Ex South African President Jacob Zuma goes to prison

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Ex-South African President Jacob Zuma has been ordered to prison for 15 months on contempt charges by the country’s highest court on Tuesday.

The judgement was read by Justice Sisi Khampepe in a sparsely populated courtroom in Johannesburg.

This is after he defied an order to appear before a corruption inquiry examining the financial scandals he is accused of when he was President from 2009 to 2018.

Zuma, a comrade of Nelson Mandela and one of the dominant figures in the governing African National Congress party since apartheid ended in 1994, was not in court on Tuesday, and he was not immediately taken into custody.

The decision by the Constitutional Court to have him arrested came five months after that same body ordered him to appear before the corruption inquiry, led by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, which he defied.

Beyond the commission’s inquiry, Zuma faces additional serious legal troubles related to corruption allegations.

He is being prosecuted on charges of racketeering, corruption, fraud and money laundering after being accused of taking bribes from a French arms manufacturer when he was deputy president in 1999. That trial was set to start earlier this year, but the case has been delayed repeatedly.

There have been efforts to fight corruption and regain public confidence by the incubent president, Ramaphosa. In recent months, he haas gone after some of his own party’s leading figures — including the health minister, in the middle of the pandemic, and the A.N.C. secretary-general, the third-most powerful member of the party — who have been accused of corruption, forcing them to step aside from their roles within the A.N.C. while they face charges.

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