Altered image of former South African president Jacob Zuma in prison circulates in Nigeria

Disgraced former South African president Jacob Zuma is back in the news again as he makes a bid to lead the nation once more while his legal problems continue to mount. A popular Nigerian singer shared a picture purporting to show Zuma in prison when he was sentenced to jail for contempt of court. However, the picture has been doctored: Zuma’s face was added to the original image of inmates in Pollsmoor prison. AFP Fact Check debunked the same picture in 2021, the year Zuma went to jail.

“This is the former president of South Africa, Mr Jacob Zuma, in his prison uniform, queue for food with fellow inmates in a South African Prison. We must take our democracy to this level if we truly want accountability and good governance (sic),” reads the caption of a post shared on March 18, 2024, by Nigerian veteran singer Charles Chukwuemeka Oputa, popularly known as “Charly Boy”.

AFP Fact Check has previously debunked claims by Charly Boy (here and here).

The post has been shared more than a thousand times. The image shows a group of South African prisoners, Zuma purportedly being the one circled in green.

AFP Fact Check first debunked the image in 2021, the same year Zuma went to prison.

Imprisoned leader

Zuma served as president from 2009 to 2018 when he was forced out following a series of graft scandals.

In June 2021, he was sentenced to jail for 15 months after refusing to testify before a panel probing financial sleaze and cronyism under his presidency (archived here).

He started serving his term early in July 2021. The following month, he was admitted to the hospital for an undisclosed condition before being granted medical parole in September of the same year.

In November 2022, an appeals court found the release was illegally granted and ordered Zuma back to the Estcourt Correctional Centre in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province (archived here).

South Africa’s prison service, which had granted Zuma’s conditional release, appealed the decision, but the bid was dismissed by the Constitutional Court in July 2023.

In August 2023, Zuma was ordered to return to jail but he immediately benefited from a remission of sentence for non-violent offenders, approved by President Cyril Ramaphosa (archived here).

However, the post is misleading; the original image does not feature Zuma in prison.

Pollsmoor Prison

A reverse image search followed by a keyword search revealed that the original version of the picture was taken in Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town, South Africa, in October 2002 during a visit to the facility by former correctional services minister Ben Skosana.

The photo was taken by AFP photographer Anna Zieminski.

The original AFP photo, in which Zuma does not appear ( AFP / ANNA ZIEMINSKI)

Also, Zuma served his partial sentence in Estcourt Correctional Centre in Estcourt, KwaZulu-Natal and not Cape Town in the Western Cape.

Besides his 2021 contempt of court conviction, Zuma is facing separate charges of corruption in an arms procurement scandal dating to the late 1990s, when he was deputy president.

Following the failure of his first special plea in October 2021, the Pietermaritzburg High Court dismissed Zuma’s latest application to have state advocate Billy Downer removed as the prosecutor in his arms deal corruption trial (archived here and here).

Zuma was suspended from the governing ANC on January 29, 2024, for backing the fledgling MK party, which takes its name from the apartheid-era paramilitary wing (archived here).

The MK party has also announced the 81-year-old Zuma as its presidential candidate in the elections in May.