SOUTH AFRICA: The 51st national conference of South Africa's ruling African National Congress opens today amid friction between the ANC national leadership under President Thabo Mbeki and what it calls the "ultra-leftists" among its allies, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions.
While Mr Mbeki and those who oppose his market-friendly polices in the Communist Party and the trade union federation have attempted to play down their unresolved dispute in the past few days, their differences are almost certain to come to a head when delegates to the national conference, the third since the ANC came to power in 1994, vote for a new national executive committee.
Many of the literally hundreds of delegates to the conference hold dual membership of either the Communist Party or the trade union federation (or even, in some cases, of all three organisations). That complicates the issue and makes it harder to pretend the ideological divergences are minor and easily resolved quarrels.
The run-up to the conference over the past few months has included an attack on the ANC leadership by the deputy general secretary of the Communist Party, Mr Jeremy Cronin, who accused it of behaving increasingly like Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe.
In turn, there was criticism of the "ultra-leftists" and "left factionalists" by Mr Mbeki and his loyal trouble-shooter Mr Dumisani Makhaye.
The ideological clash has been given a sharper edge by the leaking of some of the main conclusions by a new study by Prof Sampie Terreblanche, one of the Afrikaner university dons who criticised the economic policy of the apartheid government.
Now, however, Prof Terreblanche has turned his razor-sharp intellect to a detailed analysis of ANC policy in a new book entitled A History of Inequality, due to be published next month. He concludes that the position of many black South Africans has not improved since 1994.
The vexatious reaction of the ANC, which has accused Terreblance of seeking to thwart the "transformation" of South Africa, is aggravated by the role of President Mbeki's brother, Moeletsi Mbeki, as a co-publisher of the book.
It has added another interesting component to the course of the conference over the next five days, as has the choice of venue: the University of Stellenbosch, the alma mater of most former Afrikaner leaders of South Africa.