Transforming Jacob Zuma

Last Friday, a court in Pietermaritzburg threw out pending corruption charges against Jacob Zuma for procedural reasons and decided not to press ahead with his prosecution. The ruling did nothing to establish Zuma's guilt or innocence, and he may face future charges down the road. Still, it was a significant victory, and thousands of his supporters took to the streets, waving banners and dancing outside the court. Indoors, a visibly relieved Zuma greeted well-wishers and shook hands. His joy was easy to understand. At 67, Zuma, who's been head of the ruling African National Congress since December of last year, is the presumptive favorite to become the country's next president when elections are held in 2009.

Fighting off criminal charges is hardly a normal stage in attaining higher office. But then Jacob Zuma is no normal politician. He's a flamboyant former antiapartheid leader and exile who served as deputy president of South Africa from 1999 to 2005 before breaking with President Thabo Mbeki and later seizing the reins of the ANC. While his rise has been impressive, he's been dogged by controversy throughout his career. He's been accused of racketeering, fraud and money laundering, and the charges, along with Zuma's outsize persona, have fanned fears at home and abroad that he represents a dark turn for South Africa: away from the enlightened leadership of the country's early years as a multiracial democracy and toward the sort of big-man politics that have long blighted much of the continent. According to his opponents, Zuma is uneducated, corrupt and venal. As Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC colleague and political commentator, puts it, Zuma "doesn't have the moral integrity to lead the ANC or South Africa. His organization is characterized by thuggery."

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom. In fact, a very different Jacob Zuma has started to emerge in recent months—one often overshadowed by the drama, but who offers some real hope for the country he plans to lead. Much of the controversy surrounding him is deserved. Unlike his scholarly predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, Zuma has had little formal education. Though he's so far dodged corruption charges and he was acquitted of rape in 2006, he has admitted to having unprotected sex with the woman in question, who was HIV-positive—and Zuma claimed afterward that a cold shower was all it took to ward off the disease. He is also a proud Zulu traditionalist with four wives, an unknown number of children and a fondness for bloodthirsty war songs (such as "Bring Me My Machine Gun"). All this tends to scare the daylights out of South Africa's elites and foreign investors.

But the new head of the ANC has begun taking pains to improve his image, reaching out to various constituencies and preaching moderation. In fact, on some key issues, this longtime leftist has recently begun sounding downright conservative. "One of the great ironies is that Zuma [now] sounds like a U.S. Republican," says Stephen Friedman, a newspaper columnist and a research associate at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. "He wants tougher action against crime and freer markets. Any white person in the suburbs who's listening and getting alarmed is clearly just feeding off prejudice."

In the last decade or so, South Africa has boasted 6 percent annual growth, strong job creation, high foreign investment and smart fiscal policies. The inflation rate is solidly average for an emerging market and will probably be lower than China's in the coming year. Maintaining this kind of macroeconomic stability is key to Zuma's success, and he's taken pains to stress his commitment to it on visits with foreign capital investors. These efforts are bearing fruit. As one London-based banker with interests in South Africa recently put it, "we are not concerned about the changeover in leadership. Most people I speak to in London are relatively relaxed. Some feel that because Zuma is a populist, there could be some destruction of the public sector. But that's an uninformed view."

Within South Africa, large chunks of the population have been left behind by the boom. The poverty rate is easing, but slowly. According to Development Indicators 2008, the proportion of people living below the poverty line dropped from 58 percent in 2000 to 48 percent in 2005. Unemployment remains high. Crime is huge problem, with an average of 50 people murdered per day nationwide. And the shortage of low-cost housing for the poor—a longtime problem—sparked a wave of anti-foreigner violence early this summer that killed dozens of immigrants and forced tens of thousands more to flee the country.