What does Cyril Ramaphosa have in common with Jacob Zuma? Ten years ago, the business and media elite, much of the public, and the better people in the African National Congress (ANC) would have said little to nothing at all. Today they’d have to say: quite a lot. These are two men who led the country and the ANC through eras of national economic failure and declining party support, concluding in desperate efforts to fend off charges of personal corruption.

Ramaphosa was no doubt relieved when last week the Western Cape High Court temporarily halted Parliament's Section 89 impeachment inquiry into his Phala Phala corruption scandal. The court ruled that the parliamentary committee investigating him cannot proceed until his separate court challenge to the independent panel's report has been decided. That buys him some time and holds off the threat of having to testify before that committee – a reckoning he so fears that he will resign rather than face it.

When the Phala Phala corruption scandal re-entered the scene earlier this year The Common Sense wrote, “Ramaphosa would … present himself as respectful of constitutional processes. [But] behind that public posture, he would use every available legal and procedural mechanism to delay the impeachment process. […] That could include appeals, stays, procedural objections, challenges, arguments about parliamentary timing, claims about preparation rights, and efforts to link the impeachment process to other legal proceedings. The purpose would be to make the process difficult to conclude quickly without appearing openly defiant.”

That is what he has now done, and he was fortunate in doing it to have the precedent of his predecessor to rely on – a precedent that has seen Zuma delay his arms deal reckoning for two decades.

That a repeat of that precedent will be the defining feature of what remains of Ramphosa’s presidency is not good for either him or his party. His value to the party lay in the idea that he marked a step-change away from the economic catastrophe and moral disgrace of the Zuma era. Physically clinging to office, which is in practice what his legal strategy seeks to allow, does not restore that value. On the contrary, it deepens the parallel to his predecessor and at best lets the clock tick down until he has to be replaced. At worst, it sends a message that the era of the ANC’s great reformer turned out to be so much the same as that from which it had hoped to reform that now, there really is no hope that it might ever reform.