Zuma’s Arrest Was a Victory for Rule of Law
Just before midnight on July 7, a previously unthinkable event took place in South Africa. Former President Jacob Zuma was taken into custody by South African police at his rural homestead in Nkandla, KwaZulu-Natal, and transported to a prison within the province, where he started a 15-month sentence as legal punishment for a guilty verdict handed down by South Africa’s Constitutional Court—the country’s highest—for being in contempt of that court.
The subsequent looting and violent protests that shook South Africa are a reminder of the limits of using legal instruments to address socioeconomic and political crises. Law matters, but it must be complemented with political solutions to political problems.
Despite the ensuing unrest, the imprisonment of a former president represents a triumph for constitutionalism in a region where former liberation movement heroes, such as Zimbabwe’s first democratic president, Robert Mugabe, often became neocolonial thugs who reproduced the anti-democratic abuses of the colonialists they defeated. In fact, the story of Zuma’s imprisonment
