President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, the loser in a prolonged power struggle with his rival, Jacob Zuma, agreed Saturday to resign after the top echelon of his party, the African National Congress, asked him to quit.

The party’s decision is a harsh rebuke to the man who succeeded Nelson Mandela. Mr. Mbeki had first served the congress as an acolyte in the nation’s freedom struggle and later for two decades as one of its most prominent leaders.

Gwede Mantashe, the party’s secretary general, said in a news conference that Mr. Mbeki had taken the news in stride: “He did not display any shock or any depression,” Mr. Mantashe said. “He welcomed the news and agreed that he is going to participate in the process and the formalities.”

Mr. Mbeki’s office confirmed within hours that he would be stepping down “after all constitutional requirements are met.”

An acting president will be appointed from Parliament, likely within days, Mr. Mantashe said.

According to South African law, Mr. Zuma, who is not a member of Parliament, is ineligible to replace Mr. Mbeki. But Mr. Zuma is expected to run for Parliament next year, and is then likely to become president.

Saturday’s events bring to a close a nine-year presidency during which Mr. Mbeki brought a moribund economy back from its death bed. But whatever those gains, they moved too sluggishly to lift up most of those in need. Unemployment, variously estimated between 25 and 40 percent, has remained a manacle on

the millions of South Africans living in the shanties.

At the same time, Mr. Mbeki became internationally notorious for his views about AIDS, joining maverick scientists in questioning whether a virus was the cause of the illness. He led the resistance to antiretroviral treatment, acting as if the AIDS epidemic were a defamatory plot against Africans and a con job by avaricious pharmaceutical companies. This intransigence, critics say, sent countless thousands to a needless death.

While Saturday’s action by the African National Congress’s 86-member national executive committee required a day and a half of deliberations, it is actually the culmination of seven years of discontent between South Africa’s most powerful politicians, Mr. Mbeki and Mr. Zuma, the man he fired in 2005 as his deputy.

Last December, Mr. Zuma defeated his former boss for the congress’s leadership in a vote that showed the party deeply split. With that victory, and with the African National Congress dominant in national elections, Mr. Zuma was solidly in line to become president next year when Mr. Mbeki’s second term in office expired.

But many of Mr. Zuma’s supporters, openly despising the president, wanted him gone sooner rather than later. A majority of the party hierarchy seemed to resist that view until a week ago when a judge’s ruling in a corruption case that has long dogged Mr. Zuma tipped the balance. In that decision, the judge not only set aside the case against Mr. Zuma on procedural grounds, he pointed toward what seemed a pattern of vindictive political meddling in the matter by Mr. Mbeki’s government.

That view seemed in agreement with conspiracy theories favored by Mr. Zuma and his followers, and when prosecutors announced they would appeal the ruling, it appeared the case might yet be revived. With inevitable delays for pretrial motions, an appeal could hang over Mr. Zuma until 2010, pitching the nation into a constitutional crisis with its likely president in the dock.

The country requires “closure on that chapter,” Mr. Mantashe said, though it was unclear how the national prosecuting authority, which is nominally independent, could be relied upon to halt the case.

In his comments, Mr. Mantashe took time to flatter Mr. Mbeki for his long service to the African National Congress and said, “This is not a punishment.”

But it is hard to see Saturday’s decision as anything other, unless it is to view the action as merely another chapter in what once seemed an unlikely conflict for power between two men who had been trusted allies, with the party selecting Mr. Mbeki as its president in 1997 and Mr. Zuma as his deputy. They were a complementary pair, with Mr. Mbeki the polished intellectual and Mr. Zuma the charismatic firebrand.

By Barry Bearak: New York Times

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