"I don't want Mandela's ugly shoes."

Mthombothi - editor of the Financial Mail

It's hard to explain how such a seemingly intelligent man could have got himself into such a ditch. But his stance on Zimbabwe fits a pattern of inexplicable decisions throughout his tenure - and vindicates Mbeki critics, within the ANC and outside, who warned in the mid-1990s that he wasn't the right person to fill the great man's shoes. At the time, Mbeki famously retorted, "I don't want Mandela's ugly shoes."

From the start, the president refused to build on Mandela's legacy of reconciliation between the country's racial groups. Drawing on a long-held ANC commitment to "non-racialism," the ANC saw its mission was to unite the people of the country across race and class. Mbeki set out to destroy this legacy.

Whereas President Mandela had often treaded gingerly on race matters, no speech by Mbeki is complete without him lashing out at racism or apartheid. White guilt has been an effective political weapon for him, and as a result, his presidency has taken South African society backwards on race relations. The obsession with racism opened age-old wounds, which were beginning to heal.

The president doesn't seem to understand the country; nor does it understand him. In some ways he's still a stranger. He was barely out of his teens when he went into exile in 1962. He was almost in his fifties when he returned to find a society that had moved on. He tends to see - and govern - through the prism of his youth, when the system of apartheid was at its most vicious. He often appears aloof and unconcerned with the problems that matter to his compatriots, such as the crime that has blighted the country and led to a flight of much-needed skilled workers.

Regarding himself as a spokesman for the rest of Africa and the African Diaspora, his passion is foreign affairs, meeting heads of state and attending important summits. South Africans often joke, whenever Mbeki is around, that he's visiting their country. He seems not to have learned from the mistakes of another South African leader, Prime Minister Jan Smuts. A member of Winston Churchill's War Cabinet, he helped to draw up the charter of the United Nations. His constant absences, however, led to his party's defeat by the racist National Party in 1948, which went on to implement apartheid.

Mbeki has made international headlines for the wrong reasons - on Zimbabwe, and on the AIDS epidemic. While South Africa has become home to the highest number of people living with the HIV virus in the world, Mbeki became a cult hero to AIDS denialists across the globe. He insists that HIV doesn't cause AIDS and campaigns against antiretrovirals.

AIDS and Zimbabwe have dogged him throughout his presidency. The drumbeat for Mbeki to leave grows louder amid rising concerns within the ANC that the incumbent will hurt the party's prospects in parliamentary elections next year. Unpopularity is not reason enough to resign. But if South Africa was not a de facto one-party state, Mbeki would be in even deeper trouble. Evidence has now emerged that President Mbeki may have been involved in criminal wrong-doing. An inquiry into the suspension last year of the head of the country's National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has heard that Mbeki possibly broke the law and then lied to the public about it. The NPA was investigating the commissioner of police, a Mbeki acolyte, who is accused among other things of gun-running and involvement with organized crime. The head of the NPA was suspended after he ignored the president's instruction to stop the probe. Mbeki later denied any knowledge of the probe.

Zimbabwe, AIDS and crime at home - if handled properly - could have cemented Mbeki's legacy as one of Africa's great statesmen of his time. But they've connived to bring him this low this late in his term. The tragedy is he brought it all on himself.