Africa’s oldest liberation movement will start its fifty-fourth national conference on December 16, 2017. By the time the delegates leave four days later, Jacob Zuma’s second and final term as South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) president will have come to an end.

He will remain president of South Africa, at least in theory. There’s recent precedent in the ANC to recall the national president if they are no longer party president. It was after Zuma himself ascended to the helm of the party at the fifty-second national conference in Polokwane in 2007 that Thabo Mbeki was forced by the party to step down as South African president.

Zuma’s future may be uncertain, but his legacy is not.