Pretoria, South Africa ­ Every year in December and January ­ the summer holidays ­ South Africa practically comes to a standstill. The small but growing middle class heads for the country’s glorious beaches; poorer people join the exodus from the cities to visit family in the rural areas.

People returning from holidays this year were greeted with huge billboards filled with the smiling face of Jacob Zuma, who is likely to be South Africa’s next president. Mr. Zuma is a man who tells different factions what they want to hear, but whose real positions are still unclear.

One of the ironies of the approaching elections is that they are a sideshow to the real election, which saw Mr. Zuma become president of the African National Congress at its national conference in December 2007. While the A.N.C.’s victory in elections next week is a foregone conclusion, the battle to become president of the A.N.C. was a much more uncertain affair.

That battle brought an end to Thabo Mbeki’s term as A.N.C. president. But the real victory belonged to the A.N.C.’s two so-called partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, or Cosatu, and the South African Communist Party.

Mr. Zuma’s victory was really that of Cosatu and the Communists, who never forgave Mr. Mbeki for the way they were sidelined from policy-making in 1996. It was at that time that Mr. Mbeki and his inner circle, under the pressure from South Africa’s leading companies, adopted the neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution economic policy. This was done without serious consultation with the broader A.N.C.

Cosatu and the Communists have never had the courage to independently contest a parliamentary election. They have opted for a different strategy: Rather than confront your enemy, infiltrate and take control of him.

This strategy paid off at the A.N.C. conference in December 2007. The Mbeki camp had fallen out of touch with the grievances of ordinary South Africans and the poor. Cosatu and the Communists mobilized them to support Mr. Zuma.

The brilliance of Mr. Zuma’s campaign to become A.N.C. president was to mobilize all the various factions who had over the years been alienated by Mr. Mbeki. In addition to Cosatu, the Communists, these included the militant A.N.C. Youth League, the new black billionaires and middle class and traditional leaders.

Obviously this coalition couldn’t hold together unless Mr. Zuma could inspire them with a new vision. Now, Mr. Zuma might be many things, but he is certainly not a visionary. And so, by the time that Mr. Mbeki was deposed by his own party in August, two realities became clear.

The first was that it seemed very little could stop Mr. Zuma from becoming president. The second was that the A.N.C. had become a deeply sclerotic party, held together by the access to state and private patronage. As for a future vision for South Africa, very little remains.

For while all these power struggles were being fought, more danger signs for South Africa began flashing. The first was the growing disjunction between economic growth and social development. While South Africa has been able to achieve consistent growth in GDP of 3 percent or higher for most years since 1994, the country fell in the U.N. Human Development Index from position 89 in 1998 to 125 in 2008.

In public education, health and services things have gone from bad to worse. Despite one of the highest per capita education budgets in the world, South African school children have one of the world’s lowest literacy rates. In last year’s final year exam, which was the first to be taken by the children who went through 12 years of so-called outcomes-based education, the pass rate was not significantly higher than at the end of apartheid in 1994.

When it comes to public health, most of the nine provinces, especially in poor rural areas, are struggling to fill staff positions. According to media accounts, the most recent Saving Babies report states that of the 8,000 babies who died at birth in 2007 in state hospitals, 44 percent of the deaths may be ascribed to poor care.

Johann Rossouw is a South African philosopher and political commentator. This article first appeared in Le Monde diplomatique. Distributed by Agence Global.