President Jacob Zuma’s chances of serving out a second term may have dimmed after being implicated in a new graft investigation and that could tip the race to succeed him in favour of his deputy Cyril Ramaphosa.
Ramaphosa and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Zuma’s ex-wife whose term as chairwoman of the AU Commission ends in January, are regarded as front-runners to take over from Zuma as leader of the ANC in 2017, and possibly president in 2019.
Under the Constitution, should Zuma resign, Ramaphosa would automatically become acting president for a maximum of 30 days while the National Assembly elects a replacement from its members.
Zuma’s early exit may "circumvent the possibility of Dlamini-Zuma coming in", Dirk Kotze, a politics professor at the University of SA (Unisa), said. "It provides Ramaphosa with a major advantage. It will, in a sense, resolve the succession process by default."
Ramaphosa has a breadth of experience few can match in SA. A lawyer who co-founded the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), he helped negotiate a peaceful end to apartheid and draft SA’s first democratic constitution.
He lost out to Thabo Mbeki in the contest to succeed Nelson Mandela as president in 1999 and went into business, securing control of the McDonald’s franchise in SA and amassing a fortune before returning to full-time politics in 2012 as ANC deputy president.
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