Zuma's Fall and Ramaphosa's Rise: South Africa's 2018 Transition

South Africa’s leadership changed hands in the span of a single week in February 2018, the culmination of a power struggle inside the African National Congress that had been building for months. The trigger point came in December 2017, when the ANC held its elective conference at Nasrec, outside Johannesburg, and chose Cyril Ramaphosa, then deputy president of the country, as its new party leader. He narrowly defeated Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Jacob Zuma’s ex-wife and preferred successor, in a vote widely seen as a referendum on Zuma’s scandal-plagued presidency. Winning the party leadership put Ramaphosa on a collision course with Zuma, who still held the state presidency and showed no immediate intention of leaving it.

The pressure came to a head in February 2018. Zuma’s nine years in office had been dogged by allegations of “state capture,” the charge that the wealthy Gupta family used its friendship with the president to influence cabinet appointments and steer lucrative state contracts to itself. After a marathon overnight meeting, the ANC’s national executive committee announced on February 13, 2018, that it had formally recalled Zuma and given him 48 hours to resign, warning that the party would otherwise support a parliamentary motion of no confidence scheduled for February 22, a vote he was expected to lose. Zuma initially resisted, using a combative television interview to argue he had done nothing to deserve being pushed out. But with his own party turning against him and no realistic path to survive a confidence vote, he relented. On the evening of February 14, in a televised address to the nation, Zuma announced his resignation “with immediate effect,” ending a presidency that began in 2009.

Parliament moved quickly. On February 15, 2018, lawmakers elected Ramaphosa unopposed as South Africa’s new president after opposition parties, including the Economic Freedom Fighters, walked out rather than back a Zuma-era figure, and he was sworn in that same day. A former trade unionist, lawyer and businessman who had helped negotiate the end of apartheid in the early 1990s and later built a personal fortune, Ramaphosa took office promising to root out corruption and revive an economy battered by years of scandal and stagnant growth.

The transition also brought a new First Lady. Dr. Tshepo Motsepe, Ramaphosa’s wife, is a medical doctor who trained at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and later earned a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, focusing on maternal, child and adolescent health. Before her husband’s presidency she worked in reproductive health research, including with the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute, and served on hospital and provincial health accreditation bodies. She is also part of one of South Africa’s most prominent business families: her younger brother is the mining billionaire Patrice Motsepe, and her sister, Bridgette Radebe, is a mining entrepreneur in her own right. As First Lady, she has focused her public role on maternal and child health advocacy rather than the more overtly political profile some of her predecessors held, a shift that mirrored the more technocratic tone Ramaphosa tried to set for his government after the turbulence of the Zuma years.