Cyril Ramaphosa
Cyril Ramaphosa has been President of South Africa since 2018, having built the country's largest trade union, helped negotiate the constitution, made a fortune in business, and returned to politics to succeed Jacob Zuma. Born in Soweto in 1952 to a policeman, he studied law and was detained twice in the 1970s for student activism. He founded the National Union of Mineworkers in 1982 and grew it to 300,000 members, leading the 1987 strike that was the largest in South African history. He was the ANC's chief negotiator at CODESA, the talks that produced the 1994 settlement, and chaired the assembly that wrote the 1996 constitution — work widely regarded as his finest. Passed over for the deputy presidency in favour of Thabo Mbeki, he moved into business, becoming one of the wealthiest black South Africans through black economic empowerment stakes in mining, telecoms and McDonald's franchises. He was a non-executive director of Lonmin at the time of the Marikana strike in August 2012, when police shot dead thirty-four miners; emails in which he urged concomitant action were used against him, and a commission cleared him of legal liability. He returned as deputy president in 2014 and narrowly won the ANC leadership in December 2017, becoming president when Zuma resigned. His stated priority was reversing state capture — the systematic looting of state enterprises documented by the Zondo Commission — and rebuilding institutions including the revenue service and the prosecuting authority. Progress has been slow against persistent load-shedding, unemployment above thirty per cent and the ANC's own factionalism. In 2024 the party lost its majority for the first time and he formed a coalition with the Democratic Alliance.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: South African
- Roles: President of South Africa (2018-present)
