Mac Maharaj and his gang badly miscalculated. It is likely that they did not anticipate President Thabo Mbeki would call their bluff by establishing a commission of inquiry into their claim that Bulelani Ngcuka, the national prosecutions authority chief, was an apartheid spy.

They have to now put up or shut up, and it seems they are having a hellish time putting up.

Now that Vanessa Brereton has come out to claim she was agent RS452, Maharaj and his gang are telling us it is not their contention that Ngcuka was agent RS452. And yet this was the basis of their scurrilous allegations against Ngcuka.

After sending journalists and the country on a wild goose chase, they are now telling us we were chasing the wrong goose after all.

We have to start all over again, at taxpayers' expense of course.

Their new tack is to take us on a fishing expedition. With the rug having been removed from under their feet by Brereton's confession, Maharaj and his gang have resorted to suggesting that in 1982 Ngcuka sold out Ntobeko Maq- hubela, Mboniso Maqhutyana and Mpumelelo Gaba.

The three were convicted of high treason for a series of bomb blasts in the Durban area between 1980 and 1981. They were each sentenced to 20 years in jail.

The background to this case is that the African National Congress (ANC) had infiltrated a cadre, Litha Jolobe, into SA to conduct a series of operations with Maqhubela's unit in Durban. Jolobe had been instructed by his handler in exile to pick up a parcel from a dead letter box in the architecture library of the University of Natal, where he was arrested.

He had clearly been set up by the person instructing him from exile. Under the weight of torture Jolobe broke down and spilled the beans about the ANC's operations in the area, which subsequently led to Maqhubela's arrest.

Jolobe, Luyanda Mphahlwa, Mbulelo Hongo and Ngcuka, all members of the ANC underground in Durban, were subsequently called to testify against Maqhubela.

They refused and were all imprisoned for sentences ranging from three years to five years.

Now why would the apartheid government send one of their own, Ngcuka, to rot in jail for three years? The plot thickens.

In a further act of desperation Maharaj's camp are now suggesting that Ngcuka did not serve his entire jail term, and may have received preferential treatment throughout his stay.

Through one of their lawyers, Julie Mahomed, Maharaj and his gang approached Maqhubela to ask if he thought Ngcuka was the one who had sold them out.

I don't know what would make them think that Maqhubela would turn against someone who had gone to jail to protect him 20 years ago.

Maqhubela dismissed the insinuation with the contempt it deserved: "Bulelani could not have played any role in terms of causing us to be arrested."

He offered a number of reasons why this was such an impossibility, including the fact that Ngcuka did not know anything about this unit's particular operations, and that the person who had sold them out was the person who had set Jolobe up for arrest, and that person was known to Maharaj and Mo Shaik.

It was a brilliant performance by Maqhubela. But what struck me most was the integrity of the man, and the calmness with which he approached the matter. He said he could not believe anyone would come to make such ludicrous allegations against Ngcuka, given what Ngcuka had suffered at the hands of the security police even after his release from prison.

He was detained, went on a seven- day hunger strike, and was subsequently banned.

Unless Ngcuka was a great actor with an incredible amount of endurance for pain, it makes no sense that the apartheid authorities would torture one of their own informers like this. The only reason Maqhubela could fathom for Maharaj and Shaik's actions was that they and their ilk are under investigation for corruption. It is indeed a sorry and miserable act of diversion and make-belief.

And what about journalist Ranjeni Munusamy's assertion that she will not testify because her life might be in danger? Does this suggest that she relies for her political reportage on a political underworld, a political Mafioso who will kill its own people?

Whatever her sources, they have with her collusion done nothing less than deface our integrity as a nation.

Some time ago I suggested that what was happening to Ngcuka was sad. I now take that back. It is actually quite despicable.

The corruption charges against Maharaj and his gang must proceed, Ngcuka should take them to the cleaners for defamation, and the rest of the nation should bow its head in shame whenever these individuals rear their ugly heads of innuendo in public again. Our collective integrity demands it.

Mangcu is executive director of the Steve Biko Foundation.

With acknowledgements to Mangcu and the Business Day.