JOHANNESBURG, Oct. 11 — A politically powerful industrialist is gunned down in an ambush linked to a reputed mobster. Investigators link the mobster to the national police commissioner. Prosecutors obtain a warrant for the commissioner’s arrest. Then suddenly, the warrant vanishes — and the chief prosecutor who secured it is removed from his job.
Not even South Africa’s political insiders know for sure where this mystery leads, and the man who does know, President Thabo Mbeki, is not saying anything. But political and legal experts alike increasingly suspect the worst: that a brutal two-year battle for power in the governing African National Congress is spreading from party corridors into the government itself.
With a convention to choose the party’s next leader barely two months away, a bitter rivalry between the two major camps — that of Mr. Mbeki, who aspires to continue as the party president, and that of the populist politician Jacob Zuma, who wants to replace him — has become even more caustic.
Mr. Mbeki fired Mr. Zuma as deputy president in 2005 after investigators tied Mr. Zuma to a bribery scandal involving a multibillion-dollar military contract. Mr. Zuma has regularly accused prosecutors, and by implication Mr. Mbeki, of manipulating the justice system for political ends.
Many analysts dismissed that as sour grapes. Now the same issue has surfaced in the case of the national police commissioner, Jackie Selebi, a senior figure in the party who is broadly asserted to be an Mbeki supporter. And some analysts are no longer so certain.
Marinus Wiechers, for one, says that that he fears that the temptation to use the government’s powers for political ends has become irresistible. “The party-state is a thing that threatens all democracies, especially young democracies,” Mr. Wiechers, a constitutional law expert and former university vice chancellor, said recently. “If you break down the separation of powers, you’re certainly heading for a constitutional crisis.”
Were that true, it would — like Nixon’s use of the Internal Revenue Service against his critics — be widely considered an affront to the nation’s democratic values. In what has become known as the Selebi affair, however, neither Mr. Mbeki nor his aides have explained why they intervened in a legal proceeding to prevent Mr. Selebi’s arrest. Rather, Mr. Mbeki has named a prominent member of the African National Congress to investigate the matter and broadly suggested that the full findings may not be made public for reasons of national security. Political commentators have already noted, acidly, that Nixon used that excuse to cover up his own transgressions.
The basics of the Selebi affair are about the only things that remain clear. In September 2005, hit men pumped seven shots into a Johannesburg mining magnate, Brent Kebble. Investigators implicated a reputed organized-crime figure, Glenn Agliotti, known as the Landlord, who later said the Kebble murder was an “assisted suicide” that he helped arrange.
Mr. Agliotti’s cellphone records showed that he called Mr. Selebi — South Africa’s police commissioner and the president of Interpol, the international police organization — from near the scene of the murder shortly after it occurred.
In the ensuing outcry, Mr. Selebi denied any wrongdoing, called Mr. Agliotti a close friend and said he never discussed police business or criminal activity with him. Mr. Agliotti said he was only being a good citizen and reporting a crime to the police when he called Mr. Selebi. Mr. Mbeki declined to suspend or investigate Mr. Selebi, telling critics to have faith in his judgment.
But investigators for South Africa’s elite anti-corruption squad, the Scorpions, found evidence of crimes involving the two men. Last month, Vusi Pikoli, the head of the Scorpions and the nation’s chief prosecutor, presented the secret evidence to two Johannesburg judges and secured warrants to arrest Mr. Selebi and to search his home and office.
The warrants, however, were never executed. In late September, Mr. Mbeki’s justice minister apparently learned of the warrants, demanded that Mr. Pikoli resign and then suspended him when he refused, according to local news reports. Mr. Pikoli’s replacement then visited the two judges, asking them to rescind the warrants. The arrest warrant was canceled, the search warrant remains intact, Mr. Selebi remains in command — and to date, nobody has explained why.
Mr. Mbeki has asked Mr. Pikoli’s successor to review the evidence against Mr. Selebi and to recommend whether any action is needed. Mr. Pikoli, meanwhile, is under investigation by Mr. Mbeki’s appointee, apparently for prosecutorial excesses. While the public version of the charges is not specific, it suggests that Mr. Pikoli is accused of giving immunity too liberally to organized-crime figures in return for incriminating evidence against Mr. Selebi, and of securing his arrest warrant without informing higher-ups.
In South Africa’s Parliament, the African National Congress, which controls 7 in 10 seats, has closed ranks, and calls by the opposition to investigate the affair have been rebuffed.
News of the arrest warrant and its reversal, aired in newspapers and only grudgingly confirmed by the government in the past month, has set off outrage in the news media and among South Africa’s minuscule political opposition. After nearly two weeks of daily headlines, Mr. Mbeki’s only public comment on the issue has been to joke that the president does not issue arrest warrants.
“It’s a big mess,” said one veteran criminologist, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared losing work with the government, “and it’s a mess that comes from the uncertainty about the boundaries that separate the state from the ruling party.”
Bereft of facts, South Africa has been rife with speculation. The most damning version accuses Mr. Mbeki of protecting Mr. Selebi, a member of his party’s executive committee with some influence in the debate over the party’s next leader. Another version draws on the longstanding rivalry between the Scorpions and South Africa’s national police, the nation’s leading law enforcement organizations, and suggests that Mr. Pikoli overreached in an attempt to dispatch a rival.
The Scorpions also broke the bribery case that led to Mr. Zuma’s dismissal in 2005. Although his friend and financial adviser has been sent to prison in that case, Mr. Zuma so far has evaded prosecution — and some suggest that Mr. Mbeki has sidelined Mr. Pikoli because he has moved too slowly to eliminate Mr. Zuma as a political rival.
Or it could mean nothing, with due process occurring behind the scenes. Mr. Mbeki is a famously distant politician, renowned not just for ignoring public opinion but for shunning it.
“The failure to answer questions and inform the country of what he’s doing is not a new feature of Mbeki’s style,” Steven Friedman, a longtime political analyst, noted drily.
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