Former South African president Jacob Zuma on Thursday began a 15-month prison sentence for contempt of court, becoming the country’s first post-apartheid president to be jailed after a drama that campaigners said ended in a victory for rule of law.
Zuma, 79, reported to prison early on Thursday after mounting a last-ditch legal bid and stoking defiance among supporters who rallied at his rural home.
His battle transfixed the country, placing a spotlight on the issue of impunity and tensions within the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
Photo: AFP
The South African Constitutional Court on Tuesday last week sentenced Zuma to 15-month in jail for refusing to appear before a probe into alleged corruption that entangled his nine years in power.
As police warned that he faced arrest from midnight Wednesday, Zuma handed himself in to a jail in the rural town of Estcourt in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal.
Many South Africans hailed his incarceration as a watershed moment for the young democracy.
Former South African public protector Thuli Madonsela called it “a giant development to the country’s rule of law journey.”
However, “at a human level, it’s a sad moment because it’s something that could have been avoided,” she said. “We didn’t have to have a 79-year-old former head of state and former liberation struggle stalwart go to jail just because just he doesn’t want to be held to account.”
The opposition Democratic Alliance said: “The law cannot be mocked and challenged with impunity. If the leader can go to prison, then so can anyone.”
However, the contempt conviction did not address the wider corruption, fraud and racketeering that proliferated under Zuma, it said.
The Nelson Mandela Foundation struck a similar note.
“His legal strategy has been one of obfuscation and delay, ultimately in an attempt to render our judicial processes unintelligible,” it said.
“It is tempting to regard Mr Zuma’s arrest as the end of the road” rather than “merely another phase ... in a long and fraught journey,” it said.
Born into poverty, Zuma started out as an uneducated herder who joined the ANC, becoming its intelligence chief in the anti-apartheid struggle.
His charisma and courage, including 10 years in jail on notorious Robben Island, placed him alongside eventual South African president Nelson Mandela and former ANC president Oliver Tambo, among other liberation heroes.
In 2009, he became democratic South Africa’s fourth president.
In 2018, Zuma was forced out by the ANC and replaced as president by Cyril Ramaphosa, a former trade union leader who became a tycoon after apartheid was dismantled 30 years ago.
Investigators say that under Zuma, billions of dollars in state assets were siphoned off by cronies.
However, their efforts to get Zuma to testify hit a wall.
Critics labeled him the “teflon president” for his perceived ability to sidestep justice.
Zuma had been given a deadline of Sunday night for turning himself in.
Failing his surrender, police were given three days — until midnight Wednesday — to arrest him.
He filed a last-ditch petition to overturn the arrest and pleaded with the Constitutional Court to rescind its sentence. The court is to hear the plea on Monday.
Bucking the first deadline, Zuma had declared that he was prepared to go prison, even though “sending me to jail during the height of a pandemic, at my age, is the same as sentencing me to death.”
“I am not scared of going to jail for my beliefs,” he said. “I have already spent more than 10 years in Robben Island, under very difficult and cruel conditions.”
Minutes before midnight Wednesday, Zuma left his house in a convoy of vehicles speeding through dark rural roads “to comply with the incarceration order.”
After visiting Zuma in prison, South African Minister of Justice and Correctional Services Ronald Lamola said that the former president is in “very good spirits and has taken his breakfast, … his medication.”
“He is being taken care of, his jolly good self, laughing,” Lamola said.
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