Former ANC chief whip Tony Yengeni has accused former national director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka of being an apartheid spy.

Talk Radio 702 reported last night that in a second affidavit filed yesterday in the Pretoria High Court in support of his bid to have his four-year sentence for defrauding parliament overturned, Yengeni said Ngcuka "continues today to be an agent in the hands of the most backward reactionary right-wing political forces in the country".

He said Ngcuka was "pursuing his own political agenda in which opponents are strategically targeted and their reputations are destroyed by using the media to discredit them".

Yengeni said he had known Ngcuka was a spy back in the 1980s and that such allegations - which were investigated last year by the Hefer Commission of Inquiry - were not new.

It was because of them that Yengeni had avoided Ngcuka and excluded him from all operations while he was commander of uMkhonto weSizwe in the Western Cape in the late 1980s.

"Ngcuka knows of my knowledge of his activities and this strengthens the vendetta against me," Yengeni claimed in his affidavit.

He also linked Ngcuka to the IFP's Phillip Powell, saying he had protected Powell from prosecution.

"Powell was directly linked to supplying the Third Force elements with arms to kill members of the liberation movement."

This was in line, according to Yengeni, with Ngcuka's "overall right-wing political agenda".

Ngcuka's spokesman, Sipho Ngwema, said he had not seen Yengeni's latest affidavit. "I heard (about) it for the first time on Radio 702."

Noting that Ngcuka had been cleared by the Hefer Commission, he said Yengeni's allegations "will not be dignified with a response".

"They are desperate words from a desperate man."

With acknowledgements to Shaun Smillie, Angela Quintal and the Cape Times.