New for old, old for new
The principal reality in the ANC at this time is that the only really organised grouping within it is the SACP, which is now intent on a semi-constitutional coup d'etat, in the manner of Adolf Hitler in 1933 (i.e., constitutional in form, dictatorial in essence). The SACP is no less driven by a totalitarian ideology than Hamas, or Hizbollah, which also enjoy substantial popular support, though its ideological sources are of course not the same as theirs.
In my view, the SACP is promoting Zuma for all it is worth because (a) he provides good cover, in a political context in which the naked ambition of the SACP would appear to be just too naked; and (b) he provides a means of access to a very wide ancillary further mass base of support, as the figurehead of a Zulu-led tribalist alliance directed against the more disguised former Xhosa-based hegemony within the ANC of the last almost fifty years.
The ANC national conference at Polokwane in December 2007 proved that there was very widespread loathing of this Xhosa-led hegemony in the ANC, expressed most sharply by loathing of the Mbeki cabal, which was totally wiped out at Polokwane in elections to the National Executive Committee. Thus its complete withdrawal from the ANC and its formation of Cope, with its principal base of support in the Xhosa-speaking heartlands.
One must assume that the ANC of today is not the ANC of Mandela or Tambo. The broad ethnic alliance of the past, which animated the spirit of the Freedom Charter, and which progressively broke down the organisational barriers that inhibited the ANC from becoming a fully non-racial political party, is now a thing of the past. One most assume that the ANC now has no or very little broad political support among whites, former so-called "Coloureds" or so-called "Indians", especially those of a Hindu background. Since the Congress Alliance of the period of the Freedom Charter looked precisely to this kind of political alliance across racial groupings, the ANC of 2009 is a very different kind of animal.
Further, this is the first time in its almost hundred years' existence that the ANC has permitted itself to be defined so strongly by tribal terms. This invalidates the spiritual premise on which the ANC was founded, which was to put an end precisely to this kind of division.