Zuma epitomized a tradition of which the new black middle class had become especially critical: graft. One-third of South Africans report having paid a bribe a police officer in 2013, according to a Transparency International survey that year. About a third bribed a judge or magistrate. Even more than that have paid for a permit or license. South Africans are extorted for bribes at schools and hospitals, to obtain electricity and water. In 2017, South Africa ranked 71st on the Transparency International “perceptions of corruption” index, sliding from the 38th position it held as recently as 2001.

Zuma was brought down by the grandest corruption project to date: a proposal to purchase six to eight Russian-made nuclear reactors at a cost of more than $73 billion, opening vast opportunities for fees and kickbacks. South Africa’s demand for electricity has stagnated since 2011, and the country does not lack for sunshine to generate solar power. Zuma insisted. Then finance minister Pravin Gordhan resisted—in what became the last of an escalating series of battles over central bank independence and other institutional issues. Zuma fired him in March 2017, tumbling stock markets and the value of the rand.

In his first speech as president, Ramaphosa promised to “turn the tide of corruption.” He vowed to end the “plunder of public resources” and to “put behind us the era of diminishing trust in public institutions and weakened confidence in our country’s public leaders.”

I asked Tony Leon, the former leader of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance, how the outside world can track whether Ramaphosa is making progress toward his goals. Leon answered that we should monitor four key jobs that, when Zuma resigned, were held by compromised people:

Ramaphosa’s first round of appointments sends an ambiguous message. Two business-friendly figures, both previously fired by Zuma, have been added to the administration. Nhlanhla Nene has been restored to the ministry of finance, from which he was fired in December 2015 after his own conflicts with the overbearing Zuma. Nene’s successor Pravin Gordhan will oversee the government’s troubled and corrupt state-owned enterprise portfolio as Minister of Public Enterprises. Both remain opponents of the nuclear deal.

But Ramaphosa could not bring himself to fire outright Zuma’s last finance minister, Malusi Gigaba. Gigaba—notoriously inexperienced in financial affairs—will return to his former job at the Home Office, where he had gained a reputation for assisting Zuma’s financial backers with their immigration and naturalization difficulties in South Africa. Meanwhile, Ramaphosa has appointed one of Zuma’s ex-wives—Zuma’s own preferred successor as head of the ANC and president—to head the planning-and-monitoring section of his own office. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is blamed by many for ultra-cronyism. An angry tweet from her account in spring of 2017 denounced anti-corruption protests as “rubbish and an expression of “privilege.” (She later repudiated the tweet as “fake,” without any explanation of how it came to be issued from her account.)