Democratic Capitalist speculates on whether Jacob Zuma’s style of leadership will be successful:

[B]y Zuma’s mates own admission, he’s not great with money and yet this is the guy who is expected to negotiate South Africa through the current financial and economic crisis and the social problems that come with it… yet despite his own “short-comings” – on which I can’t really comment and have to take Shaiks comments at face value – he is well respected by the SA business community. Almost every investment strategist (at the top banking and financial services groups in South Africa) that I have spoken to believe Zuma’s best asset is that he surrounds himself with some very sharp minds – finance, trade and labour. Maybe its a sign of good leadership to be able to defer to people smarter and more successful – even if you are president of the country.

The problem is, this could go both ways. Zuma is not an intellectual or a policy expert, but he is a prodigous political talent and (one assumes) a good manager. On the surfance, this seems like a welcome change. Thabo Mbeki was an intellectual, and he was disastrous in many areas because he ignored experts, surrounded himself with yes-men, and assumed that he was smart enough to figure out the answer to every local and international problem himself. But a presidency run by a non-intellectual can be dangerous too: it runs the risk of being captured by ideologues, who offer simple solutions and the beguiling promise of certainty. (This is, to some extent, what happened to Bush during his first term, at least on foreign policy issues.) Zuma could turn out to be a steely pragmatist, protecting the national interest against extremists in his own party – or he could be swindled into adopting ruinous policies by the ideologues that surround him.