The election on Monday of Cyril Ramaphosa as president of the African National Congress (ANC) highlights the hope that now South Africa can move beyond the troubled Presidency of Jacob Zuma, come nationwide polls in 2019. For too long under Zuma, South Africa has wallowed in the mire of corruption claims, where cronyism and kleptocracy went hand in hand to choke the economic fortunes of so many. It has been 23 years now since the ANC assumed the mantle of power in the rainbow nation’s first free and fair elections and still its hope and promise remain unfulfilled, its great wealth and enormous resources untapped through poverty and widespread inequality.
The challenge for Ramaphosa will be to unite all the factions of the party to ensure that it can harness that potential, and for too long the ANC has been riven asunder by the politics of personality and the glad-handing and cronyism of its leadership. That must end if the ANC is to regain its credibility with voters.
Ramaphosa too must make tackling unemployment a priority, particularly among young people. The nation is technically in recession and investors have been disinclined to create jobs as long as there is political uncertainty over Zuma and his ministers. And the new ANC leader must also tackle corruption, whether it be in manner in which government finances are controlled, the awarding of public tenders, or at the lowest level where road traffic infringements disappear with the production of a couple of hundred rand.
Ramaphosa is of the old guard, a leadership that endured and won the Apartheid struggle and peace. That old guard has not won prosperity — and that now is what all 54 million South Africans seek.