Rating Ramaphosa: Why the president gets 62% for the job so far
In just over three weeks South Africans will vote in general and provincial elections that will arguably be a verdict not so much on the political parties in contention as on the current president of the country and embattled leader of the liberation and ruling party, the ANC. Many voters like Cyril Ramaphosa if not his party, which they associate with the corrupt decade under Jacob Zuma. But how has Ramaphosa performed since being sworn in as president of the country in February 2018? Here’s why the following report card gives him 62.3%
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 ...
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