South Africa’s former president and ANC stalwart Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma has been taken into custody to begin his 15-month jail term for contempt of the constitutional court, ending a lengthy legal battle to avoid the Constitutional incarceration order last week.
Just minutes to spare before midnight, Zuma was whisked to jail late on Wednesday, barely minutes before a midnight deadline to arrest him, according to the South Africa’s police ministry.
South Africa’s constitutional court sentenced Zuma to 15 months last week for defying its order to attend a judicial inquiry into allegations he aided systematic corruption during his presidency, which ended in 2018.
The police ministry spokesperson, Lirandzu Themba, confirmed Zuma was in the care of the police service, in compliance with a constitutional court judgment, early on Thursday and prison authorities later confirmed he “has been admitted to start serving a 15 months sentence at Estcourt Correctional Centre” in his home province.
Zuma missed a Sunday deadline to turn himself in, which obliged the police to follow a court order to arrest him by the end of Wednesday, despite last-minute legal attempts by the former president to seek a reprieve.
The Jacob Zuma Foundation on Wednesday said he “decided to comply with the incarceration order” and was “on his way to hand himself into a correctional services facility” in KwaZulu-Natal, his home province.
Zuma’s own protection team of police officers took him into custody just as a convoy of police vehicles converged on his Nkandla compound. A motorcade then whisked him to a prison in Estcourt, a town about 200km away with no resistance of blockade by onlooking supporters.
By Wednesday, these supporters had dwindled, and as SABC showed Zuma’s motorcade sweeping out of the homestead just before midnight, none took up arms.
His jailing marked a turning point for the ANC and for Cyril Ramaphosa, Zuma’s successor as party leader and president, who has pledged to rebuild state institutions.
“Without doubt this is a difficult period in the movement” but the party respects the supremacy of South Africa’s constitution, the ANC said in a statement on Thursday.
The fact that Zuma’s own state-provided security detail took him into custody showed that the “robustness” of South Africa’s institutions had won out in the end, said Sithembile Mbete, a political scientist at the University of Pretoria.
Meanwhile next week, the constitutional court will hear Zuma’s challenge to rescind the sentence, while a judgment is expected on Friday on a separate attempt to interdict the order in a lower court. The 79-year-old, struggle veteran had breathed defiance to the last including his son Edward who kept media entertained with his remarks. Zuma had remarked on Sunday that “sending me to jail during the height of a pandemic at my age is the same as sentencing me to death”, after a show of force at his homestead in Nkandla.
