SOUTH AFRICA:Jacob Zuma is to make his first public statement today about his policy plans for South Africa since his election on Tuesday as president of the African National Congress (ANC), writes Joe Humphreysin Johannesburg.
In an indication of a possible shift to the left, the country's ruling party revealed yesterday that it was preparing for a major summit early next year with its two alliance partners, the trade union umbrella group Cosatu and the South African Communist Party.
Reaction to Mr Zuma's victory could not have been more mixed, with the country's main opposition party the Democratic Alliance describing it as "a dark day for South Africa", but senior ANC officials labelling it "a triumph for democracy".
Nobel peace prize winner Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said there was a "very real sense of unease" about the result because of the way in which it set up two centres of political power.
"It's an area we have not travelled before," he said in reference to the fact that Mr Zuma takes up the ANC leadership immediately while his opponent Thabo Mbeki remains president of South Africa until 2009.
Conscious of the corruption allegations hanging over the head of the new party president, Archbishop Tutu added: "I want to wish Mr Zuma well, but we are all sitting here wondering whether he is, or isn't, going to be charged.
"That is not the kind of thing that makes you want to rush out into the street jumping up and down and celebrating. It's something that is very distressing."
Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille said it was an indictment of the ruling party that it could find "no better candidate" than Mr Zuma, a politician who was sacked from government in 2005 and acquitted of rape charges last year.
She said the conference, which had been fraught with tension, revealed many of the new leader's supporters to be "unruly and ill-disciplined populists who cannot observe the basic norms of decent, democratic behaviour".
But Prof Edward Webster of the University of Witwatersrand said not too much should be read into this week's rowdy scenes in Limpopo.
South Africa had witnessed a peaceful change in leadership in its ruling party "on a continent where that is very rare, and I think we should be proud of that".
Both the Independent Democrats and Inkatha Freedom Party also welcomed the outcome, seeing it as a shift towards a more progressive and focused government.
On the streets, and on the airwaves, there were contrasting emotions too. Some middle-class whites claimed to be thinking about emigrating. But in Khutsong - a politically-charged township near Johannesburg - hundreds celebrated wildly, believing Mr Zuma to have more empathy with their plight.
Analysts credited Cosatu with playing a major role in Mr Zuma's election. Even though the trade union body had no voting rights, it was said to have mobilised thousands of working-class people to join the ANC over the past two years in order to influence the leadership ballot.
ANC MP Prof Ben Turok said the way in which all top six positions in the party went to the Zuma camp - with an almost identical voting pattern in each poll - showed there was "a high degree of orchestration".
He said he believed the membership was going to be "far more demanding" in future, holding the leadership to account for its promises.
He said if Mr Zuma and his allies failed to deliver they "will also be removed in due course".
"The lesson is that if any political party espouses values and principles such as the freedom charter and RDP [ reconstruction and development programme] then they must be seen visibly to be performing along those lines, and I am afraid our government has been too slow in that direction," he said.