It's official: the battle for the leadership of the African National Congress is a two-man shootout, between current president Thabo Mbeki and his deputy Jacob Zuma.

Their nominations were the only ones put forward for the post at the party's Polokwane conference on Monday, ending months of speculation on a possible compromise deal.

Voting cannot begin immediately, as the company handling the polling for the ANC, The Elections Agency, still has to run off over 4 000 ballot papers.

And then, in terms of an agreement reached by delegates on Sunday, counting will be done manually rather than electronically – a concession to the Zuma camp, which feared manipulation of a computerised tally.

"It might mean there will be more delays but we will go through the process, we will do everything," said ANC spokesman Thabo Masebe.

In the runup to the conference, Zuma scored a massive victory over Mbeki in the branch and provincial nomination processes, amassing a total of 2 236 branch votes, almost a thousand more than Mbeki.

Zuma also won the support of the ANC Youth League and Women's League, and the backing of five of the nine provinces.

The contest between the two men has divided the ANC into camps, and Mbeki and Zuma supporters have been at loggerheads with each other since the opening of the conference on Sunday morning.

ANC national chairman Mosiuoa Lekota, an Mbeki ally, was booed by the Zuma camp when he took the microphone to get proceedings under way.

And though the pro-Zuma delegates listened respectfully to Mbeki's wo-and-a-half hour presidential report, they burst into Zuma's theme song "Awuleth' umshini wami" (bring me my machine gun) as soon as he finished.

Throughout the day, they waved newspaper photographs of Zuma, despite a conference ban on "divisive" material such as t-shirts bearing the faces of the two men.