Flushed with its success in the Shaik trial, the National Prosecuting Authority jumped the gun and charged Zuma before it had prepared a case against him

In the view of Judge Herbert Q Msimang in the Pietermaritzburg high court on Wednesday, it was clear and simple.

The National Prosecuting Authority's (NPA) biggest balls-up in relation to Jacob Zuma was that the state charged the former deputy president before it had properly prepared the case against him.

This was Msimang's main reason for not allowing the state a postponement of the trial. And it was why, since the state said that it was not ready to proceed with the trial there and then, Msimang there and then said he had no choice but to strike the case off the roll. And the Zulu kingdom and the Cosatu conference erupted in a spasm of joy.

"If a person has been charged very early in [a] complex case that has been inadequately prepared," quoted Msimang from a judgment by Judge Johann Kriegler, "and there is no compelling reason for this [early charging of the person], a court should not allow the complexity of the case to justify an over-lengthy delay."

Msimang continued: "It is now history that these words of wisdom … were jettisoned by the state [in the case of Zuma] in favour of some non-procedural policy and a precipitate decision was taken to prosecute [Zuma] a mere 12 days after what the prosecution perceived to be their success in the [Durban businessman Schabir] Shaik trial."

So what is a "non-procedural policy"?

From the judge's point of view, it is a policy that excludes good or valid legal reasons for doing something.

In short, the judge was saying that the NPA charged Zuma, before being adequately prepared, for reasons unrelated to the law.

Zuma was charged because… Well, it seems Zuma was charged because, as Msimang said, the NPA, flushed by its success in the Shaik trial, believed it could easily nail him. In fact, in an affidavit in support of the trial postponement, Vusi Pikoli, the national director of public prosecutions (NDPP), said exactly this.

He said that, in the days following the sentencing of Shaik in the Durban high court on June 8 2005, he got together with his investigators.

They told him that it stood to reason, following Judge Hilary Squires's judgment that Shaik had been in a generally corrupt relationship with Zuma - that it always takes two to tango - that Zuma could be successfully prosecuted.

On June 20 the NPA charged Zuma with fraud and corruption.

In retrospect, however, there were some curious issues of timing.

In the days preceding June 14, Pikoli had been on the same trip as President Thabo Mbeki to Chile.

On June 14, Mbeki fired Zuma because of the Shaik judgment.

Pikoli has testified under oath (in an affidavit) that he never discussed Zuma with Mbeki while in Chile - though he did not say, because he did not have to do so, whether he discussed Zuma at any other time during that period with the president.

Pikoli is the NDPP and is doubtless an honourable man. There is no reason to disbelieve him.

But are we not doing ourselves - as human beings, citizens and adults - a disservice by believing that the NDPP decided to charge the then incumbent deputy president without mentioning to the chief of state that he was about to turn the country upside down?

Of course - to get things in the proper time sequence - the country had already been turned upside down six days previously when Zuma was fired.

So the more correct question is: are we not doing ourselves a disservice by believing that the NDPP was not at all influenced in his decision to charge Zuma by the fact that the chief of state had just dumped his deputy president?

Certainly, Judge Msimang was not prepared to do Zuma or the legal system such a disservice.

Why did Mbeki fire Zuma in such a hurry? The president is notoriously cautious, he has a full-time legal counsellor on his staff (Mojanku Gumbi), and he is apparently not unfamiliar with the law.

Surely the president knew, or was told, that there is an appeals process in this country and that, more importantly, even Squires had stated a number of times that it was Shaik, not Zuma, who was on trial.

What "non-procedural policy" was driving the president?

Zuma adherents would say the president's motives were as obvious as the proverbial erection on a stallion.

The president would presumably say that Squires's judgment had been clear and unequivocal and that it was his duty as president to demonstrate that South Africa will not accept corruption, no matter whom the (alleged) perpetrator might be.

Those who remember those days will remember that Mbeki was due at a G8 gathering at Gleneagles in the first week of July 2005 and that one of the issues on the agenda was corruption in Africa.

There was another matter to which Pikoli ought to have given thought: in August 2003, Bulelani Ngcuka, Pikoli's predecessor, had said - in the company of Penuell Maduna, the then minister of justice - that although a prima facie case existed against Zuma, it was not winnable in court and Zuma would not be charged.

Was that decision driven by law, kindness, the national interest, or politics?

Whatever the correct answer, one thing was clear. Zuma was clearly royal game - and Pikoli needed to be very certain that he was hunting Zuma for legal, not political, reasons.

But this brings us back to Msimang's basic question: if you were not ready to nail Zuma legally, why did you charge him then? What was the hurry? What was the non-procedural imperative?

The correct answer may be that the NPA investigators may simply have become too ambitious.

Titillated by Shaik's admission that payment to Zuma had gone on long after the period under the spotlight in Shaik's trial, the investigators simply wanted to bring more against Zuma than they had previously, or had from their investigations into Shaik.

This led the NPA into what turned into a series of events that left the state woefully unprepared - summed up by Msimang as follows:

"[By the middle of 2006] there were legal challenges to the warrants [related to the August 2005 raids on the premises of Zuma, his attorneys, and on Thint] which were far from being resolved, a lengthy forensic report [held up by the challenges to the warrants] to be compiled, an indictment to be formulated, an application for an amendment to the indictment to be attended to and the requests for further particulars to the indictment to be responded to."

Sadly, unless the state re-charges Zuma, we will never know whether he was guilty or innocent of certain corrupt acts.

In his August affidavit, Leonard McCarthy, the Scorpions chief, noted that in about 2002-2003, investigators into the arms deal were taken aback to discover that one of the people implicated was the incumbent deputy president of the country, and that the NPA realised that this posed, and would pose, all kinds of problems.

That notation must rank as one of the great understatements of the century.

With acknowledgement to Jeremy Gordin and Sunday Independent.