When Cyril Ramaphosa delivers his State of the Nation address to Parliament tomorrow night, many will be expecting radical steps to confirm the New Dawn has broken. Having absorbed 450 pages of Anthony Butler’s biography on SA’s president, I’ll be looking for something more subtle.
As we discover from the superb book, Ramaphosa is a perfectionist. He is at pains to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Having long believed that progress only comes from calmness, a cool head and patience. For that we should be grateful. Decisions made in an emotional state are invariably poor ones.
In childhood, most of us heard the story of the tortoise and the hare. I’ve seen many publicity-seeking hares in my financial journalism career. But as with Aesop’s fable, very few of them, in the long run, surpass the performance of their lower profile, slow and steady counterparts.
Ramaphosa plays the long game. Perhaps it’s time for the rest of the nation to appreciate the benefit of this strategy.
*You can download a sample of the new Ramaphosa audiobook here.
