South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, a former trade union leader turned billionaire, came to power in 2018 promising a ‘new dawn’ for a damaged and demoralized country in the wake of the catastrophic Jacob Zuma presidency of 2009 to 2018. Once a darling of the Left, Ramaphosa was ‘deployed’ to the private sector in the 1990s where he spent his time serving the cause in such worthy endeavours as owning McDonald’s South African franchise.
Ramaphosa represents the antithesis of Zuma in many respects: educated, technocratic, comfortable meeting with the Davos crowd and shaped by his experiences fighting Apartheid from inside South Africa, rather than from exile. His plans at the start were ambitious: high-tech cities, bullet trains and a state cleansed of corruption.
