President Thabo Mbeki’s challenge that a commission of inquiry be created to investigate claims that the charging and removal from office of Jacob Zuma was a conspiracy is either a brilliant tactical move, as most early comment seemed to agree, or the final throw of an exasperated rationalist who has become just sick and tired of the intellectual chaos in his own party.

I suspect it might be the latter. I suspect Mbeki no longer cares about the ANC and its allies. Zuma’s inability to tell right from wrong and his pursuit of a thoroughly inappropriate relationship with Schabir Shaik seem to mean absolutely nothing to the union, youth league and ANC cadres who now support him.

The calls for his reinstatement as deputy president and for his corruption trial to be stopped are so completely insane it is hard to contemplate even trying to discuss them with the Zuma camp.

Mbeki’s call for a commission of inquiry into the allegations that he is running some sort of political strategy to deny Zuma leadership of the party and country is a desperate one, like a rugby referee trying to stop an all-out brawl on the field by referring it to a television umpire.

But you can’t reason with mad people. You can’t reason with citizens who, in order to get their own political way, trash the constitution like so much waste paper.

You have to destroy them. Imagine a commission — even one made up of people of impeccable credentials — finding there was no conspiracy by the president or the Scorpions or anyone else to destroy Zuma. What chance Cosatu or the ANC Youth League or the KwaZulu-Natal ANC would accept it? Zero. Hell, the ANC under Mbeki has fostered conspiracy theories anyway. I can’t remember how often I have been on the receiving end of dark, knowing glances from people around the president about this or that supposed “agenda” in our reporting.

Mbeki has to win the fight by the force of his own personality. He has to give interviews (and not just to an obsequious national broadcaster), answer questions and make statements when important things like the Scorpions raids happen.

He needs to be grilled on national television by aggressive, skilled and independent commentators. He certainly doesn’t need the speaker of the National Assembly disallowing questions, as has just occurred, to him on the arms deal on the farcical grounds that it is of no national or international importance.

In short, Mbeki needs to put himself on the line. He’d probably be surprised how easily he could make the Zuma madness go away. ?

Of course, this whole dangerous affair turns on one pivotal and probably innocent moment — Bulelani Ngcuka and Penuell Maduna making a statement to the effect that while they had a prima facie case against Zuma they didn’t think they could prosecute him successfully. Did Mbeki see the statement before it was issued? It is quite conceivable that he did, and that between the three of them they failed to spot the threat posed by the prima facie phrase.

It was this that allowed Mbeki’s enemies (Zuma’s supporters were Mbeki’s enemies before they were Zuma supporters) to begin baying at the moon, and it also explains why they have never stopped.

Even now, a candid disclosure of the events surrounding that fateful statement would do much to diffuse the tension in the ANC and its allies. Citizens need to know who they can trust. That so many have chosen to trust a man who lived off a fraud speaks volumes for the relationship they feel they have with Mbeki.

With acknowledgements to Peter Bruce and the Business Day.