Former President Thabo Mbeki has made it clear to ANC president Jacob Zuma that he will not campaign for the ruling party, or allow his name to be abused or falsely used, The Star reported on Friday.

In fact, he plans to stay away from the ANC's internal politics and "will not rule from the grave".

In a hard-hitting letter to the man who succeeded him as party leader, Mbeki goes for the jugular.

Publishing the letter in full, the Johannesburg newspaper said it could reveal that ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe tried to use the October 9 letter to damage the breakaway party of Terror Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa by quoting selectively from it on the eve of this weekend's national convention.

Mantashe was trying to inflict maximum damage, but it was a gamble that has since backfired, given that the letter is now public, The Star reported.

Mbeki's letter appears to have more in common with Lekota's open letter to Mantashe earlier this month, and does not read like a pledge of loyalty to the party of which he has been a member for 52 years.

Addressed to "Comrade President", Mbeki is critical of Zuma ignoring ANC tradition and allowing the "highly noxious cult of personality" to take root.

Mbeki takes exception to the fact that alliance leaders had
attributed this cult to him personally, given that he was part of a movement that sought to repudiate what had manifested itself elsewhere in the world.

They had "unfortunately and wrongly" proclaimed "that Comrade Terror (Lekota) and others have acted as they have, driven by their loyalty to me as an individual".

The cult of personality had consistently been repudiated by the ANC.

"It therefore came as a surprise to me that anybody within our revolutionary democratic movement could so much as suggest and therefore insult somebody like Terror Lekota, that he could act as he was, whether rightly or wrongly, driven by attachment to a personality cult," Mbeki said.

In a veiled rebuke of Zuma himself, Mbeki asks his comrade for any instance in the past during which the ANC had fallen victim to the "noxious phenomenon of the personality cult, as a result of which it ceased to think, content to act in the manner the anointed 'personality', such as the late Kim Il Sung, determined for the people of North Korea".

Mbeki listed several "true heroes and heroines" of the struggle with whom he had interacted who had not fallen prey to this.

Significantly, he makes a point of telling Zuma they would have "opposed the emergence of such a cult with every fibre in their revolutionary bones".

In vintage Mbeki style, the former president hits home: "For this reason, I find it strange in the extreme that today cadres of our movement attach the label of a 'cult of personality' to me, and indeed publicly declare a determination 'to kill' to defend your own cause, the personal interests of 'the personality' Jacob Zuma."

Mbeki also stresses that despite the insults from within party ranks, some media, as well as intellectuals who appear to have profited financially from attacking him, he had done "absolutely nothing" of which he was ashamed.

The campaign to discredit him in particular had been based on outright lies and deliberate and malicious distortions, Mbeki says.

Zuma had fallen into the damaging trap that he, Mbeki, had
successfully avoided.

Mbeki says that following his loss of the ANC leadership in 2007 and his resignation in September as the country's president, "I have considered carefully what I should do as a private South African and African citizen".

"Currently I am working as speedily as I can to elaborate the substance of this work, which will ensure that whatever I do in no way involves me in the internal politics of the ANC or the functioning of the government of SA."

Mbeki says he refused "absolutely to rule from the grave".

"History will judge whether what I did during my political life, until September 25 2008, is worth anything."

Mbeki says the country is at a crossroads, but believes the
decisions the ANC under Zuma will take "will indeed advance the goals of the national democratic revolution".

"As a small plea in this regard, I appeal that nobody should abuse or cite my name falsely to promote their partisan cause, including how the 2009 ANC election campaign will be conducted,." said Mbeki.