Mr Mbeki, who at first fired Mr Zuma, then ended up being fired by Mr Zuma, who in turn has managed to stay one step ahead of the public prosecutor and who has dropped dark hints of Mr Mbeki's own shaky status in the same sorry business, which is too complicated to go into now, got dragged into the spin-off affair begun by Mr Lekota , who had taken a walk when the Zuma-ites started purging the Mbeki-ites, decided (this is still Mr Mbeki, okay?) to write a letter to Mr Zuma which was later deliberately misquoted by one of Mr Zuma's lieutenants to try to show that Mr Mbeki rebuffed Mr Lekota but in actual fact it turned out, when someone leaked the letter, that Mr Mbeki said that he, Mr Zuma, had a bladdy cheek to say that he, Mr Mbeki, would be expected to campaign for the ANC after being kicked out of the two big leadership jobs by the party, but that having said that he was not necessarily endorsing Mr Lekota, either. So there.

Get it? Well, there might be a problem if you do get it. You might not have what we call "a life".

This is where South African politics has got to. It is a labyrinthine struggle between connivers and dissemblers, all wearing parliamentary democracy as their mask, all seeking the exposed flank, all seeking the advantage.

This would be depressing enough if it were happening anywhere else, which it does, from time to time, make no mistake. But South Africa isn't anywhere else. It is a land in desperate need; and for it to be served up a tableau of politics more akin to a gothic farce than a great national effort led by the nation's best is to witness a debacle.

South Africa has a debt owed to it by history, which it is entitled to recover. It is owed a Rooseveltian New Deal or a Konrad Adenauer wirtschaftswunder, or even the inspirational politics articulated by Barack Obama. What South Africa lacks, it need hardly be said, is a Roosevelt, an Adenauer or an Obama.

Of course, South Africa has its Mandela - the equal at least to any of the foregoing. It is true, too, that South Africa will never be able to measure fully what it has Mandela to thank for. This is because Mandela's legacy is about what didn't happen: the great reconciler defused much of the country's latent racism. In the main, whites didn't try to defend their privilege and blacks didn't seek revenge. Yet, for some reason, the spark of national revival didn't quite ignite; and if it did, it soon went out.

The process by which the spark was extinguished doesn't need retelling here - it died in corruption, in ineptitude, in the scramble for office, in the intoxication of power, and in cynicism.

Now all these qualities have become the character marks of the country's body politic. They are to be seen in nearly every move.

It may seem churlish to take this view only three days after the gathering of thousands in Sandton (how rich in symbolism) who see themselves as the political healers of the ills of the ANC. Here, surely, is a rebirth of hope.

It would be nice to think so. But it seems clear from all that has been said and done so far that this is a movement united more by what it is against than what it is for. One cannot shake the uncomfortable suspicion that if the leading lights were not the losers in a brawl in the saloon of the gravy train, and now feared that they were to be ejected at the next stop, they might not have been in Sandton this weekend.

So, to think like this may seem churlish and it may even be churlish. With luck it may even prove to be wrong. But right now what was on display at Sandton falls short of the kind of visionary and principled leadership this country weeps for.

South Africans would instantly recognise the leadership and the politics they deserve. It is the kind of politics that has a story embedded in it. It is a story that everyone can believe in, one that can be elevated to a Great Project that all good souls can throw their weight into. When politics is great it always has an overarching narrative. In South Africa there can be only one binding narrative, and that is a story of upliftment. Compared to the need for upliftment of the broad mass of people so that they might take a dignified place in the world, almost nothing else matters.

South Africa today is a country where education for the masses is rudimentary and inadequate to present-day needs, where the sick often don't get medicine, where a proper home is a luxury millions must foreswear, where the self-respect accorded by honest work is a dream millions cannot realise ... where one's safety, the credibility of one's public representatives and even a regular electricity supply are not things one can take for granted.

Naturally, every politician will tell you that he or she seeks power precisely to do something about these deficiencies. But their track record in recent time tells a different story; they have made power an end in itself.

There is a principle of politics here: once the overarching political narrative is lost, then political energies turn inward; politics, instead of being a means to strive for something beyond itself, becomes a power play, restricted to those already in the game. Factions form. Cabals connive against cliques. Heroes are replaced by figureheads.

The clamour of the poor becomes a muted drone in the background - to be tuned in only when it can do temporary service as an instrument of political manoeuvring. It is given voice only in the pieties of cynics.

It is at this point that politics becomes cruel. It sins against humanity. If South Africans want a good example of what lies at the end of this road, where politicians break their social contract with those who elected them, where a liberation struggle is replaced by a power struggle, then South Africans need simply look north.

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