The actual arrest of Zuma is the test

If former president Jacob Zuma thought he could play a game of legal “chicken” with Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, then he made a big mistake.

The Commission of Inquiry into State Capture chair has started a process to have the former president charged with contempt after he walked out of its session last week.

Possibly, Zondo also believes in the old adage that if you give someone like Zuma enough rope, sooner or later he will hang himself.

The evasive politician has for years been fighting tooth and nail – the so-called “Stalingrad defence” – to avoid having his day in court on corruption and other charges, and has been doing the same to Zondo.

He has used just about every tactic in the book, from claiming illness to trying to have the commission chair recuse himself (on spurious grounds) … and the walkout was probably a calculated, albeit desperate, last throw of the dice.

Zuma clearly believed he was untouchable – as he has done for most of his career, before and after he occupied the highest office in the land.

At the same time, though, he and his supporters in the ANC’s “radical economic transformation” lobby – many of them linked to state capture – clearly hope to turn any warrant of arrest for him into a campaign to make him a martyr.

In this narrative of victimhood, Zuma is the innocent target of political machinations by his bitter political rival, current ANC and state President Cyril Ramaphosa.

No doubt there will be those who do still believe, despite the mountains of evidence pouring out at the inquiry, that the concept of state capture is a fiction of the Ramaphosa faction.

The crucial test – for both Zuma and the country as a whole – is whether an arrest warrant, if issued, will be executed.

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.