Ramaphosa foot on the pedal to clean up corruption – Melanie Verwoerd

The relief among investors was clear to see as they assessed President Cyril Ramaphosa's South African cabinet line-up. The slimmed down executive were given the thumbs-up and the retention of the crucial Finance Ministry post to Tito Mboweni, while allowing Pravin Gordhan as Public Enterprises Minister to continue the clean-up of the state-owned enterprises calmed the markets. The Rand advanced immediately after the read out of the names and continued its upwards move gaining another 0.4% around midday after the announcement. Political analyst Melanie Verwoerd delves a little deeper into the Cabinet to assess what it means and whether Ramaphosa is accelerating the clean-up of state capture. – Linda van Tilburg

President Cyril Ramaphosa has a brand new cabinet, smaller and leaner. But the big question is can it be considered as a clean-up operation of people linked to state capture. We have political analyst, Melanie Verwoerd on the line. Melanie, is this the clean-up of the cabinet that investors had hoped for?

I think it's a massive clean-up and first of all, of course he's reduced his cabinet. And for me that is a sign of a Ramaphosa that feels a lot more confident about his own future and his own prospects within his own party. A bigger Cabinet would have indicated that he was still nervous and needed to keep some of the Zupta guys around in his cabinet to just appease the different factions in the ANC. He has not done that; first of all he's cut the ministers quite a lot. And secondly, the people who are there are very much his supporters. This is very much a Ramaphosa cabinet. Of course he's kept the deputy ministers, quite a number of deputy ministers, quite high and I think that is where he made some compromises to all the various interest groups and factions. But they are not the most significant. What we really need to look at are the ministers. And I think that is very significant what has happened there.

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