The African National Congress is rapidly losing its glitter as a liberation movement and its pantheon of heroes is metamorphosing into scheming politicians.
Opinion '99, a major investigation into how South Africans see the rival political parties, shows that there has been a steady decline in committed support for the ANC since the heady days of 1994, when it won just under two-thirds of the vote in South Africa's first fully democratic general election.
Barely more than half of South Africa's potential voters (51 per cent) intend to vote for the ANC in next year's general election, a sharp decline from the 61 per cent who planned to vote for the party four years ago and, more worryingly from the ANC's perspective, from the 62 per cent who pledged their vote to the ANC hardly more than 15 months ago.
The start of the most recent slide coincides with the phasing out of the patriarchal President Nelson Mandela and his replacement at the head of the ANC, and increasingly of the country, by the suave Mr Thabo Mbeki.
Another sign of the same process is the marked decrease in the proportion of voters who strongly identify with the ANC, as distinct from those whose attachment may not last beyond next year's election. Voter identification with the ANC has fallen to 35 per cent, its lowest level since its 1994 election victory.
But the ANC's loss of support has not translated into generally increased backing for opposition parties. It has simply increased the proportion of undecided voters. If the measure is how voters intend to cast their ballots next year, undecided voters account for a fifth of an electorate of more than five million. If the yardstick is voter identification with a particular party, unattached voters constitute over half (56 per cent) of the eligible voters.
Evidence that the ANC is comporting itself as a political party seeking narrow sectional advantage is abundant, most spectacularly in its eleventh-hour attempt to impede publication of the massive report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) last month. Its bitter reaction to adverse findings recorded against it by the TRC, and to the TRC's refusal to accord it special treatment (in the form of a belated oral hearing), has lost it many admirers.
The warning of the TRC chairman and former Nobel Peace laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, still rings in the ears of many South Africans: yesterday's oppressed can become today's oppressors.
Gone are the days when the ANC would admit to errors, as it did when Mr Mandela acknowledged that young ANC cadres had been tortured in ANC guerrilla camps abroad during the armed struggle.
The ANC's insistence that only voters in possession of bar-coded identity documents be allowed to vote is increasingly seen by opposition leaders as evidence of skulduggery. The ANC has insisted that its primary reason for that stand is to reduce election fraud to a minimum: details recorded on the bar-code can be checked with those on the population register by use of an electronic scanner.
But Opinion '99 has produced figures that suggest a more cynical reason. Opinion '99 data - which are corroborated by independent research by the company Mark Data - show that "significantly more blacks" (81 per cent) have bar-coded identity documents than members of the minority communities: Indians (71 per cent), "coloureds" (67 per cent) and whites (65 per cent).
The main reason for the skewered distribution of bar-coded identity documents lies in history:
Blacks qualified for possession of South African identity books only in the mid-1980s after the abolition of the pass laws. Until then they had to carry the hated "pass", or reference, book.
The law providing for the issue of bar-coded identity documents came into operation at that time. By then a high proportion of the minority communities had already been issued with identity documents without bar-codes.
Since ANC support is concentrated in the black community a higher proportion of ANC supporters have the requisite documents compared to those of opposition parties, which are thus placed at a disadvantage because they have to persuade proportionally more of their supporters to apply for the bar-coded document.
Commenting on these findings Ms Sheena Duncan, who led the civil rights organisation Black Sash in the apartheid era, says: "The ANC is behaving appallingly."