Former rebel leader Pierre Nkurunziza has an air about him of a man who always wears new shoes.
He struts rather than walks — not surprisingly for a leader who claims to have more than 35 000 men under his command.
At the Burundi peace talks in Pretoria this week his swagger was even more pronounced.
When beleaguered interim President Domitien Ndayizeye arrived, claiming not to negotiate but to advise, Nkurunziza declared triumphantly that he too was here as a consultant.
During the event it was neither of these participants but the minority Tutsi Uprona party that gummed up the works.
Nkurunziza left to prepare for his party congress next week where his Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) will officially announce its transformation from rebel army to political party. In effect, Nkurunziza went to prepare for power.
Of the four participants in Pretoria this week — the list is completed by the predominantly Hutu Frodebu party — Nkurunziza is by far the most confident.
When he says he is ready to fight elections tomorrow, he knows that he will sweep Frodebu away.
But Nkurunziza’s appeal has crossed the Hutu ethnic divide.
When he came into government last December he was given only 15 seats in the transitional assembly. MPs with an eye for the main chance, who have defected to his ranks, have put that number at 35 — this includes at least three Tutsi parliamentarians, one of them a former Uprona minister.
Nkurunziza claims that 60% of his membership in the capital Bujumbura is Tutsi.
This crossover appeal gives him a new image in and beyond Burundi —someone who has risen above the ethnic divide that cost the country more than 300 000 lives in the past decade of civil war.
It has earned him the support of Tutsi leaders across the border — Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda — who see him as the best hope for the future of a country trying to break with its divided past.
Disturbingly, his supreme confidence gives one a sense of déjàvu —back to the days of the Lancaster House negotiations that ended the Rhodesian rebellion and gave Zimbabwe its Constitution.
Robert Mugabe went into those protracted talks with the attitude that it would be nice to get a political settlement because he was a shoo-in, but that if negotiations failed, matters would still go his way in the bush.
The Tutsi group comprises no more than 15% of Burundi’s six million people. It has managed, however, to retain so much of the political and economic power that it has negotiated itself a 40% share of the political cake for at least the first five years of the post-transitional government.
This was the Tutsis’ key success in the power-sharing negotiations leading to the signing of the Arusha Accord in 2000.
For the sake of long-term peace, there remains consensus over this —even by the FDD who were not allowed into Arusha but were forced into the transitional government in the last third of its life.
Deputy President Jacob Zuma, who has deftly handled the job as chief facilitator in the peace process, published a list of successes achieved at the Pretoria consultations this week.
They include agreement on a 50/50 split between Hutus and Tutsis in the post-transitional senate and a 60/40 Hutu and Tutsi split in the assembly.
Ministers and vice-ministers will also split 60/40 in favour of the Hutus.
The president will be elected by two-thirds of the assembly and senate with two vice-presidents — one from each major ethnic group.
The devil, however, remains in the detail.
The parties walked away from Pretoria without signing anything because they could not agree on exactly who the Tutsi are.
Simple, says Uprona, it is us!
Nkurunziza scoffs at this, pointing to his growing Tutsi following.
Uprona argues that once a Tutsi has gone over to the FDD he or she ceases to represent the political interests of that ethnic group.
And Arusha’s template refers specifically to people ”representing the political views” of each group.
Uprona is also calling not only for a guaranteed vice-president’s post, but a co-management deal with the president — a veto right at the very top of the tree, as it were.
The FDD dismisses this as an attempt to short-circuit the will of the voters.
Three-quarters of the facilitators’ time this week — President Thabo Mbeki went the distance along with Zuma to show South Africa’s seriousness about this process — was taken up with Uprona. They appear not to have budged the Tutsi leader, Jean-Baptiste Manwangari.
Uprona does not buy into Nkurunziza’s new non-ethnic message.
At the first opportunity, they believe, he will purge the country of Tutsis.