South Africa’s top election court on Tuesday overturned an election commission ban on former President Jacob Zuma, clearing the way for Zuma to run in the May 29 election despite having been jailed in 2021 for refusing to testify in a corruption probe.
Zuma, 81, was president from 2009 to 2018. A member of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, he rose to fame as a dedicated opponent of apartheid. When the apartheid system fell and the old government’s ban on the ANC was removed in 1990, Zuma’s rise through party politics was meteoric — he held a party leadership position within a year and was appointed as President Thabo Mbeki’s deputy in 1999.
Zuma’s troubles with corruption began during his time as deputy president, leading to Mbeki dismissing him from the post and trying to kick him out of the ANC in 2005. This launched a bitter struggle for power between the two party leaders.
Zuma’s supporters dismissed all of the corruption charges, plus a rape charge in 2006, as politically motivated hit jobs, pointing to the tendency of South Africa’s courts to dismiss the cases against him after years of deliberations.
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Mbeki was the one who wound up getting drummed out of office after most of the corruption charges against Zuma were dismissed, and Zuma took his place in 2009 despite a fresh wave of graft allegations. These charges were more serious and substantiated, but Zuma skated on technicalities, including accusations of prosecutorial misconduct.
More corruption cases bloomed during Zuma’s administration. He was almost knocked out of office by a vote of no confidence in 2016, but held on until party leaders forced him to resign in 2018. The ANC remained dominant in South African politics despite some setbacks, so the party’s former deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa succeeded Zuma, and remains in office to this day.
Several corruption investigations continued to hound Zuma after he left office, including a wide-ranging probe into graft during his presidency that compelled him to testify in the summer of 2021. Zuma refused to appear as ordered, so he was sentenced to 15 months in prison for contempt of court, becoming the first South African current or former president to serve prison time.
Zuma received kid-glove treatment from the prison system, ending with a shockingly early medical parole after only two months in jail. The opposition threw a fit, so Zuma was marched back to jail in August 2023 — only to be released again after just two hours, as the very first beneficiary of an early-release program authorized by Ramaphosa supposedly intended to reduce prison overcrowding.
The opposition threw up its hands and declared the South African system to be an “absolute joke.” A tiny measure of justice seemed to creep back into the picture in March when the election commission barred Zuma from running in the May general election due to his contempt of court conviction, citing a provision of the South African constitution that bans persons sentenced to more than 12 months in prison from holding public office.
The ban was overturned by South Africa’s election court on Tuesday, however, as Zuma’s lawyers successfully argued the rule should not apply to him because he was jailed for refusing to cooperate with a civil trial instead of a criminal proceeding, and because his sentence was shortened to far less than 12 months.
Zuma’s clearance to run for office is highly significant despite his age and checkered past, because he is no longer a member of the ANC — he is now the leading candidate of a new opposition party called uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), whose name translates to “Spear of the Nation.” This was also the name of the ANC’s paramilitary wing during the apartheid years.
MK is a populist party registered in late 2023 that bills itself as the true inheritor of the ANC’s revolutionary spirit. Some opinion polls show MK with more than 10 percent support nationwide, which could make it one of South Africa’s top three parties — and combined with other growing opposition parties and a dramatic slide in ANC’s popularity, May could be the first election in which the ANC slips under 50 percent of the vote since the end of apartheid.
Analyst Richard Calland told the BBC last month that Zuma is really just “playing a mischievous hand” and seeking to regain influence in the African National Congress with his third-party bid. Calland expected MK to run well behind its opinion poll numbers, as upstart populist South African parties often do. He pointed to the example of former ANC youth leader Julius Malema’s garish Economic Freedom Fighter (EFF) party, which caused a media sensation at launch but took only six percent of the national vote in its debut election. MK is “not as organized” as EFF was, so it can be expected to fare even more poorly in its first run at the polls.
“I’ll be surprised if he gets 6%,” Calland said of Zuma’s prospects — but he added that even such a weak showing could be important in a crowded election where ANC finally loses its traditional majority of the vote.
“Once we enter minority government territory, every single percentage matters. If the MK party gets 3%, it could be the difference between the ANC getting 48% and 51%,” he pointed out.
Zuma could be a particular headache for ANC in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal, whose huge population has been crucial to putting ANC over 50 percent for the past twenty years. ANC is worried enough about MK to try banning it from the election with a court challenge, or at least prevent it from using the name MK, which ANC claims it holds the copyright on.
It is also possible that South Africa’s election commission could appeal Tuesday’s court ruling and attempt to reinstate its ban on Zuma running for office. Local analysts view that scenario as unlikely because the appeal would probably lose, and the election commission would open itself to charges of nakedly attempting to interfere with the May election.
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