President Thabo Mbeki's much-criticised intervention in the controversy over national Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi - and everything else in the politics of the moment - should be "viewed through the prism" of the presidential succession contest.

So says Mark Gevisser, author of the magisterial, more-than 800-page biography of the President, Thabo Mbeki, The Dream Deferred.

Speaking at the Cape Town Press Club yesterday, Gevisser sketched a portrait of a principled, highly skilled but complex president who, more than anyone else, could be acknowledged as the architect of South Africa's stable transition from apartheid to democracy.

Gevisser said he was not familiar enough with the circumstances surrounding Mbeki's recent intervention in the furore over Selebi to offer an explanation for Mbeki's actions, but added: "At the moment, everything that happens in Mbeki's world is to do with Polokwane, the votes for Zuma, the votes for Mbeki."

He added: "It's not clear to me that Mbeki desperately wants to stay in power, but he is allowing himself to be put forward as a candidate.

"It is also not clear to me why he is doing that, but I speculate that it is because he feels his job is not done.

"He has been in power for 15 years and though I do not mean he thinks the country is his personal territory, 15 years is a long time, and when you have power, you get used to it, not to abuse it, but to change things.

"The people around him really do believe that Zuma would change South Africa into a post-colonial basket case and they have presented him (Mbeki) as the thin blue line between a safe future and one that confirms Afro-pessimism."

While noting that - not only as a biographer - it was false to believe it was possible to "know another", and, in his case, to know Thabo Mbeki, he had sought in The Dream Deferred to "excavate" the world that had formed the president and try to see the contemporary world as Mbeki saw it.

The challenge was to achieve a degree of "empathy" for this subject, rather than choosing the less revealing and less valuable option of judging him, of "putting the knife in".

He made a critical exception in the case of Mbeki's dissident stance on Aids.

Gevisser said he believed the "cycle of animosity" between the government - the Presidency especially - and the media, was born of a mistaken over-reaction both within the government and the media.

He traced it back to a speech made by Mbeki in late 1994 in which he suggested it was unfair that the media should sustain the hostile stance that had defined its relationship with apartheid governments with the legitimate democratic government of the ANC. Both sides over-reacted, he said.

Gevisser pointed out that Mbeki was "the primary architect" of the drive for reconciliation after 1994, but that key to his thinking was the idea that there could be no reconciliation without transformation.

On the controversial arms deal, Gevisser said he believed that if this was "the poisoned well" of contemporary politics, "Mbeki did a significant job of contaminating the water, even if he did so with the best of intentions".

There was no reason to believe Mbeki was "personally involved", but he "was a major chain of the arms deal" in part by mediating the strong disagreement between then Defence Minister Joe Modise and Finance Minister Trevor Manuel.

Mbeki had spoken out often against self-enrichment: "I believe he's not a voluptuary and he really is appalled by the craven rush to acquire, yet I think he knows he has played a part in the institution of that culture."

Gevisser's audience included several retired political veterans, among them stalwart liberals Colin Eglin, Ken Andrew and Peter Soal, and former ANC MP and latterly ambassador to Greece, Jannie Momberg.

With acknowledgements to Michael Morris and Weekend Argus.