Bloemfontein : was sweltering this week, and things were even hotter on the third floor of the Justicia building, and not only because of the rickety air conditioning in the cramped conference room where the Hefer commission hearings are taking place.

But through it all, commission chairman Joos Hefer has generally managed to maintain a cool demeanour among the potentially fractious participants through his witty interventions and a wry sense of humour.

In fact, the commission's hearing over the past week has been marked by humour and lightheartedness that seem oddly in contrast to the deadly seriousness of its topic.

Perhaps precisely because the commission is dealing with allegations that really strike at the heart of how the African National Congress defines itself, the humour sometimes borders on nervousness.

Former transport minister Mac Maharaj gave evidence just a few metres away from the man he was accusing, Scorpions chief Bulelani Ngcuka.

Former Sunday Times journalist Ranjeni Munusamy sat next to former intelligence officer Mo Shaik. At one point, the wives of Ngucka and Shaik were in the room together.

The atmosphere was like a pressure cooker. Perhaps unwittingly, cooking came up several times. At one point Maharaj said: "I don't cook things up. I have done no cooking here."

Cooking or no cooking, Maharaj's skills as a politician were on full display, as he showed an amazing ability to answer questions at length without saying anything at all. This led to counsel for the commission, Kessie Naidu, no slouch in the garrulousless department himself, asking Hefer to intervene to stop Maharaj from repeating himself.

Hefer raised his eyebrow and asked: "Do you want to try and stop him?"

Counsel for Justice Minister Penuell Maduna Norman Arendse said in frustration: "We are going to sit here for longer because you never answer a question directly."

Maharaj gave the perfect politician's reply, saying: "I hope you are not using the word never' in its absolute form." For politicians, obviously, "never" has a certain inherent flexibility.

But if politicians came off badly, journalists came off worse, drawing unfavourable comparisons with fish.

Naidu asked Maharaj whether he had asked Munusamy where she got her documents.

Maharaj said no "they fish from you but they don't allow you to catch them".

Pressed by Naidu, Maharaj said he tended to let journalists talk as much as possible to avoid having to answer questions himself. "I am doing the same with you," Maharaj said.

"I noticed," Naidu said wryly. "You are not making any friends in the media today." But Maharaj said he meant no prejudice, and considered it merely part of journalistic tradecraft.

In a way, the central issue of the commission revolves around tradecraft. Was it correct for Shaik to draw the conclusions he did on the information he had at his disposal?

Shaik's problem, and that of the commission, is that the tradecraft of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) is that they are not particularly prone to revealing aspects of their trade.

At one point yesterday, Shaik suggested that the commission investigate information held by the NIA. Hefer responded by saying; "We tried to do that and the answer was a big nyet."

The cross-examination has, however, revealed some interesting things about the NIA and ANC intelligence: both had an obsession with codes. File numbers, codes and cross-references are a feature of the Shaik documents.

The eye-opener was the crossexamination on behalf of Ngcuka by Marumo Moerane, who managed, in the most delicate way possible, to destroy Maharaj's credibility and his evidence.

He managed to extract admission after admission, culminating in Maharaj's statement that he did not know whether Ngcuka was a spy.

Maharaj said at one point that his integrity was immensely precious to him. But what kind of integrity do you have if you implicitly accuse someone of being a spy in public without coming to a decision in your own mind first?

With acknowledgements to Tim Cohen and the Business Day.