INTRODUCTION

As a check upon potential for authoritarian rule, the South African constitution of 1996 imposes a ban upon Presidents serving for more than two five year terms in office (unless individuals are elected to fill a vacancy in the office, in which case the period between that election and the next election of a President by parliament is not regarded as a term). Furthermore, the principle of occupying office for a limited term was underlined by Nelson Mandela who, after his election as President by parliament following the country's first democratic general election in 1994, chose to stand down in 1999. Indeed, prior to that, Mandela had already made way as leader of the African National Congress (ANC), being succeeded as party president by then (state) Deputy President, Thabo Mbeki at the party's national conference in Mafikeng in December 1997. At that time, the political implications of a separation of the state and party presidencies were not much debated, not least because Mbeki had already assumed effective power, with Mandela being devoid of personal ambition and serving very much as a figurehead and icon of South Africa's new democracy. Yet, as subsequent events were to prove, the division of party and state powers was pregnant with constitutional and political difficulties.

The ANC's own constitution requires, flexibly, that a national conference, the supreme body of the organization, shall be convened ‘at least every five years’. However, the practice since 1997 has been for the conference to be held at fixed five yearly intervals. This resulted in the party's 52nd national conference being scheduled for December 2007 at Polokwane, the capital of the province of Limpopo. The principal business of the Conference was to be to elect a president. However, unlike the state constitution, the ANC's constitution sets no limit upon the number of terms of office that a party president may serve.

Mbeki, re-elected as state President in 2004, was scheduled to relinquish that office following the country's fourth democratic general election, which constitutionally could be held no later than the first half of July 2009.