A quarter-century after Mandela’s African National Congress took over following decades of white-minority rule, the party is bitterly divided over major corruption allegations against former president Jacob Zuma. The ANC is still the party that most South Africans support, but according to polls from the Pew Research Center, almost two-thirds of the population is dissatisfied with the way democracy works here.

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The piecing back together of Africa’s most famous liberation movement will require a dexterity even Ramaphosa may not be able to muster. Some South Africans wonder if it should be repaired at all or instead should be taken in a new direction.

“Present-day South Africa is a society founded around revolutionary ideas. It understands itself as carrying out an incomplete transformation that began in 1994,” said Jonny Steinberg, a South African writer and political commentator, referring to the year South Africa ended apartheid. “The question around Ramaphosa is: Does he keep on with the ‘revolution,’ or can he forge a more genuine transformation?”

Ramaphosa grew up in a block of homes bordering a trash heap in Soweto, the ramshackle suburb of Johannesburg where his father was a police sergeant and his mother a domestic worker who ran a liquor business to make ends meet.

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Soweto gained international notoriety in 1976 when policemen massacred student protesters and arrested scores of them. Ramaphosa, then 24, was among them, and he endured six months of solitary confinement, a punishment he was familiar with after serving 11 months for his participation in previous protests.

A natural leader, he went on to found the National Union of Mineworkers and led the biggest mining strike of the apartheid era, propelling him into the competitive world of the ANC leadership as it negotiated with the white government for a hand­over. Mandela ultimately passed him over as his chosen successor, and Ramaphosa spent the next 14 years building a fortune in investments and franchising that yielded oligarchic levels of wealth.

By the time he rejoined politics in 2017, corruption scandals surrounding Zuma had broken the ANC into factions. Ramaphosa led a faction that called for Zuma’s replacement and won in an internal vote. He swiftly approved a judicial inquiry into Zuma’s alleged wrongdoings (which Zuma denies) and fired ministers and heads of state-owned institutions that he asserted were being mismanaged.

Since then, however, South Africa’s economic misery has only intensified. Ramaphosa’s promised wave of foreign investment hasn’t materialized, and South Africa’s currency has tumbled against the dollar. Rolling blackouts have plagued manufacturing as well as everyday life as continued mismanagement of the state-owned power company has proved hard to root out. Analysts say that South Africa might have ceded its economic primacy in Africa had other regional powers such as Kenya and Nigeria not suffered from their own corruption problems.

In his final appeal to voters on Sunday, Ramaphosa presented himself as a change candidate, despite being from the only party to run the country since ­apartheid.

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“This a moment when we have to choose between the past and the future,” he said at a rally in Johannesburg. “We can choose to return to a past of conflict and anger, of corruption and hunger. Or we can choose to embark on a path of renewal and go forward to a future of peace and stability, jobs and progress.”

Economic woes have driven voters to opposition parties in large enough numbers for large cities such as Johannesburg, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth to slip out of the ANC’s grasp. Average income in South Africa is less today than it was five years ago.

At a rally Saturday for the Democratic Alliance, the largest opposition party, some voters who were switching their allegiance away from the ANC this year expressed skepticism that Ramaphosa had the political chops to overcome Zuma’s faction, which still occupies powerful positions in the party.

“If Ramaphosa is such a whiz, then why is everything still so messed up after he’s been president for more than a year?” asked Tshepiso Mohlala, 37, who hasn’t had a regular job in a decade.

Nevertheless, Ramaphosa’s approval rating has soared to near 70 percent, and even detractors such as Mohlala believe that he wants the best for the ­country.

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“At least he is rich enough that he won’t need to steal like the rest of them,” said Mohlala, who plans to vote for the Democratic Alliance.

Mmusi Maimane, president of the Alliance, told supporters on Saturday that Ramaphosa was “no savior” and that there was no way to divorce Ramaphosa from his party’s past.

“If you vote for that guy, you are voting for corruption,” he said.

Others in and around Johannesburg who said they were voting for the ANC said they wanted to give Ramaphosa a strong mandate to help him fend off a possible challenge from the same pro-Zuma ANC members he bested in 2017.

“These internal opponents, allies of former president Jacob Zuma, will obstruct Ramaphosa’s anti-corruption campaign, delay his economic reforms and force him to pursue populist policies, all in conjunction with efforts to remove him from office,” said Darias Jonker, the Africa director of the Eurasia Group.

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The “Zuma faction,” as Jonker puts it, can count on retaining top positions in the ANC through provincial elections and by pressuring Ramaphosa not to divide the party further, keeping some pro-Zuma ministers in his cabinet. The ANC is scheduled to have a national conference of its leaders before Ramaphosa would even reach the halfway mark of his presidential term, at which he could be toppled in the same way he became president.

That kind of turmoil would only deepen most South Africans’ sense that the ANC is broken, Steinberg said.

“What Ramaphosa symbolizes must be seen in contrast to what precededhim: He’s not corrupt, he’s temperate, he’s honest. This is such a divided country, but he means that to almost everybody,” he said.