Cyril Ramaphosa

Few political lives contain as many contradictions in one person. Cyril Ramaphosa spent the 1980s organising Black mineworkers against the companies that employed them. He spent the 2000s becoming one of the richest of those companies' shareholders. He was the man Nelson Mandela was said to favour as heir, then the man Mandela's party passed over. He came to the presidency on a wave of hope in 2018, and he now governs a country where most people tell pollsters the economy is bad and many say they would be better off without him.

He is, at 73, serving his second and final term as president, and his last stretch as leader of the African National Congress, which he is expected to hand over in 2027. That makes this a useful moment to take stock. Not of the myth in either direction, the saviour or the sell-out, but of the record: where he came from, how he got rich, how he got power, and what he has done with it.

This profile runs in that order, and it tries to stay close to the numbers. His fortune is an estimate, his poll numbers move with the pollster, and some of the charges against him remain contested. Where that is true, it is flagged.

Ramaphosa was born in Soweto in 1952 and studied law at the University of the North, the segregated campus at Turfloop that produced much of the Black Consciousness generation. He was detained without trial twice in the 1970s, once in solitary confinement, for student political activity. He qualified as an attorney, and in 1982 he became the founding general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers.

That is where he made his name. He built the NUM from almost nothing into the biggest union in the country, and in 1987 he led roughly 340,000 miners out on a three-week strike, the largest in South African history to that point. The skills he sharpened across the negotiating table, patience, preparation, a long game, carried into the talks that ended apartheid. As the ANC's chief negotiator in the early 1990s he was central to the settlement, and he chaired the assembly that wrote the 1996 constitution. When Mandela chose a deputy in 1994, though, he chose Thabo Mbeki. Ramaphosa, widely seen as the other contender, was left out of the line of succession.

Shut out of the top job, Ramaphosa left frontline politics in the late 1990s and went into business, at the moment when Black Economic Empowerment was opening corporate boardrooms to well-connected members of the liberation movement. He founded the Shanduka Group and turned it into one of the largest Black-owned investment houses in the country. Through it he held stakes in the South African franchise of McDonald's, in Coca-Cola bottling, in Mondi, Standard Bank, Bidvest, MTN and the platinum producer Lonmin, among others, and he chaired several of them.

The wealth came fast. Forbes put him at $275 million in 2011 and around $700 million two years later, ranking him among the thirty richest people in Africa. When he became deputy president in 2014 he began divesting to reduce conflicts of interest, and in 2015 he sold Shanduka, reportedly netting a few hundred million dollars. He kept a game farm, Phala Phala, and a prize herd of cattle. His nickname on the business pages was the Buffalo.

Ramaphosa returned to frontline politics in 2012, elected ANC deputy president, and became deputy president of the country in 2014 under Jacob Zuma. As the Zuma years sank into corruption scandals, he positioned himself as the clean alternative. In December 2017 he won the ANC leadership by a narrow margin, and when Zuma was pushed out in February 2018, Ramaphosa took over. The mood was euphoric enough to earn a name, Ramaphoria, and the ANC recovered slightly to win the 2019 election.

The recovery did not last. The ANC's slide, underway for two decades, resumed and then accelerated. In 2024 the party fell to 40.2% of the vote and lost the parliamentary majority it had held since 1994. Rather than hand power to a rival, Ramaphosa formed a Government of National Unity with the Democratic Alliance and nine smaller parties, and the new National Assembly re-elected him for a second and final term.

The scandal that trails him is known as Phala Phala, after his game farm. In 2020, a large sum in US dollars, later put at about 580,000, was stolen from furniture at the farm. The theft was not reported through the normal channels at the time, and when a former spy boss made it public in 2022 he accused the president of concealing the money, and of irregular conduct in tracking down the thieves.

What the money was, and whether anything unlawful happened, has been picked over ever since. Ramaphosa says it was the proceeds of a sale of buffalo and denies any wrongdoing. An independent panel found in 2022 that he had a case to answer, but the ANC-majority parliament voted down an impeachment process. The Reserve Bank found no exchange-control breach on his part, the public protector found no ethics violation, and in 2024 the prosecuting authority declined to charge him, citing insufficient evidence. Politically, it has not gone away: pollsters still test what voters make of it, and opposition parties still raise it.

Start with the win, because it is real. For most of 2022 and 2023 South Africa was dark for hours every day as the state power company failed, at one point for 335 days in a single year. That has stopped. By 2026 the country had gone more than 300 days without scheduled blackouts, Eskom returned to profit for the first time in years, and the improvement fed through to confidence: inflation fell to around 3%, South Africa came off a global financial-crime watchlist, and a ratings agency raised its grade for the first time in two decades.

Now the hard part. None of it has moved the numbers that decide how most people live. Growth has run at about 1% a year through his presidency, far below the roughly 3% economists say is needed just to stop unemployment rising. Unemployment sits near a third of the workforce, and much higher among the young. Income per person is lower than it was in 2007. South Africa remains, by the standard measure, the most unequal country in the world. The lights are back on; the economy they light is barely growing.

Ramaphosa's personal standing has always run ahead of his party's, and it has swung hard. He entered office in 2018 with approval near two thirds. It collapsed during the blackout years to around 40%. It recovered after the 2024 election and the return of the lights, with one major international survey putting his favourability back above 60% in early 2025. By mid-2026, though, some local polls had turned again, with more voters viewing him unfavourably than favourably, and more saying the country would improve without him than said it would worsen. Read across the pollsters, the pattern is a leader who is still the most popular individual politician in the country, and one whose shine has dimmed.

The coalition he built has held, which few predicted. It survived an early crisis in 2025 when a proposed tax increase nearly split the ANC and the Democratic Alliance, and it has muddled through repeated clashes over economic and race policy since. Holding it together plays to Ramaphosa's oldest strength. It also leaves him governing by permanent negotiation, with a junior partner that opposes parts of his own programme, and a party behind him that is arguing about who comes next.

The sharpest external test of Ramaphosa's presidency has come from Washington. After Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, relations fell to their lowest point since apartheid. The Trump administration cut aid, expelled South Africa's ambassador, imposed steep tariffs, and opened a refugee channel for white Afrikaners it said were being persecuted. The claim at the centre of it, that white farmers face a genocide in South Africa, is rejected by the South African government and is not supported by the country's crime data, which shows farm attacks as a small share of a very high overall murder rate.

It came to a head in May 2025, when Ramaphosa went to the Oval Office hoping to reset the relationship and instead sat through a televised ambush, as Trump dimmed the lights to play a video he said proved his case. Ramaphosa stayed calm, corrected the record where he could, and was widely praised at home for not taking the bait. The reset did not happen. The United States gave the G20 summit in Johannesburg a wide berth later that year and said South Africa would not be invited to the next one. For an economy that needs trade and investment, a hostile Washington is a serious problem, and one Ramaphosa has not solved.