Counting of votes is in progress at the 54th National Congress of South Africa’s hegemonic political party, the African National Congress, (ANC). Results are being expected anytime from now but unlikely to be before late evening. The outcome is known to the extent that it is either Comrade Cyril Ramaphosa, the incumbent Deputy-President to President Jacob Zuma who exhausts his second term later in 2019 Or Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, a former Minister for Health, foreign affairs and Chairperson of the AU Commission.
Whoever emerges, it promises to be a turning point not only for Africa’s most industrialised country but for the continent too. A hard hitting South African president would create ripples on the continent to which the rest must respond, one way or the other. Irrespective of how they do, they would have been responding to an agenda so powerful in space and time that they cannot but follow. After all, in spite of the pockets of resistance to Murtala’s ‘Africa Has Come of Age’, Africa and progressive humanity bought into it.
