Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

Movement and breakaway Should former defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota, and others opposed to the direction the ANC has taken, stay within the party or split from it and oppose it in next year's election? BILL The choice to leave or stay should be left to Lekota and his colleagues who feel aggrieved by the direction the African National Congress (ANC) is taking. If they stay they must prepare for a fight to wrest control of the ANC from their opponents. This option is fraught with risks as it includes fighting a battle they cannot win. The group in control now has the support of the Youth League, the South African Communist Party (SACP) as well as labour federation Cosatu. The Youth League assumed primary responsibility for mobilising for the electoral outcome in Polokwane. Lekota's group lost precisely because they had no control over these groups. Forming a new party would be a neater option for Lekota, who appears keen to show the ANC is deviating from its historical path.

This would be useful only if it is intended to attract disenchanted ANC members to a party he intends forming. A new party would offer voters an alternative to the ANC. Such a development would constitute an immense long-term investment in the future of democracy. It would help the ANC focus on the concerns of voters rather than the endless palace revolutions that have become the dominant mode of changing leaders. Forming a new progressive party would also point the way forward for others in southern Africa who are up against the hegemony of former liberation movements.

Regards, Khehla KHEHLA Lekota is a humane and sincerely nonracial man and of course he and others can do just as they wish. I fear they have chosen the wrong grounds and the wrong time. Really, they should have stood up to Thabo Mbeki over AIDS and Zimbabwe, pointing out that these two policies were killing enormous numbers of people, and dissented on principle.

The fact that no cabinet minister did that meant one lost respect for all of them. Anyone who had dissented and paid the price would now be in a spectacularly good position. Instead, Lekota went along with all that, left the SANDF in a mess and ended up defending someone last week's Economist called a rotten president". This is not a good basis for launching a new movement and it is too late before the election.

On top of that the SACP, having achieved a large measure of control, will not give way peacefully. Already it is threatening mass action against anyone who dares form a splinter party. These people are not democrats and they have no regard for the constitution. So when you speak of fighting a battle", you are quite literally right.

Yours, Bill BILL There was nothing for Lekota to oppose in Mbeki's Zimbabwe stance. The alternative to talking is fighting, which no one wants. Robert Mugabe succeeded in sowing misery because Zimbabweans let him. They chose exile rather than standing up to a dictator. The principal agents for democracy in Zimbabwe are Zimbabweans themselves who should rid their country of a repugnant tyrant.

Lekota needs no reminding that there is nothing untoward about disagreeing with anyone. If he has reached a point where he cannot agree with enough policies of the ANC, he should leave and join the legion of others who have done so. He is a seasoned politician who should readily appreciate history records not a single party that has been right all the time. Any party he forms should this option appeal to him might just be right some of the time, in which case he will continue with his passion of working in practical policy, a role he enjoys. Regards, Khehla KHEHLA I disagree: SA had all the (peaceful) leverage it needed to make Mugabe behave from the start. But AIDS was even more straightforward: Mbeki killed far more black people than apartheid ever did.

It is a great pity that the United Democratic Front (UDF) ever dissolved itself. The current situation certainly cries out for a stronger opposition. But the Democratic Alliance (DA) doesn't seem to have understood the electoral system properly and is, crazily, talking about pre-ballot coalition deals. All proportional representation (PR) systems create centrifugal forces, but our pure-type PR is the most extreme. What that means is that parties maximise by fighting on their own and then make coalition deals after the ballot. A good example would be 2004 and the DA-Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) election deal. The result: KwaZulu-Natal was the only province where the DA vote went down and the IFP lost power to the ANC. Would you ever find Pick n Pay and Checkers pooling their ad budget to promote supermarkets in general? It's a no-brainer.

Regards, Bill BILL Mention of the UDF is bound to evoke memories that Lekota must have participated in processes which culminated in the dissolution of that organisation. This should put into perspective his protestations about being marginalised in the ANC and give him a taste of the treatment he meted out to members of affiliate organisations.

Lekota would presumably form a party rooted in social democracy, were he to form one. This would be an excellent idea, which would be even better were someone to provide the many conservatives in SA with a party without the race baggage of the past. Were such a party to be formed, it would give voters a choice of voting conservative, explode the myth that Africans are somehow congenitally averse to modern conservative politics, and give the ANC a run for its money. Regards, Khehla KHEHLA You write as if SA were a communist state. In any other country social democracy is seen as a left alternative. Nowhere else would anyone describe it as a conservative option. The problem with conceptualising this as a social democracy vs communist struggle is twofold. However desirable social democracy is, we cannot afford to be the only one in Africa. Handing out welfare payments to more and more people simply pushes up our marginal labour costs and helps price us out of doing any manufacturing at all. It also sucks in vast numbers of unskilled foreigners through our porous borders, swamping the housing, labour, health and every other sort of market and producing xenophobic violence. No third world country has developed by being a social democracy. It's something you afford after you're developed.

Second, for a split to have traction it must fasten itself onto a powerful, underlying cleavage which has, inevitably, to be tribal. By the end, Mbeki's cabinet was overwhelmingly Xhosa and he was defeated by a Zulu-led phalanx. But this doesn't fit the right-left spectrum. All surveys show Zulu voters to be far more moderate than Xhosas. There are fascinating questions of political sociology here but most of the questions and answers are not PC.