Although he was Mandela’s choice to succeed him, Mr Ramaphosa was defeated in the leadership contest by Thabo Mbeki in 1999.
Perhaps sensing that Jacob Zuma's time was up and that it was the appropriate time for him to strike, Cyril Ramaphosa sharpened his rhetoric against the president in recent months. He even called for police to detain those thought responsible for corruption without waiting for the results of a judicial inquiry that the president has sought to block.
Mr Ramaphosa, 65, was born in Soweto, which is west of Johannesburg, and got involved in student activism while studying law in the 1970s. As founder of the National Union of Mine Workers, he became one of the anti-apartheid movement’s most prominent “internals”, agitating for change within the system while Nelson Mandela and others were in prison.
In 1991 he beat Mr Zuma to become the party’s secretary-general, won global fame as one of the chief negotiators in the ANC’s transition to power, then helped to draft the country’s first post-apartheid constitution — roles requiring significant diplomatic skill.
When he could not succeed Mr. Mandela he went into business, making the most of the ANC’s new policies that helped black people to buy into established companies.
Mr Ramaphosa led a consortium that bought parts of Sir Ernest Oppenheimer’s Anglo American, a mining company. He held stakes in McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and became one of the richest men on the continent, estimated by Forbes to have a net worth of $450 million in 2015. He returned to frontline politics in 2012 and was picked by Mr Zuma as his deputy in 2014.
Friends have described him as fiercely bright, worldly and lacking in the tribalism and prejudice that has come to the fore in Mr Zuma’s camp.
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