African National Congress (ANC) chairperson Mosiuoa Lekota is what South Africa needs when President Thabo Mbeki steps down, political commentator Xolela Mangcu said on Friday.

"It may well be the time for the ANC to make a declaration on Lekota, and start grooming so that he is ready to rule in five years' time," he said in a presentation to a Democracy and Diversity Summer Institute seminar in Cape Town.

He said Lekota, who serves as defence minister in Mbeki's Cabinet, had made some mistakes and had a tendency to be brash.

But five years was enough time for him to develop a presidential profile.

Mangcu said a new leader would have to face the legitimate issues of inequality, racism and unemployment that Mbeki had been raising, but would have to do so differently.

With every election and succession debate, one had to look at the "social facts" relevant at the time.

For Nelson Mandela's presidency, reconciliation had been the key issue; Mbeki in turn had done very well in raising the issue of transformation.

The "social fact" of the third presidency was a need for a broadened and energised public sphere.

This was "a space for public deliberation in which people feel they have a sense of affecting outcomes, they feel they are not being talked to, they are being talked with", he said.

Mbeki's shortcoming was that he did not have Lekota's grassroots organising experience in the mass democratic movement.

Lekota, who had a successful history as part of both the black consciousness movement and the United Democratic Front, would be able to "rejuvenate" the networks that had contributed to his own political identity, bringing in a "whole layer" of people who had been left out of the fold when the ANC's exiles returned.

Mangcu said that under Mbeki's second cycle of leadership, political culture had turned into a "vicious cycle" of mutual suspicion and recrimination between the president and the white opposition, and the president and black intellectuals.

"Abandoned by both his erstwhile white backers as well as the black intellectuals the president turned to the party.

"He has consolidated power around him by among other things centralising decision making in the ANC, including the appointment of provincial premiers and the appointment of mayors.

"He's like 1/8former French president Charles 3/8 De Gaulle: he really runs an executive presidency."

Mbeki had made the mistake of taking on as a personal burden the stresses of society.

"Indeed, one ought to look at the way the opposition and the media salivate at the prospect of Mbeki's weekly column on the Internet," he said.

"They love it because they can predict what he is going to rail at them, and that provides them with enough material to write on the weekend. The strange thing is that a man as bright as Mbeki does not see that.

"To discern the larger patterns on the dance floor the leader has to stop moving and get on the balcony. Mbeki never seems to go on the balcony, and let the rest of us actually do the work."

Mangcu said that though he thought six years ago South Africa needed Mbeki's intellectual vision, he was wrong, and was now inclined to suggest intellectuals should be banned from running for office.

"What we need is politicians, not intellectuals," he said.

The Diversity and Democracy Summer School programme is sponsored by New York's New School University and Idasa, and has been running at the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business.

With acknowledgements to Sapa and Independent Online.