It is hard to actually grasp the reality that former president Jacob Zuma is in jail. Not for encouraging the capture of the state during his terms in office and not for his role in the old arms deal. He is behind bars for mere contempt of court. But spin it however you like, it is, in every possible way, a stunning reversal of fortune for him and for the gang of chancers and bottom feeders that still constitute the "Zuma faction" of the ANC.
Zuma lost a bid to have his arrest interdicted by the Pietermaritzburg high court on Friday. At the same time suspended ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule failed in the high court in Johannesburg to have his suspension overturned. Tomorrow the Constitutional Court will decline Zuma's appeal to rescind its decision to imprison him.
There was nothing noble about his going to jail. By Sunday Zuma's freedom to hand himself over to the authorities to begin his 15-month sentence had expired. The spin was that he had selflessly decided to avoid any violence by not resisting arrest. But resistance would have only increased his jail time. The violence in KwaZulu-Natal in the wake of his incarceration is serious and, typically, criminal but not out of control. No-one wants to die for Zuma any more. No-one should.
Better still, Zuma's imprisonment will stir a new confidence in the police, the courts, the prosecution authorities. Just about everybody. It will also send shivers down the spines of every politician, public official or state company manager who took a cent they shouldn't have.
This has been President Cyril Ramaphosa's doing - he has tried to stand key institutions back on their feet after the Zuma years, and as an institutional reformer he is beginning to succeed. The police on the whole are, sadly, still poorly led but the events of the past 10 days will leave indelible marks.
The raw lesson is that not only did we become a democracy in 1994; we became a constitutional democracy, not the parliamentary one we replaced and as countries like the UK remain. Zuma never came to terms with this. He ran the ANC like a Mafia don and as jail approached I am sure even then he never quite understood how it was all happening to him.
"They must tell me what it is that I have done," he wailed to every camera turned on him. But it no longer matters that he still can't tell right from wrong. It's over.
On Friday I watched Magashule give the longest TV interview in history on Newzroom Africa. As he rambled on about how alternative voices like his are excluded from the media I could almost tick off the reporters who get their "news" from Ace and write it verbatim and attribution-free.
There is a mass of people out there who support Zuma, and Ace himself. These are the days of their victimised lives. Oh, the fear of poisoning! And the cabal! The mobilisation against Ramaphosa will begin soon. ANC MPs speak to him privately. They want to resign. He tells them to stay. Never a name. He'll stay ANC forever. He "adored" Zuma.
And dark hints about people who "got money" from Ramaphosa's party leadership election campaign. Of course they did - the idea was to spend it on, um, campaigning.
Ramaphosa's rival in that election, Jacob Zuma's former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, also ran a busy campaign, but her financing was from the Guptas so there's little chance of an accounting there just yet.
Zuma will be out of jail in just over three months. It will give him time to join the battle to unseat Ramaphosa at the ANC congress in December 2022.
But Ramaphosa will by then have in hand deputy chief justice Raymond Zondo's report into state capture, stuffed with names and evidence against ANC leaders, many of whom will be prosecuted.
Inside his own party, Ramaphosa clearly now has the upper hand. His immediate frailties are the department of health and its botched vaccines, and populist but ultimately doomed economic policies like "localisation" which, while well intended, will destroy more jobs than they create. Ramaphosa the economic reformer is stuck in an ideological treacle.
But we're being swept along by an old-fashioned commodities boom that is making our finances look a lot better than expected, so no-one cares for now.
The fact is Zuma and his cronies vastly underestimated Ramaphosa when they made him deputy president in Bloemfontein in 2012. He would be their patsy. Turns out he is much more ambitious, self-controlled and cold than they ever imagined.
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