“Senescence” is defined as the condition or process of deteriorating with age.

This week’s video announcement by President Joe Biden that he will seek re-election as US president next year sent the commentary class into overdrive on the risks of senility or physical impairment afflicting Biden, who would be 82 at his inauguration.

Cognitive decline is no small matter when the US commander-in-chief has his hands on the nuclear codes in a world in disarray.

No slouch in underlining the issue of presidential befuddlement was long-shot Republican challenger, former governor Nikki Haley — a mere youth at 51.

She proposed mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75. This bracket would include both Biden and, conveniently for Haley, the man she needs to beat to the nomination, 76-year-old former president Donald Trump.

The tabloid New York Post last year published “Joe Biden’s worst gaffes of all time”, a long list of whoppers, misstatements and verbal stumbles, many of which go back decades. When Biden served as vice-president his exasperated boss, Barack Obama, reportedly said: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f***k things up.”

Still, with Trump as his likely 2024 opponent possible senility might be the lesser risk in voters’ minds than a return to the chaos and incivility of a Trump resurrection.

Either way, the choice amounts to “the evil of two lessers” as the 1980 contest between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter was dubbed — though by the diminished leadership expectations of today, that was a clash of political giants.

This leads to a consideration of what ails and afflicts our gaffe-generating, verbally incontinent and confused President Cyril Ramaphosa. By the standards of Biden and Trump he is a mere stripling at 70.

But his gaffe this week over South Africa’s withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC) — hastily retracted hours later — suggests, at best, that Ramaphosa doesn’t read his briefs or simply is ignorant of what the ANC conference decided on the topic.

Or maybe it was a Freudian slip suggesting that Ramaphosa prefers to pal with Vladimir Putin rather than respect his international and domestic legal obligations to arrest Putin on arrival in South Africa.

Melanie Verwoerd, former ANC MP and Ramaphosa backer, decided this week that it wasn’t so much presidential confusion or enfeeblement but poor advisers who were to blame.

But she was, in her News24 article, dealing with the faux pas — or series of them — prior to the ICC blooper. She referenced the flouting of the law by the president in delaying the appointment of the SABC board and his legal disaster on Phala Phala, when his effort to approach the Constitutional Court on the parliamentary report was rejected.

Still, as the Americans say, “personnel are policy”: smart leaders choose smart staff; poor ones replicate themselves in their hires.

There is a long list of overblown Ramaphosaisms. There was his promise in September 2015 that load-shedding would be over in “another 18 months to two years”.

A few years later, amid continuous load-shedding and the collapse of the railways, he was offering “smart cities and bullet trains”.

There was this year’s portentous February declaration of a state of disaster to solve the energy crisis — only for it to be withdrawn six weeks later. Then there was the announcement that a minister of electricity would fix the problem. And here we are at the end of April and the new minister still awaits the delimitation of his powers.

All the while, as warring ministers squabble amid confused policy — seemingly made up “on the hoof” as one energy expert said — we plunge into further darkness.

At the start of his presidency in 2018, Ramaphosa was hailed by Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator for the globally influential Financial Times, as “an informal spokesperson for a continent … a standard bearer for Africa”.

The article was headlined “Why South Africa matters to the world”. Last week, South Africa — after five years of  Ramaphosa — found itself disinvited from the global conclave of the most advanced economies in the world, the G7 gathering in Japan.

A foreign diplomat recently underlined to me that South Africa’s exceptionalism of 29 years ago, commemorated with Freedom Day this week, no longer applies.

“You are now, with your erratic [read pro-Russian] alignments just another middling and declining [read collapsing infrastructure and minimal growth] country in a world where what you do and where you now stand determine far more your place than what you once did.”

In sum, the afterglow of Nelson Mandela and the miracle new nation-in-the-making of 1994 has almost entirely faded.

Among Ramaphosa’s apparent misstatements of yesteryear, there was his warning in 2013 that if people did not vote ANC “the Boers will come back to power”. This will likely be repurposed for 2024.

Back then though, his office quickly retracted and clarified the comment, just as the Presidency did this week on the ICC matter. But in both cases the original comments likely describe his core beliefs. And that’s more troubling than any verbal miscues or presumptions on mental acuity.