Two icons of the liberation struggle were humiliated in public this week as they failed to make their 'apartheid spy' claims stick, writes S'thembiso Msomi

Shaky under pressure Mo Shaik giving evidence at the Hefer commission of inquiry this week. Picture Simon Mathebula

'No, I hold no flag for my brother. I do hold it for someone else though. But that is for another time'

 'The problem with Mac Maharaj," quipped one spectator during the tea break, "is that he used to be a commissar and is not used to being questioned. He is already losing his temper even though he is still under friendly fire."

It was Monday afternoon, the first day of the former transport minister's testimony in support of claims that National Prosecuting Authority head Bulelani Ngcuka "might have been" an apartheid-era spy - yet it was already becoming clear that the seasoned freedom fighter was in for it.

The "friendly fire" referred to was coming from Kessie Naidu, evidence leader for the Hefer commission of inquiry and Maharaj's one-time landlord. Still to interrogate him were Justice Minister Penuell Maduna's legal representative Norman Arendse, and Ngcuka's lawyer Marumo Moerane - who was to later force Maharaj into the embarrassing admission that he did not know whether Ngcuka was once a spy or not.

The battle lines were drawn long before this appearance before retired Judge Joos Hefer. On the one side is Ngcuka and his Scorpions unit, whose powers Ngcuka is alleged to have abused in an attempt to settle old scores with certain prominent ANC members. Cheering for him were his wife, Minerals and Energy Minister Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Maduna, and prominent ANC member and businessman Saki Macozoma.

On Maharaj's side was the former head of the then-banned ANC's internal counter-intelligence unit, Mo Shaik, whose brother Schabir had been charged by the Scorpions for alleged corruption relating to the arms deal.

Apart from a dozen or so ANC sympathisers who staged a five-minute protest outside the Justicia building where the commission is being held, no prominent member of the party has expressed public support for the two.

This in a province - the Free State - which recently threw a spanner in the works of the ANC hierarchy by voting Deputy President Jacob Zuma ahead of President Thabo Mbeki in its list of national candidates for next year's elections. Maharaj and Shaik consider themselves among Zuma's closest friends.

So soured are the relations between the erstwhile comrades-in-arms that the protagonists barely spoke to each other throughout this week's hearings. They even avoided having lunch at the same restaurant.

Before Mbeki appointed the commission to investigate claims that Ngcuka was an apartheid-state agent, Maharaj and Shaik had publicly confirmed media reports that the Scorpions head was the subject of an investigation by the ANC's Project Bible counter-intelligence unit, which was set up to expose moles within party structures in the 1980s.

But this week the two struggle icons humiliated themselves in public on a number of occasions.

Naidu, Moerane and Arendse dug major holes in the evidence supporting a 1989 conclusion by Project Bible that Ngcuka was "most probably" security branch source RS 452 and that he worked for the then National Intelligence Service .

This conclusion was mainly based on two documents said to have been acquired by Shaik's unit from a mole within the security police in the 1980s. One relates to the activities of the National Democratic Lawyers (Nadel), of which Ngcuka was a member, and the other is about the Henk van Handel Trust, of which Ngcuka was a trustee.

Former Eastern Cape lawyer Vanessa Brereton - who has since confessed to being agent RS 452 - was also a member of Nadel and her firm was said to have had an involvement with the trust.

Shaik, whose unit is credited with exposing a number of agents who had infiltrated the ANC, broke down under questioning as he recalled how his inaction at one stage had resulted in the death of certain ANC members.

But it was when he was speaking about the evidence against Ngcuka that Shaik was most unconvincing. For instance, part of his argument that Ngcuka was a spy was based on a police statement made by a detainee who suggested that Ngcuka had known about the arrest of one of his comrades, Patrick Maqubela, before being told so by someone else.

The fact that Maqubela was arrested right outside his offices - which were close to Ngcuka's - and that Ngcuka was in the office at the time of the arrest, was ignored by Shaik during his investigation.

Other information, like the claim that slain anti-apartheid lawyer Griffiths Mxenge had instructed Ngcuka to leave his firm because of political differences, was single-sourced and not supported by any documentation.

This prompted Naidu at one stage to call Shaik's information - the sources of which he refused to reveal - "mere gossip".

At times Maharaj seemed choked up as he struggled to explain why, if sufficient information about Ngcuka's alleged spying activities had been gathered in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was still searching for information a few weeks ago.

The former commander of Operation Vula - a secret operation set up by the ANC in 1986 to infiltrate some of its leaders back into the country - found himself on the back foot in many instances, and was forced to point to Shaik as the only source of his information.

In one dramatic exchange with Moerane, Maharaj had Judge Hefer and the lawyers in stitches as he avoided giving a direct answer to a specific question.

Moerane "I am putting it to you that Ngcuka was never a spy. I am putting it as a positive statement for you to react. So the answer to that question is, 'I disagree, he was a spy, he was not a spy, or I don't know'."

Maharaj "I would prefer the third answer from my side to say I think it is a question that legitimately needs to be investigated."

Moerane "The reasonable inference to draw is that, Mr Maharaj, you don't know. Isn't that true?"

Maharaj "I cannot make a conclusion on the matter on the information at my disposal . . ."

Moerane "So you do not know. Why is it so difficult to say such a simple thing, 'I do not know'?"

Maharaj "That was not the first proposition you put to me. Your first proposition was either he was not or he was and there was a third one whose formulation I cannot remember."

Moerane, in an impatient voice "The third one, Mr Maharaj, is the one which you are consistently refusing to concede and that is 'I do not know'."

Maharaj then "accepted" - live on television - that he did not know whether the head of the Scorpions was once a spy or not.

The drama did not end with Maharaj's testimony. Shaik stunned the commission when he threatened to walk out unless Naidu undertook not to ask him questions relating to his torture by apartheid security police.

"It is a humiliating experience of which you have no experience. If you do not give an assurance that you will not ask me about it I will leave now and provide no further assistance to this commission," a highly emotional Shaik shouted at Naidu.

Shaik, it seems, misunderstood Naidu's question, which clearly aimed to demonstrate that statements obtained from tortured detainees could not be entirely relied upon as evidence. As part of the documents presented by Shaik to the commission to support his unit's conclusion about Ngcuka were a number of statements signed by people while they were being interrogated by the police.

But at the core of the outbursts by Maharaj and Shaik was the belief that they were being betrayed by the post-apartheid South Africa they had spent their lives fighting for.

For Maharaj, who was held in the same high esteem as other ANC military leaders such as Chris Hani and Joe Slovo, it seems hard to fathom that he could today find himself the subject of an investigation by the very state he helped to create.

He told the Sunday Times on Wednesday "My friend, tell me a single person who served the struggle from the grassroots level to national level, but repeatedly returned to the trenches throughout our struggle, like I did."

Part of his suspicion about Ngcuka, Maharaj told the commission, was that the conduct of the head of the Scorpions in investigating a number of cases involving high profile ANC members did "not fit the profile" of a party member.

He pointed to probes into Zuma, himself, North West Premier Popo Molefe, Schabir Shaik and KwaZulu-Natal Health MEC Zweli Mkhize as indicative of a "disturbing" pattern within the Scorpions of targeting certain ANC leaders for trial by the media.

Mkhize, a well-known Zuma loyalist, this week joined the fray by announcing he had reported the Scorpions to the Public Protector for tarnishing his image by announcing that he was being investigated for gunrunning.

The Scorpions are yet to charge him, even though the statement confirming an investigation was issued in 1999 - at a time when Mkhize was one of two ANC leaders in the running for the KwaZulu-Natal premiership.

So, could Shaik's motive for making spy allegations about Ngcuka, "reconstructing" a 1989 intelligence document and flying notorious apartheid-era security policeman Gideon Nieuwoudt from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg for an e.tv programme, be the fact that his brother is facing prosecution by the Scorpions?

"No, I hold no flag for my brother," said Shaik. "I do hold it for someone else though. But that is for another time."

Could that someone else be Zuma, some of whose supporters believe the Scorpions' arms deal investigation is part of a plan to push him out of his post as deputy president next year?

Besides the fact that his brother Schabir is Zuma's financial adviser, Shaik's own relationship with Zuma dates back to their underground involvement in Project Bible.

With acknowledgements to S'thembiso Msomi and the Sunday Times.