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As South Africa's governing African National Congress prepares to decide whether President Thabo Mbeki should continue to lead the party, Ronald Suresh Roberts, author of Fit to Govern: The Native Intelligence of Thabo Mbeki, says Mr Mbeki has been faithful to its legacy.

President Mbeki has helped South Africa get the World Cup. Last February, Financial Times journalist Alec Russell commented on Thabo Mbeki's "almost other-worldly refusal to pander to the soundbite culture".
This is by far Mr Mbeki's most important and most misunderstood legacy - ensuring that the African National Congress does not stray from its historical principles - the creation of a non-racial and prosperous South Africa.

A discussion document that was circulated in advance of the ANC's national conference last December describes the party's approach to "building a national democratic society."
The ANC cannot, this document urges, "behave like a shapeless jellyfish with a political form that is fashioned hither and thither by the multiple contradictory forces of sea waves."
The elevation of policy discipline above spin-doctoring is not merely Mr Mbeki's personal eccentricity, but instead reflects the party's historical role.

Ever since its founding protests against the 1913 Land Act, the ANC has seen itself as "an organisation for focusing native opinion". The party has always blended moral and political convictions with intellectual leadership.
This historical firmness of purpose can sometimes be hard to grasp, let alone believe, in the spin-dominated ethos of contemporary politics.

Mbeki's insistence upon proper risk assessment of early ARV drugs turns out to have been eminently correct Look at the UK, for example, where Prime Minister Gordon Brown's status as a "conviction politician" did not last long.
The ANC saw Mr Brown's grandstanding demand for the banning of Zimbabwe's leader Robert Mugabe from the European Union/African Union summit in Portugal as the elevation of media management above conviction politics.
And even more than on Zimbabwe, Mr Mbeki's approach to policy-making in the area of HIV/Aids has shown firmness during a public relations disaster.

He has had unambiguous policy successes in moving the global agenda towards a better balance between the roll-out of anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs and the emphasis upon poverty and underdevelopment as the root cause of the horrendous spread of the disease.
In an era of multi-billion dollar lawsuits involving Vioxx and other drugs, Mr Mbeki's insistence upon proper risk assessment of early ARV drugs turns out to have been eminently correct.
Institutions such as the UN now accept the importance of "African solutions."

William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University, now writes unchallenged that "the activists have been only too successful in focusing attention on treatment instead of prevention".

Mr Mbeki was ridiculed for saying this six years ago, but now Easterly's book, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, is book of the year in The Washington Post, Financial Times and The Economist.

Meanwhile, on the other issue that Mr Mbeki's critics say compromised his leadership of the ANC - that of the arms deal - media reporting ignores his obvious anti-corruption position which is backed by prosecutions both past and ongoing.

Mbeki's relations with Mugabe showed "firmness"Instead, discourse is dominated by the hearsay of disaffected activists such as Andrew Feinstein, who writes in his recent book: "I was told by someone from the [parliamentary joint investigation team] about a meeting with the president at which they were told who they could and could not investigate."
Is that "fact" by BBC standards?
Meanwhile, those who campaign against arms acquisitions as a matter of principle merely ensure the military irrelevance of African countries as players in the geopolitics of our oil-rich continent and in situations such as Sudan.
Although well-meaning, they enable metropolitan arms to continue to dominate African lives.
The big problem for Mr Mbeki's ANC today is not any supposed drift from its moral and political moorings, but rather the persistence of an appalling metropolitan reporting upon Africa.

BBC NEWS REPORT.