South Africa's ruling party on Monday chose Cyril Ramaphosa, a reformer who helped negotiate the end of apartheid, to succeed President Jacob Zuma as the president of the African National Congress and likely the country's next leader.
Ramaphosa was elected at a party conference after the vote was delayed more than 24 hours to settle internal disputes. He defeated former government minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, who is also Jacob Zuma's ex-wife.
A divided ANC
Zuma's second five-year term as party president will end with the close of the convention Wednesday, but he will remain president of the country until 2019. His years as president have been marked by rampant corruption that has left voters disenchanted with the ANC.
Ramaphosa now faces the task of winning back the support of voters.
Twenty-three years after the country held its first all-race election, which the ANC won with Nelson Mandela at the helm, more than one in two South Africans lives in poverty. The country suffers from an unemployment rate of nearly 30 percent. Systemic corruption prompted two rating agencies to downgrade the country, Africa's most industrialized, to junk status.
Ramaphosa captured a majority of the 4,708 votes cast at the convention, and while he's seen as a reformer in the party, it amounts to a "pyrrhic victory," said analyst Richard Calland, because the ANC remains divided.
"The candidate lost, but the faction won," Calland said of Dlamini Zuma. Three of the party's top six positions went to Dlamini Zuma's allies, who will cater to the party's rural base instead of trying to court the urban middle class.
"That's an extraordinary paradox. But it makes sense because she was the wrong candidate for this faction. She was a misfit."
The ANC has seen its share of the electorate fall in each of the last three elections. In 2016, it lost control of Johannesburg, Tshwane, which includes the capital, Pretoria, and Nelson Mandela Bay. Those three cities are run by coalitions led by the Democratic Alliance.
The DA also rules Cape Town, and the surrounding Western Cape province, outright.
Private sector success
Ramaphosa founded the National Union of Mineworkers and led the union through strikes that shook the apartheid-era economy. He helped negotiate the end of apartheid on behalf of the ANC and was Mandela's chosen successor to lead the party.
When he lost his chance to become ANC president in the 1990s, Ramaphosa embarked on a lucrative career in the private sector and amassed a fortune that ranked him as one of the country's wealthiest people. His Shanduka Group, a holding company, invested in the mining sector. He divested from the company and stepped down from various corporate boards three years ago.
