Could Cyril Ramaphosa Be the Best Leader South Africa Has Not Yet Had?

Pieter Hugo for The New York Times

Cyril Ramaphosa, who was elected by the African National Congress in December to be the deputy president of the A.N.C.

By the time I met Cyril Ramaphosa in 1992, he was Nelson Mandela's choreographer at the negotiations that would eventually bring three centuries of white dominion to a thrilling and relatively peaceful end. Every day a polyglot, multiparty assembly — of former prisoners and their onetime oppressors, Communists and Bantustan autocrats and Afrikaner nationalists and union militants — mingled in a conference center outside Johannesburg to discuss what would be, in effect, the terms of surrender.

Trevor Samson/AFP/Getty Images

Cyril Ramaphosa, right, with James Motlatsi, president of the mineworkers' union, during a strike in 1987.

At times the endeavor seemed to shudder with the prospect of failure, even civil war — most ominously when two white supremacists gunned down a charismatic young Communist leader in his driveway. Another day a group of Afrikaner bitter-enders drove an armored truck through the plate-glass front of the conference building. (It is a little eerie now to recall that the venue was called the World Trade Center.)

Mandela provided the aura, the moral authority. Ramaphosa, then secretary general of the anti-apartheid alliance, the African National Congress, was the business end. Big, round-faced, grinning through a peppercorn beard, a charming manipulator in multiple languages, he was adept at both creating tension and defusing it, at threatening to send his constituents on a campaign of "rolling mass action" and then easing the pin back into the grenade. Janet Love, a member of Ramaphosa's negotiating team who now runs a human rights law center in Johannesburg, reminded me recently how he resolved the conundrum that arises when you have a constellation of 19 parties and alliances in which some matter more than others — namely: How do you know when something should be regarded as decided? Ramaphosa came up with the concept of "sufficient consensus." It sounds absurdly vague, but it was a polite way of saying that when the white National Party and the A.N.C. came to terms, everyone else, as Ramaphosa explained later to a reporter, "can get stuffed."

When the deal was done, he was the obvious choice — in fact, he was Mandela's choice — to be the first deputy, next in line for the presidency. But the party elders, especially the powerful faction that spent the struggle in exile, were wary of Ramaphosa, who had worked the home front as a union organizer and came late to the A.N.C.

So on my visit to South Africa this past December, I met a new Cyril Ramaphosa: Cyril the tycoon, at the office of his holding company, Shanduka Group, a sleek sandstone-colored complex in Johannesburg's most upscale neighborhood. On the Forbes list of the richest Africans, Ramaphosa is No. 21. His worth is estimated at $675 million — Russian oligarch money, astounding wealth in a country where about 40 percent of the population survives on less than $2 a day. How he became so rich is a story we'll get to, but I was there because of reports that he was considering a return to politics.

Sure enough, a week after our conversation, the governing African National Congress summoned him back to the national cause, voting him the party's deputy president by a landslide. The election put Ramaphosa, now 60, back on the track Mandela had in mind for him 18 years ago. At last, we may find out whether he is, as many South Africans have long believed, the best president South Africa has not yet had.

To someone visiting after a long absence, South Africa feels both prosperous and precarious. The malls of the tonier neighborhoods are filled with shoppers of all races. The airports and sports arenas of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban are world-caliber. And there is a class of very rich black capitalists like Ramaphosa. But the wealth does not completely hide a malaise, born of stubborn inequality and conspicuous corruption and discharged in bursts of violent discontent.

The most unsettling recent reminder that South African liberation is far from fully delivered was a wildcat strike in August that ended with the massacre of platinum miners in a town called Marikana. The mine killings entangled Ramaphosa in a controversy that, in America, would surely have the suffix "gate" attached to it. He is a shareholder and board member of the platinum company whose mine was the scene of the killings. Indeed, his portfolio is stuffed with investments in the mining industries — gold, diamonds, coal and platinum. In the days of white rule, Ramaphosa organized South Africa's powerful black mineworkers' union. So the industries that made him a champion of the liberation struggle have, more recently, made him a very wealthy man and caused some to question where his loyalties lie. He is now trying, with characteristic political agility, to turn a tragedy that looked at first to be a liability into an asset — a spur to action for a democracy in dire need of a second wind.

Bill Keller is a former executive editor of The Times and was the paper's Johannesburg bureau chief from 1992 to 1995. He writes a column for the Op-Ed page.

Editor: Dean Robinson

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 24, 2013

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the position to which the African National Congress elected the South African business tycoon Cyril Ramaphosa in December 2012. He is deputy president of the A.N.C., not the deputy president of South Africa.