The story of Nelson Mandela’s special relationship with Scotland is well known.

Throughout the years of the struggle against apartheid, Scots threw themselves behind the anti-apartheid cause.

Back in those activist days of the 1970’s and 80s they mounted boycotts, pickets, rallies, concerts and calls for sanctions. Much less widely known, too however, was the role some played within a clandestine or underground movement.

At the time ordinary Scots also acted as couriers, procured documents, and established safe houses in cities like Glasgow for those African National Congress (ANC) activists in exile, some of whom came and went through Scotland.

In acknowledgement of such commitment and support, some of the giants of the South African anti-apartheid movement have since visited Scotland over the years. Besides Mandela himself among them have been Mandela’s close friend and comrade Oliver Tambo, and former South African President Thabo Mbeki.

Given such long and fraternal links, many Scots last week will have watched with special interest as the latest power struggles within South Africa’s ruling ANC played out.

It was back in April 1994 as the world watched that Mandela led the party to power with more than 60 per cent of the vote. It was an election victory seen by many as a uniting force for a country that for decades had been divided by apartheid.

Decades on however the ANC is a very different political entity to the party that epitomised Mandela’s vision.

That much was obvious last week as party stalwart Cyril Ramaphosa was sworn in as South Africa’s new president, following a bitter and reluctant resignation of the embattled Jacob Zuma.

That Zuma’s presidency has been a disaster for the ANC and South Africa as a whole few would disagree. For many South Africans the days leading up to his departure last Wednesday night were emblematic of his nine-year tenure as president, a tense time filled with scandal and gallows humour.

While political cartoonists had a field day, Twitter competed to name the best 'Zuma recall' movies, with “Swindler’s List” and “The Lying King” among the favourites. Here was a man after all who had faced multiple corruption charges while thumbing his nose at the public’s expressions of concern over his conduct.

“While corruption was rampant in previous administrations, the extent of Zuma’s selling of the state silverware to the highest bidders has made the magnitude and impact of the looting on his watch uniquely rapacious,” observed Eusebius McKaiser, a political analyst based in Johannesburg.

On Zuma’s watch, the South African economy suffered enormously and inequality and unemployment soared to almost 27 per cent.

Unlike his Robben Island-veteran compatriots, Zuma, a former ANC intelligence chief, eschewed the erudite cosmopolitanism oozed by Mbeki or Ramaphosa. He claimed to stand for the vast black poor of South Africa.

Among his supporters many claimed that as a Zulu, Zuma was being targeted because of his ethnicity. With Zulus representing approximately 20 per cent of South Africa’s population, making them numerically the country’s largest ethnic group, it was time for a Zulu president to rule both the ANC and the country they argued.

For the ANC this type of ethnic nationalism was unprecedented in the party’s politics. Throughout its history, the party had derided “tribalism” and sought to unite black South Africans of all ethnic groups and also welcomed whites and Indians committed to the fight against apartheid. Alongside his other failings and miscalculations, Zuma will now also be remembered as the first ANC leader to openly mobilise support along ethnic lines.

In the end, as his departure loomed, South Africans were reduced to mere spectators, as the man who had dominated headlines for close to two decades had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the presidential exit.

“Even Zuma’s party, the African National Congress, seemed incapable of talking him into a quiet retirement,” wrote Sisonke Msimang a South African commentator. “The party that had for so long sheltered him in the face of everything from rape charges to corruption allegations seemed helpless in the face of his intransigence.”

In the end though Zuma finally went, and many South Africans breathed a sigh of relief as Cyril Ramaphosa was sworn in as president. The question now of course is whether that sigh of relief is justified. Will Ramaphosa’s election to office herald an ANC renaissance and can he pull South Africa out of the doldrums?

On Friday in his first major speech as president, Ramaphosa laid down a marker by invoking the spirit and message of Mandela. Pledging to restore economic growth, tackle entrenched inequality and turn his attention to the fight against corruption, Ramaphosa sought to give South Africans a renewed sense of hope and vigour.

“It is a new dawn that is inspired by our collective memory of Nelson Mandela and the changes that are unfolding …We will build a new nation and confront the injustices of the past and the inequalities of the present,” Ramaphosa promised. “We are not merely honouring the past but building the future… South Africa belongs to all who live in it.”

Not everyone however is convinced that invoking the spirit of Mandela is the right political direction in which the ANC and South Africa should travel right now.

“There is certainly a great deal of anger directed even at the memory of Nelson Mandela today,” noted well known South African journalist Phillip de Wet. “You’ll find that many people now consider Mandela to be a sell-out, someone who, instead of making sure that economic power was taken away from white people, took an approach which allowed the situation that we see today.”

Agree or not with such an assessment, there undoubtedly remains widespread hope among many South Africans that Ramaphosa will turn things around. From ordinary citizens to international bankers, there is now an incredible expectation that the country will be properly run.

Though he was once Mandela’s favoured successor, the ANC leadership previously brushed Ramaphosa aside in favour of Mbeki. As an anti-apartheid veteran and with prominent trade union service behind him, Ramaphosa is seen at home and abroad as an able leader serious about tackling the problems South Africa faces.

He certainly has a knack of saying the right things. His insistence that the kleptocrats and architects of what he calls “state capture” will not just be booted out, but put in the dock and punished, goes down well in the country.

Ramaphosa’s handling too of Zuma’s bitter exit displayed the political skills for which he is known. For despite Zuma’s unpopularity, Ramaphosa played it safe when it came to ousting him, a clear and calculated attempt to prevent the ANC from fracturing any further.

Instead, in a political masterstroke, he allowed Zuma to show his true colours in a rambling interview on state television to the nation. In effect it gave every South African a taste of what Ramaphosa now confronts as he tries to put things right.

The challenges he faces, though, in trying to reignite national pride, self-belief, and mutual trust are immense by any standards. He also has to salvage the ANC’s reputation and win the next election in 2019, no mean feat in itself.

With Zuma gone though opposition parties to the ANC will no longer be able to rely on firing political pot shots at the president as a means of getting at the ANC.

Instead they will have to grapple with the new face of the party, a leader intent on a policy of anti-corruption and good governance, which the country’s growing black middle class is increasingly concerned about.

Moreover, Ramaphosa will likely try to strike the difficult balance between promoting business-friendly policies that jump-start the economy while also shoring up support amongst the country’s impoverished black majority, one of the ANC’s core constituencies. If Ramaphosa can properly execute his ANC renaissance in the coming years, he could substantially slow the party’s otherwise inevitable demise as the most dominant political force in the country.

All this remains a big ask of the new president, however, with many sceptics believing the task is just too great and the ANC too damaged to pull it off.

Professor David Everatt, Head of the School of Governance, at the University of the Witwatersrand, pulled no punches in his assessment: “Ramaphosa is no Messiah, and when the post-Zuma champagne corks stop popping, South Africans need to assess him as a mere mortal, one who is inheriting a country laid almost as bare as the country Mandela inherited in 1994.”

He suggests that Ramaphosa’s recent elevation to Messiah status in the media and the popular imagination is nothing more than an illusion. “He maketh Zuma to bugger off. He maketh the currency to rise and pessimism to fall; he will cleanse where others defiled; and he may lead South Africans towards the promised land, or, for the non-believers, will it be down the garden path?” Everatt asked.

Other sceptics point out how crucial it is to understand the nature of the party that Ramaphosa has inherited to fully appreciate why the ANC or South Africa will not be out of trouble any time soon.

They point to an ANC they claim is beginning to resemble the authoritarianism of the apartheid era and signs that one of Africa’s democratic success stories is turning into a Mafia state.

“This creep toward authoritarianism must be taken seriously. The ANC’s main leadership structure, the National Executive Committee, has been unable to halt the capture of the state,” insists analyst Eusebius McKaiser

According to McKaiser, under Zuma the criminal justice system and law enforcement agencies have been compromised, and intelligence structures have become pawns of warring factions within the ANC and there is little sign that this will change under Ramaphosa.

On Friday an op-ed piece in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian had similar warnings. “Long after Jacob Zuma has gone, we will still have the ANC and its inherent shortcomings to reckon with,” the writer Lukhona Mnguni concluded. “Zuma embodied a pervasive and brazen culture of abuse of power that led to a massive political syndicate. This syndicate infiltrated any space it could venture into within state departments and institutions.”

Should such a political culture continue then there is little doubt that constituencies in the future will continue to lose loyalty to the ANC.

But for his part Ramaphosa has to start somewhere if change is to come, and both Zuma’s removal and his first speech as president, have presented the best opportunity South Africa has had in years.

“We should put all the negativity behind us because a new dawn is upon us,” Ramaphosa told those listening during his speech in Cape Town on Friday.

In contrast with previous years when police were on standby to keep protesters at bay, this year’s event had a celebratory air and security was kept to a minimum.

A good sign perhaps. But only time will tell if Cyril Ramaphosa has what it takes to truly invoke the Mandela spirit and pull South Africa out of the mire.