Gavin Woods, the chairman of Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Accounts, had one objective when he resigned this week: to force the tired topic of the arms deal back into the public eye.

Had it not been for Woods, from the IFP, and his ANC colleague Andrew Feinstein, who resigned from the committee in August last year, there would probably have been no investigation into the arms deal.

But when the investigators tabled their report in November, Woods was strangely silent.

Now after poring over the report of the inquiry and the transcripts of every Scopa meeting last year, Woods said that he had arrived at a "moment of truth" and realised that "Scopa has gone to hell".

For someone who had spent most of last year strategising how to outwit the far bigger and more powerful ANC majority, it was also a concession that finally he had been outmanoeuvred.

Woods and Feinstein were the force that got Parliament to agree to commission an investigation - both believing firmly that there had been criminal wrongdoing .

Clever, hard-working and of one mind regarding the arms deal, Woods and Feinstein, who led the ANC component of Scopa, stole the initiative in November 2000 - and before Feinstein's bosses within the ANC had time to blink, they had won consent from the entire committee for an extensive multi-agency probe into the deal.

The Scopa report calling for the inquiry was then rushed through Parliament in the last sitting of that year - perhaps, once again, without too many political heavies taking note of its implications.

It didn't take long for them to catch up. Beginning with a sudden intervention by the Speaker, Frene Ginwala, in the midst of the Christmas holidays, the ANC began the process of trying to gain control of a process that had got out of hand .

The game in Scopa became keeping up with Woods, containing his actions as the chairman - by packing the committee with ANC loyalists - and trying to steal back the initiative.

It was a battle into which everyone was dragged - from Ginwala, who improperly met the ANC members of Scopa (something she denies) to senior executive members Jacob Zuma and Essop Pahad .

When he resigned this week, Woods released two documents that he had compiled.

One provides a detailed and damaging critique of the report of the inquiry into the arms deal, which shows that the report fell far short of exonerating government.

The other is an account of the machinations in Scopa which, he says, caused the inquiry's failure.

Instead of a thorough investigation, Woods got a report that was only half complete and the release of which was brilliantly stage-managed by the ANC. Government was able to insist that the report has exonerated it, says Woods. But in fact, he says:

• None of the criminal allegations that were made were included in the report or refuted;

• The head of acquisitions, Chippy Shaik, and former Defence Minister Joe Modise were both heavily implicated;

• A matrix of all the different processes and bodies (many of them irregular) places Shaik at every level of the process; and

• Although the investigators discovered serious deviations from procedure they inexplicably concluded that these had no impact on the outcome.