or Joel Netshitenzhe. On the 3rd of April however Zuma released a statement rejecting reports that he might challenge Mbeki for the ANC presidency. "I have felt it important to state publicly that I have no intention or desire to stand for the position of the President". It was around this time that the National Deployment Committee (NDC) was disestablished and its functions transferred to ANC officials. In mid-2001 Noseweek reported that a cabal in the ANC's National Executive Committee had already met in the Eastern Cape to pick a suitable replacement for Zuma. It reported: "This may or may not happen, depending on how Zuma behaves. Meanwhile, he will be kept in line via a Scorpions investigation into his links with his longtime financial adviser and sugar-daddy, Schabir ‘Arms Deal' Shaik."

Although the Presidency effectively headed off the various plots against it in 2001, it had not vanquished its internal enemies and the issue of the presidential succession was only deferred. Mbeki's opponents had perhaps decided that they would be on stronger ground to mount their challenge once Mbeki was into his second term. Indeed, it was then that Zuma would formally lay claim to the presidency.

There is a certain symmetry between Jacob Zuma's current misfortunes and the events of 2000/2001. It is Zuma now who is up on corruption charges stemming the arms deal, and it is Zuma who is having the most intimate details of his private life exposed, in excruciating detail, to the world. Although this symmetry is undoubtedly coincidental it is nonetheless unlikely to cause Mbeki much displeasure.

There are two reasons why Zuma might reasonably believe he is the victim of a conspiracy, even if he has not presented any evidence to back this up. The first is that when the arms deal was being put in place he was a Kwa-Zulu Natal MEC. It was Mbeki, not him, who sat at the centre of that particular spider's web. And, as we have seen, it is Zuma who played the key political role in launching the arms deal investigation-which Mbeki effectively scuppered. The second is that in 1998 the ANC passed legislation centralising ultimate control over all prosecutions in South Africa in the hands of the National Director of Public Prosecutions. It then proceeded to appoint an ANC MP (Bulelani Ngcuka) to this position. As Zuma knows full well from his deployment committee days ANC ‘cadres', wherever they are deployed, remain answerable to the party leadership.

It is quite easy to identify the logic that has led Zuma to conclude that he has been the victim of an injustice, whatever the outcome of his trials. In broad terms, many in the senior ranks of the ANC might have thought, not unreasonably, that with the attorney general's office now under party control they would enjoy effective immunity from prosecution. Their view of the dividing line between propriety and impropriety could, again quite understandably, have become slightly blurred as a result, particularly when another of their own was appointed to head up the police. One can imagine their sense of disappointment then when some of them, shortly after having displeased Mbeki, found themselves under investigation, and then in the dock. Their sense of injustice could only have been sharpened when they looked around and saw various presidential loyalists - many of whom, they knew, had done much worse - still enjoying high level protection.

Mbeki's reluctance to have Zuma succeed him is equally explicable. He is unlikely to ever hand over power to someone to whom he has given such ‘just cause of lasting enmity'. This is all the more so when he would be handing over not just control over the party, but of all the instruments of state. Put very simply, he cannot trust Zuma not to use those instruments to open up and examine the skeletons rattling around his own cupboard - not just the arms deal, but Virodene, the South African Oil Company, and Oilgate. This does raise the question of whether Mbek can really trust anyone enough as his successor to willingly give up power? Would Mbeki really be centralising control over the judiciary if he thought that in a few years he was going to be in retirement?

This article was originally published on the http://www.ever-fasternews.com/ website in May 2006.