South Africans Are Already $855 Richer Under Ramaphosa, Sort Of

(Bloomberg) -- It may be “graph crime,” but Renaissance Capital economist Charles Robertson has a nice way of looking at the rand’s Ramaphosa-driven rally.

Anticipation that Cyril Ramaphosa would win the vote to head South Africa’s ruling party has sent the currency soaring in the past month. As a result, his compatriots are now $855 better off in dollar terms in that period, compared with a mere $163 rise in income since President Jacob Zuma came to power in 2009, according to Robertson. 

But as he concedes himself, the maths are a little naughty.

The chart above is what you get if you divide the International Monetary Fund’s estimates for average annual per capita gross domestic product in 2017 by the rand’s spot exchange rate.

“Yes, this is graph crime,” Robertson wrote in an emailed note. “Because we economists use the average exchange rate to calculate the per capita GDP. But to be fair to this graph, the average rand rate could have been 14.5 if Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma won and 12.5 with Ramaphosa winning -- so it kind of works.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Alex Nicholson in Moscow at anicholson6@bloomberg.net, Selcuk Gokoluk in London at sgokoluk@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Nicholson at anicholson6@bloomberg.net, John Viljoen

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