The Question: What was the biggest news story in your country last year [in 2007], and why?

Jacob Zuma’s astonishing comeback to win the presidency of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress against the incumbent President Thabo Mbeki ranks as South Africa’s most earth-shattering political event since 1994, when the country turned to democracy.

Zuma is now set to be the ANC’s presidential candidate in the country’s general elections that will take place in 2009. Since the ruling party has no significant opposition, he may then become the country’s next president. Although the country is unlikely to collapse into chaos, Zuma’s election means that post-apartheid South Africa is unexpectedly entering an unsettling, uncertain and turbulent phase. South Africa’s fragile new democratic institutions be tested to the limits. Beyond that, delivering services to the very poor ANC members who voted for Zuma may be undermined by the political uncertainty that his elevation to the top job has and will continue to generate within the ANC and outside of it. Meanwhile, the biggest economic boom South Africa has experienced since 1981 may now drift even further away from poorer citizens, for whom those benefits are still a distant dream.

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