Former President Zuma MK Party
Zuma Is Running Again: Jacob Zuma, who resigned as South Africa’s president in 2018, is now staging his biggest comeback act yet by running in the parliamentary elections with an upstart opposition party at the top of its ticket.
The A.N.C., which suspended Mr. Zuma as a party member in January over his campaigning for MK, has tried several times to stop the new rival’s momentum.
It challenged the legality of MK’s electoral registration last month but lost a court bid. Then it tried to stop Mr. Zuma’s new party, which bears the name of the A.N.C.’s apartheid-era armed wing, from using a name and colors historically associated with the party of Nelson Mandela, arguing that to do so would create confusion among voters. The court ruled in favor of Mr. Zuma then, too.
The Electoral Court ruled in favour of the Former President Mr. Zuma
When the special electoral court sided with Mr. Zuma on Tuesday, it did not give reasons for its decision to allow him to run as a candidate. An earlier decision by the IEC had ruled him ineligible to run because of the 15-month prison sentence. He received for defying a court order in a national corruption inquiry three years ago. Mr. Zuma’s lawyers argued that he was eligible because he had been released on medical parole two months into his sentence and was later pardoned by President Ramaphosa, his successor and now political rival.
Mr. Zuma, no stranger to the courts, has turned these court appearances into spontaneous political rallies.
Mr. Zuma has spun his legal battles into a tale of political persecution that his supporters have lapped up. During his televised court hearing this week, Mr. Zuma’s lawyers accused the Independent Electoral Commission of political bias.
“The attitude has been, ‘Let’s see where we can catch him,’” Dali Mpofu, Mr. Zuma’s lawyer, told the court.
