Let's get one thing clear. If this country is to achieve its goal of permanent First World status and retain its rank as repository of Africa's hopes for economic and political renewal, then Jacob Zuma must not become our next president.

This stipulation holds whatever the outcome of the trial of the Deputy President's financial confidant, Schabir Shaik. It stands, despite the constituency Zuma commands in the ANC and the undoubted support he enjoys from a great swathe of African voters. It is not negated by his lifelong record of service and sacrifice in the liberation struggle.

Zuma has many admirable qualities. He is warm and personable. His courage and daring in the decades of revolutionary adversity are legendary among his comrades. His political shrewdness (his enemies call it guile) is equally a byword. He is a good mixer in almost any company.

But these virtues dwindle into insignificance when seen in the light of his ambition to be South Africa's First Citizen, on the one hand, and what might charitably be called his disabilities on the other.

As the Shaik trial has shown, and his familiars have long known, the Deputy President is unable to handle his personal finances. As he openly concedes, he practically taught himself to read and write. His lifestyle is that of a tribal traditionalist. He is a polygamist, who maintains a R1.3 million, 12-unit kraal at Nkandla in KwaZulu-Natal.

Doubtless some of his supporters will argue that these things only go to show that Zuma is a man of the people, rooted in their traditions and better able than the rest of his cabinet colleagues to see the world through the eyes of the poor.

Certainly this is the image he has cultivated to such good effect among trade unionists, communists, tribal patriarchs and the unemployed.

To the leading players in the European Union and North America, however, Zuma represents the unacceptable face of Africa, the visage that glowers at modernity from the lethargy of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Rightly or wrongly, they see in his ambition the threat of a repetition of the cycle of incompetence, corruption, the descent into violence and primitivism, which for them is the tired tale of this continent's modern history.

Such an outcome would fatally influence Euro-American perceptions of the future of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. As one European diplomat told me frankly last week, if South Africa's experiment with democracy and growth-orientated economics were to end in disaster, the governments of the developed world would more than likely write the region off as unsalvageable.

"South Africa is really Africa's last chance," he said gloomily.

It is useless for Zuma's backers to protest that our national leadership is a matter for South Africans and South African political processes, not foreign influences to determine. As a matter of constitutional principle, they may be right.

In terms of geopolitical realities they are hopelessly wrong. The proof of that pudding is that it was these realities, perhaps more than any single domestic factor, which put paid to apartheid.

When the ANC leadership in exile, and Nelson Mandela in prison, began seriously to negotiate the package of deals that eventuated in the democratic dispensation we presently enjoy, the brokers and overseers of that process were leading figures and institutions in the international business and banking community, whose word is pretty much law to the First World governments, who represent their interests.

An essential, but more or less unspoken feature of those agreements was that in return for the political power that a popular franchise would ensure, the ANC would do nothing to jeopardise the delicate balance of politico-economic stability at home or abroad and would pursue a macro-economic course, which was in broad agreement with paths favoured by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and leading members of what, in 1995, became the World Trade Organisation.

Now the accession of Zuma to the presidency would not in itself constitute a breach of this pact, but it would certainly be construed as threatening it. Who would he appoint to his cabinet or as close advisers to guide him through waters beyond his competence to chart?

The leftist MP and economic theoretician, Ben Turok? The political scientist and general secretary of the South African Communist Party, Blade Nzimande?

What sort of leadership would he provide in combating Aids? Would he listen to responsible scientists or would his background predispose him to sympathise with the traditional healers I watched outside the Cape High Court last week, prancing in support of Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Misimang, and proclaiming that their potions had "withstood the test of time"?

Such questions from foreigners may sound impudent to patriotic ears. The fact remains that the observers asking them, have the power to cure or kill our country in the passageways of power in Brussels, Whitehall and Washington and in the international marketplace.

Many of the inquisitors are not ill disposed towards us. Nonetheless, they are growing anxious and are, therefore, conducting their interrogation with increasing urgency.

Despite his effort to appear aloof from the contest to determine his successor, President Thabo Mbeki and his inner circle are painfully aware of this situation. They are working as unobtrusively as can be managed to avert a worst-case scenario.

The names of several potential candidates, acceptable to the Mbeki camp, have long been on the lips of the cognoscenti. The Minister of Defence, Mosiuoa Lekota, is one such.

Ditto Cyril Ramaphosa, if he can be persuaded that it is his patriotic duty to quit the delights of millionaires' row in the business world and lead the nation with the same vigour as he once led the miners and as Mandela at one time hoped he would do.

Mbeki's chief difficulty is to find a way of stopping Zuma without doing irreparable damage to the ANC. The organisation is in a state of internal tension at central executive and regional levels, not seen since the 1959 split, which issued in the formation of the Pan Africanist Congress. The main source of this polarisation is precisely the vast gulf between rich and poor that Zuma promises to address.

As the drama unfolds, Mbeki may well find that he has to choose between party unity and national survival.

Dr Holiday teaches philosophy at the University of the Western Cape and is an Associate Researcher with the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Rechèrche in Paris.

With acknowledgements to Anthony Holiday and the Cape Times.