Former president Jacob Zuma asked the high court on Tuesday to urgently stay the Constitutional Court's orders that he be arrested, pending his bid to rescind the court's contempt ruling and the 15-month sentence it imposed on him.
But he surrendered himself to police less than an hour before midnight on Wednesday after a night of high drama during which a phalanx of heavily armed police units was on its way to arrest the former statesman at his home in Nkandla in rural KwaZulu-Natal.
In his closing arguments, Zuma's representative, advocate Dali Mpofu suggested that dismissing the application could lead to "another Marikana".
Mpofu, who had earlier argued that the high court had jurisdiction to hear the matter, said that if the order was not suspended, it would amount to one of the most fundamental invasions of human rights that can ever be imagined in a case that dealt with an arrest of a person.
In this week's Editors' Table, assistant editor for in-depth news, Pieter du Toit, will lead a discussion on the events of the past 10 days and focus on whether Zuma's unprecedented actions had damaged South Africa's constitutional dispensation.
He will be joined by News24 editor-in-chief Adriaan Basson, specialist legal reporter Karyn Maughan and politics reporter Pule Letshwiti-Jones, who spent the past few days in Nkandla where Zuma's supporters had gathered in support of the former president.
Watch the discussion live on News24.