In S. Africa, ANC Dissidents Pledge 'New Way'

Splinter Party of Mbeki Loyalists Set for Tuesday Launch, but Many Challenges Lie Ahead

JOHANNESBURG, Dec. 13 -- The South African city of Bloemfontein was the birthplace nearly a century ago of the African National Congress, the iconic liberation movement that toppled apartheid and dominates government.

Now the city is playing host to a splinter party that may herald an end to the ANC's supremacy and a new era in South Africa's young democracy.

Thousands of ANC dissidents are descending on Bloemfontein for the Tuesday launch of a political organization that they promote as an alternative to a ruling party that has abandoned its ideals for corruption, intolerance and factionalism after 14 years at the helm. The breakaway party, called Congress of the People, is led by liberation struggle luminaries making promises of hope and change ahead of general elections next year.

"We are indeed a progressive organization that is charting a new way in our country," one of its leaders, ANC veteran Smuts Ngonyama, said at a recent news conference.

The breakup, triggered by the ANC's ouster of President Thabo Mbeki in September, has riveted South Africans. Newspapers regularly speculate about the next high-ranking ANC defectors. COPE, as the new party is known, said this week that it had more than 400,000 paid members, about two-thirds as many as the ANC.

Just how much support the new party can garner in a few short months is unclear. The ANC, which won nearly 70 percent of the vote in 2004, is a formidable brand with a deep legacy, and polls indicate it is unlikely to lose.

But surveys also show that public confidence in the ANC is waning as worries grow about the future of South Africa, where crime and poverty rates remain stubbornly high, and schools produce few skilled workers. So COPE could wipe away the ANC's two-thirds majority, analysts say, and by allying with other small parties -- which profess delight about the split -- it could provide the first real opposition to the ANC.

"There is no doubt that COPE is not just another opposition party that can be easily dismissed," said Prince Mashele, an analyst at the Institute for Security Studies.

The effort has produced more political theater than substance. The parties have called each other names and demanded apologies. They have gone to court over the phrase Congress of the People, which the ANC claimed ownership of because it was the name of a 1955 event that spawned the party's historic Freedom Charter, which outlined the ANC's core principles. The court disagreed.

But the new party has offered little in the way of policies beyond a pledge to push for elections that let voters, not Parliament, decide who is president. The ANC says the fuzzy platform is evidence that COPE is just a group of bitter outcasts.

"I don't believe for one minute that the ANC is going to be challenged," said ANC spokesman Carl Niehaus. "That is, for lack of a better word, poppycock."

No matter how it turns out, the split was inevitable, historians and analysts say. Throughout its history, the ANC has been a political hodgepodge of communists, unionists, intellectuals and capitalists who allied in the fight against apartheid, which ended in 1994. Once in government, their goals often diverged.