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Former South African President Jacob Zuma has surrendered to police to start serving a 15-month prison sentence for contempt of court.
He was admitted to the Estcourt Correctional Center in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal on Wednesday.
The police had warned that they were ready to arrest him if he didn’t surrender by midnight.
Zuma, 79, was sentenced to jail last week after failing to investigate corruption.
The conviction sparked an unprecedented legal drama in South Africa, which has never seen a former president jailed before.
Zuma initially refused to surrender, but in a brief statement Wednesday the Jacob Zuma Foundation said he had “decided to comply.”
Her daughter, Dudu Zuma-Sambudla, later wrote on Twitter that her father was “on his way [to the jail] and he’s always in a good mood ”.
Zuma was convicted on June 29 for defying an instruction to testify in an investigation into corruption during his nine years in office. He only testified once during the investigation into what became of “state capture”, that is, the siphoning of state property.
Businessmen have been accused of conspiring with politicians to influence decision-making while in office. But Zuma has repeatedly said he is the victim of a political conspiracy.
Although he was forced to resign by his own party in 2018, the African National Congress (ANC), he retains a staunch body of supporters, especially in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal.
Crowds formed what they called a human shield outside Zuma’s lavish home on Sunday in an attempt to prevent his arrest. Similar crowds gathered before he surrendered on Wednesday.
BBC’s Noma Maseko, who was outside Zuma’s home on Wednesday, noted that there was a heavy police presence outside the property which included armed officers and a paramilitary unit.
A delegation of senior officers reportedly spent several hours inside the residence negotiating with the former president over his arrest.
A convoy of cars, one of which was carrying Zuma, was then seen leaving the house at high speed shortly before the midnight deadline for his detention.
Zuma had previously said he was ready to go to jail.
However, he said that “to send me to prison at the height of a pandemic, at my age, is tantamount to sentencing me to death.”
In a separate legal case, Zuma pleaded not guilty last month in a corruption lawsuit involving a $ 5 billion (£ 3 billion) arms deal in the 1990s.
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