April 24 (Bloomberg) -- South Africa’s about-to-be president Jacob Zuma “has survival skills like we can hardly imagine,” says Susan Booysen, a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

He’ll need them.

Zuma, who survived being fired as the nation’s deputy president and beat charges of rape and graft, is about to take control of Africa’s largest economy with promises to create jobs and improve health and education for the millions of poor South Africans who voted for him, as well as to woo foreign investment. With about nine-tenths of the ballots counted, his African National Congress was leading with about two-thirds of the vote.

He faces the largest budget deficit in more than a decade and what may be the first recession since the end of apartheid. Fifteen years after his ANC came to power, five million adults in a population of 49 million are illiterate; about 34 percent of them live on less than $2 a day. The unemployment rate is 21.9 percent, the highest of 62 countries tracked by Bloomberg.

“A lot of people around Zuma have agreed that the ANC needs to be pro-poor,” said Nic Borain, a political analyst for HSBC Holdings Plc in Cape Town. “In the face of a recession, they are really up against it.”

Zuma has beaten the odds before. With no formal education, he rose through the ANC ranks, spending 10 years in prison on Robben Island along with Nelson Mandela to become the ANC’s intelligence boss and a negotiator in talks that led to the end of apartheid in 1994.

Acquitted of Rape

His career appeared to be over in June 2005, when South Africa’s High Court implicated him in his financial adviser’s graft trial and then President Thabo Mbeki fired him as deputy president. Zuma fought back, traversing squatter camps and villages seeking support.

After he was acquitted on a rape charge in 2006, Zuma trounced Mbeki at the last ANC leadership conference in December 2007, winning 61 percent of the votes, to become party leader and presidential nominee.

Mbeki’s fate carries a warning for Zuma: He must keep together his broad coalition of forces from communists to businessmen.

“Zuma won’t be able to deal with things immediately because there are going to be so many voices,” said William Gumede, associate professor at the Graduate School of Public and Development Management in Johannesburg. “It’s going to be very difficult to make any reforms.”

Machine Gun

Zuma said in a Bloomberg interview last October that the unions and the communists wouldn’t set the agenda in his presidency. “They participate in the evolution of policy, but they do not determine which way policy must go,” he said.

If he fails to create jobs and expand social welfare stipends to more than the one in four South Africans who already receive them, the supporters who flocked to his election rallies to hear him sing his theme song, “Bring me my machine gun,” could turn against him.

“We love him,” said Snethemba Mdudu, 20, a finance student who voted for the ANC in Cape Town’s Joe Slovo township on April 22. “He is in touch with the people. If he doesn’t do what we put him there to do we will bring him down.”

Born in the rural village of Nkandla in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, Zuma lost his father, a policeman, at the age of five. His mother earned too little as a maid to send him to school, so he tended his uncle’s livestock. Friends taught him to read.

Prison on Robben Island also gave him time to study. Ebrahim Ebrahim, an ANC member who shared a cell with Zuma and later served in the parliament, recalled two years ago that Zuma was reading Tolstoy by the time he was released.

Experienced Hands

With the South African economy expected to contract, Alister Sparks, the author of three books on South African politics, says Zuma will have to tap more experienced hands, such as Finance Minister Trevor Manuel.

Zuma’s remarks during his April 2006 trial on charges of raping an HIV-positive family friend half his age outraged campaigners for victims of rape and AIDS.

Once the head of South Africa’s AIDS program, Zuma said among other comments that he didn’t use a condom because he didn’t have one and took a shower to “minimize the risk of contracting the disease.”

He later apologized.

A Zulu traditionalist who practices polygamy, Zuma has married four times. One of his wives committed suicide in 2000 and he divorced another.

“There are so many people out there who see him as a symbol that they haven’t had for a very long time in the ANC,” said Booysen. “That is the symbol of a person who mingles with them, who seems to take their issues to heart.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Mike Cohen in Cape Town at mcohen21@bloomberg.net; Karl Maier in Johannesburg at kmaier@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: April 24, 2009 11:30 EDT