Ramaphosa, when we met, was cagey and ingratiating, with that habit good negotiators have of dropping in common points of reference. (He cited Malcolm Gladwell.) The hair and beard have been cropped, the blue blazer is perfectly tailored. It is easier to imagine him winning over a board room or a foreign business delegation than rousing a union meeting or a campaign rally. But maybe that sells South Africa short. During the interview, my mind went back to a conversation I had a few days earlier with a 29-year-old woman, the head of the A.N.C. Youth League chapter in a forlorn squatter camp on the far eastern outskirts of Johannesburg. Her candidate for savior of South Africa, she told me, was not any of the Youth League radicals, but Trevor Manuel, the sober, studiously uncharismatic former finance minister. This was like canvassing a low-income housing project in Chicago and discovering a groundswell for Ben Bernanke. As Ramaphosa talked, I couldn’t help wondering if South Africa has moved past the pumped fist.

In fairness, South Africa has made real progress. The country has grown a substantial black middle class and extended subsistence-level welfare for the poorest. But an enormous population remains immobilized at the bottom. The combination of economic empowerment for the rich and welfare for the poor has created not just a wide gulf in living standards but also a cultural gap between the ambitious and powerful and the dependent and despairing.

The fastest growing party is not the A.N.C. or the opposition Democratic Alliance, though the D.A. has a larger foothold than it did a few years ago; it is the party of nonvoters, the disillusioned. The message you hear from the top of the business establishment down to the rankest squatter camps is that thievery and ostentatious materialism have corroded the moral foundations of the governing African National Congress. If I had to sum up what I heard in two weeks of reporting in a simple plea, it would go like this: Spare us the liberation cant; send us someone who can just get the damn job done.

Thabo Mbeki, who had the impossible task of following Nelson Mandela, was not that person. Mandela came to bitterly regret his acquiescence on that choice, as Mbeki grew remote, paranoid and autocratic while in power. Kgalema Motlanthe, another mine-union veteran who served a tour as the country’s interim president after Mbeki was ousted and is currently deputy president, is regarded as decent but ineffectual.

And President Zuma, elected in 2009, has become a laughingstock. Graft and nepotism have dominated the headlines. Cronyism has diminished the competence of government ministries that were already feeble. His original support included the rabble-rousers of the A.N.C. Youth League, the Communist Party and the trade unions representing those sclerotic state bureaucracies — not a natural constituency for moderation or accountability. On top of that, Zuma has introduced a disquieting element of Zulu nationalism into a party that prides itself on rising above tribalism, and his sex life has invited both ridicule and loathing. In addition to his coterie of polygamous marriages and mistresses, some of whom live on the largess of special interests, he beat a rape charge after blaming the young woman’s short skirt and disclosed that his home remedy for infection after unprotected sex was to take a shower.

The obvious question, asked by skeptics and admirers alike, is how much a Cyril Ramaphosa can do to fix a system that is festering from top to bottom.

“It’s not about Cyril being corrupt,” his friend James Motlatsi says. “You can’t corrupt him. But now people will focus on Cyril, not Zuma. Expectations will be too high again.” And, he adds, “you know, that sea has got a lot of sharks.”