South Africa’s Zuma prepares to depart a diminished ANC

JOHANNESBURG— Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress once inspired hope across Africa. It helped liberate black South Africans from white-minority rule, promoting reconciliation with former oppressors and the ideal of a postracial “Rainbow Nation.” It seemed even poised to lift up the rest of the continent with its vision of an “African Renaissance.”

But as ANC members began gathering on Saturday to elect a new leader, many analysts described the stilldominant party as a shadow of what it once represented — bereft of ideals, roiled by insiders fighting over diminishing spoils, abandoned by a growing list of disillusioned graying party heroes known as “stalwarts.”

For many at home and across Africa, the once heroic liberation movement is now synonymous with corruption and cynicism. South Africa has become a normal nation.

The winner of the party election is expected to become South Africa’s next president in the 2019 elections unless the ANC loses its overwhelming strength in Parliament, which selects the nation’s top executive.

Its present leader is President Jacob Zuma, who as South Africa’s head of state since 2009 has been at the center of a series of personal and political scandals.

He will step down as head of the party after his successor is chosen, possibly as early as today, at an elective conference in Johannesburg.

In his final address as party leader, Mr. Zuma acknowledged that the ANC had been weakened and needed to be renewed. But he blamed outside forces — which also have been the ones to check his exercise of power — and launched into a broad and bitter attack on the opposition, the judicial system, the news media and civil society.

He reserved his harshest words for the white-dominated business community, saying that the party needed to be protected from “corporate greed.”

“Theft and corruption in the private sector is as bad as that in government,” he said.

Two front-runners are locked in a tight race to succeed him, embodying starkly different strains within a deeply divided party.

Nkosazana DlaminiZuma, a medical doctor and anti-apartheid veteran who served in several roles in previous governments, is also a former wife of Mr. Zuma. She has his support and that of many of his allies, and has adopted his populist rhetoric.

Cyril Ramaphosa, the deputy president, has won the support of some of Mr. Zuma’s fiercest opponents: business groups and middleclass black voters in cities. His own record in business, however — as a former trade union leader whose ANC connections helped him become one of the country’s richest men — has made him a representative of the gulf between South Africa’s tiny new black elite and its poor.

Critics have focused on Mr. Zuma, 75, to explain the ANC’s precipitous decline.