Ramaphosa acknowledges his biggest regrets during his term

The party has been reviewing its 2019 manifesto this weekend. Ramaphosa will be leading the rally at the Dobsonville Stadium in Soweto this afternoon. Speaking at a media engagement in Johannesburg yesterday, the president said that he is confident the party will secure another win next year.

"The ANC is going to achieve an outright majority. We are not working to be in a coalition but if we have to choose a coalition party, we will choose the ANC to be a coalition partner. We are confident that we are going to emerge victorious."

Ramaphosa says his biggest regret during his first term was the unanticipated scale of corruption that gripped various sectors during the procurement of Covid-19 personal protective equipment.

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"That depressed me, and I paused for a while and said we should not have centralised the distribution of PPEs as we did with vaccines. With vaccines, many companies kept coming saying we can get you vaccines, and we refused. We said no, only the state is going to do it,"

That is why we were able to set up a vaccine rollout process where we worked together with labour, businesses and communities and we had a religious sector involved and that one was well-managed."

He says the July 2021 unrest in KZN and Gauteng, which was closely followed by the April floods caught the government off guard. " What I'm not pleased with is the unrest we had in 2021 because that followed soon after us dealing with Covid. 

"That was devastating, we didn't manage it well, our security forces were not prepared for it and so that to me was a dark blot. And the floods, we tried our best but were not as prepared as we should've been but we are getting better."