Do we like Cyril Ramaphosa?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A long record of building and negotiating, and no harmful words of his own found, set against an unresolved cash saga he denies and a slow-moving integrity record.
Ramaphosa was born in Johannesburg in 1952 and grew up in Soweto, the son of a policeman. He did six months in jail over his work with the Black People's Convention, then became the first secretary general of the National Union of Mineworkers, a job he held for just over a decade while it grew into the country's biggest union. When he lost the race to be Mandela's deputy in 1994, he walked into business and built the Shanduka holding company.
Before that, he was the ANC's lead negotiator at the Codesa talks, then led the team that drafted the new constitution, which The Conversation's profile calls one of the most progressive in the world. The dark spot from his business years is Marikana. In 2012 he sat on Lonmin's board, and emails shown to the Farlam inquiry reportedly had him pushing Lonmin to treat the violence as criminal. He told the inquiry he meant the killings, not the strike itself.
The scandal that defines his presidency is Phala Phala. About US$580,000 in banknotes was stolen from a sofa at his game farm in 2020, and a former head of the state security agency went to police in 2022 and accused him of money laundering and other offences. A parliamentary panel found initial evidence of serious misconduct. Ramaphosa denies wrongdoing, says the cash came from buffalo sales, and calls the panel's findings flawed.
On the harm test, nothing nasty turned up in his own words or acts. At a 2021 Freedom Day speech he said the nation should be deeply ashamed of the killings of LGBTIQ+ people and promised the killers would be brought to book. In 2025 he called the US Afrikaner refugee programme misguided. I found no record of him campaigning against queer or trans people. This is a quick read of his public record, not a full policy review.
The second cloud is policing. Critics say he has been shielding suspended Police Minister Senzo Mchunu by not acting on him after the Madlanga Commission's interim report, which flagged fourteen other officials. The Presidency says there is no evidence of protection and that he will act once the commission finishes. Mchunu denies the allegations against him.
The recent story is the court fight. In July a 2-1 High Court majority gave him an interdict freezing the public impeachment hearings, with his lawyers arguing a public inquiry based on a flawed report would humiliate him. The EFF, MK, ATM and UAT opposed it. The Constitutional Court then declined to hear their direct appeals, saying the review would soon settle things. I couldn't find a ruling on the review itself.