A reflection on 2018

Almost a year ago, Cyril Ramaphosa was elected president of the African National Congress (ANC) at the Nasrec national conference of the ruling party. Two months later, he became the President of the republic. His election was greeted with a great sense of euphoria, optimism and hope. The end of former President Jacob Zuma’s darkness at noon was declared a  new dawn by Ramaphosa and his disciples inside and outside the ruling party. While Ramaphosa has the subjective interest of positioning himself as the antidote to Zuma’s ignominious reign, and while he  is seen as an embodiment of both his new dawn and new order, objectively, the expectation that Ramaphosa should, somehow, have turned Zuma’s solar eclipse into a new dawn in the short period prior to the 2019 general election was always going to be unrealistic – both because of objective factors beyond his control and his subjective weaknesses as a leader.