Former South African President Jacob Zuma turned himself in to police early on Thursday to begin serving a 15-month sentence. Just minutes before the deadline for the police arrest at midnight, Zuma left his home in Nkandla in a convoy of vehicles.
Zuma surrendered to authorities to obey the country’s highest court, the Constitutional Court, that he would serve time in prison for contempt. “President Zuma has decided to comply with the prison order. He is about to enter a prison facility in KZN (KwaZulu-Natal province),” said a tweet from the Zuma Foundation.
Shortly after the South African police confirmed that Zuma was in their custody. Zuma’s imprisonment comes after a week of rising tensions over his sentence. Zuma, 79, was sentenced to prison for contempt because he defied a court decision for him to testify before a judicial commission that investigated extensive allegations of corruption during his time as president, from 2009 to 2018.
The Constitutional Court ordered that if Zuma did not surrender to the police voluntarily, the police would arrest the country’s former president at the end of the day on Wednesday. On a last-minute basis to avoid going to jail, Zuma’s lawyers had written to the functioning Supreme Court requesting that his arrest be suspended until Friday, when a regional court will rule on his application to postpone the arrest.
Zuma’s lawyers asked the ruling Supreme Court to issue directives preventing police from arresting him, claiming there was a “prejudice against his life.”
The Supreme Court met late Wednesday, according to local reports, but apparently rejected Zuma’s request. Zuma had also initiated two court proceedings to avoid arrest following his sentence last week. He applied to the Constitutional Court to have his sentence overturned and that application will be heard on July 12.
On Tuesday, his lawyers were in Pietermaritzburg’s Supreme Court, trying to prevent the police minister from arresting him until the constitutional court ruled on his application. The regional court will consider that application on Friday.
Political tensions have risen in the province of KwaZulu-Natal as a result of Zuma’s conviction, punishment and ongoing arrest. Hundreds of his followers gathered at his home over the weekend and promised to prevent his arrest, but they left on Sunday.
The judicial inquiry into corruption during his tenure as president has heard condemnatory testimony from former cabinet ministers and top executives of state-owned enterprises that Zuma allowed his staff, members of the Gupta family, to influence his cabinet appointments and lucrative contracts. Zuma refused to comply with a court decision to meet with the Commission, which led the Constitutional Court to sentence him to contempt and sentence him to prison.
In a separate case, Zuma is facing charges of corruption in connection with a weapons agreement in 1999, in which he is alleged to have received bribes from the French arms manufacturer Thales. His financial adviser has already been convicted and imprisoned in that case. Zuma has had other legal problems. In 2005, he was accused of rape but acquitted in 2006 after the court found that intercourse was consensual.
Zuma bounced back from this to become president in 2009. But until 2018, evidence of nasty corruption in his administration increased his party, the ruling African National Congress, to force him out of office. Although Zuma is now damaged by scandal, he had built up a reputation as a strong opponent of apartheid, South Africa’s former regime of harsh white minority rule.
He was imprisoned for ten years in Robben Island Prison where political prisoners including Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu were held. When he was released in 1973, Zuma left the country to continue his work in the African National Congress and travels through countries such as Swaziland, Zambia and Mozambique.
When South Africa legalized the ANC in 1990, Zuma was a high-ranking official in the party and was part of the negotiations on the political settlement that led to the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. Zuma’s reputation in the new South Africa was further strengthened. when he was sent to his hometown of KwaZulu-Natal where he helped resolve political violence that threatened to track the country’s progress towards a democratic and non-racial society.
Zuma’s political reputation will be marred by the corruption scandals surrounding him, says Lesiba Teffo, senior lecturer in politics at the University of South Africa.
“It is very disappointing to see a man who has done so much for the country, a liberation hero, now reduced to zero,” says Teffo. “This is a man who fought hard for the liberation of this country, but like many African leaders on our continent, he fell at the altar of money.” By MOGOMOTSI MAGOME Associated Press
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