Jacob Zuma corruption charges

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This article is part of a series about Jacob Zuma
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Jacob Zuma, the former president of South Africa, is currently facing criminal charges relating to alleged corruption in the 1999 Arms Deal. He was first indicted on the charges in June 2005, but attempts to prosecute him have been beset by legal challenges and political controversy. He is currently charged with two counts of corruption, one count each of racketeering and money laundering, and twelve counts of fraud, all arising from his receipt of 783 payments which the state alleges were bribes from businessman Schabir Shaik and French arms company Thales.^[1][2]

The Arms Deal, a major defence procurement package, was signed shortly after Zuma was appointed deputy president in 1999, and both Shaik and Thales had financial interests in the underlying contracts. By 2003, Zuma was one of several South African politicians rumoured to have benefited improperly from the deal, and these rumours appeared to receive substantiation during Shaik's criminal trial. In June 2005, the court convicted Shaik of making corrupt payments to Zuma in connection with the Arms Deal, including annual payments of R500,000 made on behalf of Thales. In the aftermath of the judgement, President Thabo Mbeki fired Zuma as deputy president, and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) instituted formal corruption charges against him. However, the charges were struck off the court roll in September 2006 due to the NPA's unreadiness to proceed with the trial.

At the Polokwane conference in December 2007, Zuma was elected president of the African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party. Just over a week later, the NPA reinstated the charges against him. The charges were set aside again in September 2008, when high court judge Chris Nicholson declared them unlawful on procedural grounds. Nicholson also suggested that political interference in the NPA had played a significant role in Zuma's prosecution. This finding inflamed an ongoing political rivalry between Zuma and Mbeki, and it led the ANC National Executive Committee to demand Mbeki's resignation as national president. In January 2009, the Supreme Court of Appeal overturned Nicholson's ruling. Yet in April 2009, the NPA voluntarily withdrew the charges against Zuma due to new allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, this time fuelled by the so-called spy tapes.

Zuma's presidency lasted between May 2009 and February 2018. In the middle of his second term, in April 2016, the Pretoria High Court ruled that the NPA's April 2009 decision to drop the charges had been irrational. That decision was therefore set aside, and the NPA's new leadership was required to decide anew whether to reinstate the charges. On 16 March 2018, just over a month after Zuma resigned as president, the NPA announced that Zuma would again face prosecution. His first court appearance was on 6 April 2018 in the Durban Magistrates' Court, but the trial was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and by what commentators dubbed Zuma's Stalingrad defence. In the interim, in a separate legal matter, he was imprisoned for contempt of court. He pleaded not guilty to the Arms Deal charges on 26 May 2021, and the trial was set to resume on 11 April 2022.^[3]