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Changing times: As a country's hero ages, has Mandela's vision for a democratic South Africa grown feeble, too?

Not entirely. Democracy has rarely had such a bright start as it did in South Africa, emerging from 46 years of apartheid in 1994. The country's Constitution became the world's most democratic, including rights to water, food, education, security, and healthcare. But former President Nelson Mandela was indeed prescient in titling his biography Long Walk to Freedom, for as South Africa approaches its fourth national elections, its democratic credentials are far from clear.

During the last 15 years, South Africa's politics have increasingly fallen into an elite system more intent on patronage than provision of services. As convicted criminals and fraudsters populate party lists with little public outcry, leading figures of integrity have all but given up, eschewing public service and leaving the door open to those who view politics as an opportunity for personal enrichment. Mandela's vision -- to build a democracy based on "one people with a common destiny in [its] rich variety of culture, race, and tradition" -- appears to have been lost on successive generations of South African politicians across the ideological spectrum.

The news for opposition parties is equally troubling. Although elections are held and contested freely, South Africa is today a de facto one-party state ruled by the African National Congress (ANC). Recent events paint a disturbing picture of how the line between the ruling party and the state has blurred. In December 2007, then President Thabo Mbeki was ousted as head of the party by his former deputy and political rival, Jacob Zuma, despite corruption charges against the latter. Less than a year later, Mbeki was gently forced to resign the presidency -- humiliated -- from his weakened position. Instead of formally putting forward a motion of no confidence to Parliament, the ANC's National Executive Committee pressured Mbeki to go quietly out the back door.

The Mbeki-Zuma fissure, which began as an internal party squabble, soon became the country's divide. So deep was the conflict that, for the first time in South Africa's post-apartheid history, a credible nonracial opposition party emerged from the ranks of disaffected ANC members. Still, it will take years for the Congress of the People (COPE) to penetrate the one-party structures that have come to dominate mainstream politics. A recent survey conducted by market research firm Plus 94 projected that the ANC will retain eight of the country's nine provinces, losing only the Western Cape to a coalition of opposition forces. COPE garnered only 8.9 percent of public support in a recent Ipsos Markinor poll.

After the elections, South Africa will have to continue on its very long walk toward freedom under the rule of Zuma, whose leadership divides the country and instills concern, not confidence.

“South Africa Has Overcome Racism, Ethnicity, and Violence.”

At the polls. Certainly, South Africa is home to an increasingly mature polity. The ANC and opposition parties include figures from a rainbow of races, and the ethnic violence that left 12,000 dead in KwaZulu-Natal province before the 1994 election has not returned. But political apartheid -- white rule over a black majority -- has proven much easier to end than economic and social separation.

Ghosts of racism past are still evident on the richest city streets and in the most impoverished township neighborhoods. South Africa has one of the highest Gini coefficients, a measure of inequality, in the world -- and studies suggest the economic divide is only growing. The government's policy of "black economic empowerment" has created an emerging black middle class of some 2.6 million South Africans, colloquially referred to as "black diamonds." Yet, though nearly half of this new elite now lives in formerly white suburbia, for much of the country's remaining 44 million people, poverty still follows racial lines.

Nor has the apartheid mind-set been fully exorcised from South Africa. The country's Human Rights Commission receives a plethora of complaints about racial inequality each year. Examples include an incident at the University of the Free State a year ago in which a group of young white male students tricked older black female employees of the university to eat urine-laced meat stew, or a young white teenage boy's shooting rampage in the Skielik informal settlement that killed four and wounded six people. Such cases remind South Africa of darker days.

“HIV/AIDS Is the Biggest Problem Facing South Africa.”

If only. After years of bad news on HIV/AIDS, South Africa is actually making progress in fighting back against the epidemic. Throughout much of his administration, Mbeki and his now notorious health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, advocated only one policy toward AIDS: flat denial. The minister's recommendations -- for AIDS patients to eat beet roots and avoid "poisonous" antiretroviral (ARV) drugs -- became a rallying point for local and international activist communities. "Dr. Beet Root" is gone, and today at last, the government has a comprehensive action plan to combat HIV/AIDS, including a commitment to paying for patients' ARV drugs. The plan and its budget have consistently grown every year. And a visionary new minister of health, Barbara Hogan, has significantly boosted hopes of bringing help to the country's 5.6 million infected people.