Rating Ramaphosa: Why the president gets 62% for the job so far

As the 100-day mark of the Cyril Ramaphosa era approached last May, we decided our clients needed a firmer, more reasoned basis for assessing the new president. What I then described as "unrealistic Ramaphoria" was evaporating as fast as Julius Malema could say "expropriation without compensation". It was being replaced by an "unreasonable Ramapessimism". We [The Paternoster Group, a risk consultancy agency] asserted that between these two extremes, a more rational basis could be found for measuring Ramaphosa’s performance. Over 10 editions of Cyril Watch, Paternoster has awarded a mark out of 10 for each of 15 indicators — one mark for each green light, half a mark for amber and zero for red. On this basis, Ramaphosa scores 62.30%. If he were one of my students, I’d probably say he deserved an upper-second and that a lower-second was a bit hard on him. But it was a tough exam that posed demanding questions. PODCAST | The DA didn’t win the 2016 election, as much as the ANC lost it ​...