Position: President of the Republic of South Africa
Incumbent: Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma
Date of birth: 12th April, 1942
Term: May 2009 to 2014, eligible for reelection to one more terms of five years. President is elected by the National Assembly.
Key Facts:
-- Zuma is seen as a populist and a cagey pragmatist who has walked a fine line in office to satisfy his left-leaning, organised-labor allies who helped him ascend to the country's top office as well as the business barons who power the continent's largest economy.
-- Zuma has resisted calls from his allies on the left to devalue the rand, nationalise mines and launch a drastic redistribution of wealth, while mostly keeping his hands off business, easing concerns in South African boardrooms and among investors.
-- National municipal elections in April are likely to expose the simmering tensions between Zuma's African National Congress (ANC) and its formal union and communist allies, and discontent at perennially poor public services could breath new life into smaller opposition parties.
-- Zuma was able to wrest control of the ANC in 2008 from then-President Thabo Mbeki. Zuma's own political career seemed to be nearing an end in 2005 when he was dismissed as deputy president after being charged with corruption. Zuma avoided a trial on a technicality and then faced renewed charges that were thrown out by a judge.
-- Zuma had a storied career in the ANC, which he joined in 1958. Four years later, he became a member of its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.
-- He was arrested in 1963 by the white minority rulers of the apartheid state and sent to Robben Island prison for 10 years. While there he learned about politics from imprisoned ANC leaders, including Nelson Mandela. After his release, Zuma joined ANC leaders in exile. By the end of the 1980s, he was the head of the ANC's Intelligence Department.
-- Zuma, a Zulu, helped broker peace in the early 1990s between the ANC and the Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party in his native KwaZulu-Natal province, where thousands of people were killed in the run-up to the country's first all-race elections in bloody fighting between the two political rivals.
-- Zuma has three wives and 20 children. South African law and Zulu culture allow a man to take more than one wife. His personal life is never far from the headlines. In February last year he was found to have fathered a child out of wedlock with the daughter of one of his friends.
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