Jacob Zuma may have won a public relations victory in the Pietermaritzburg High Court yesterday. But he has not won the legal battle yet.

Indeed Judge Herbert Msimang’s decision to strike the corruption case off the high court roll could even leave Zuma a little worse off, increasing the chances that he will still be on trial for corruption by next December’s African National Congress (ANC) conference.

Not that the prosecution has come out of this one looking great. Msimang had some nasty things to say about the state’s case. The judge indicated he didn’t much like the look of the evidence, and said the state should have finalised its indictment before charging Zuma, who had experienced pain and suffering as a result. Since the state was not yet ready to proceed with its case immediately, Msimang threw it out of his court.

The judgment will fuel the Zuma camp’s charge that their man has been persecuted by the state. It creates the space for Zuma’s jubilant supporters to argue, as they are doing, that his name has been cleared, and that he will stand for election as the ANC’s new leader.

Inevitably, too, a judgment such as this feeds into perceptions of inefficiency on the part of the state when it comes to prosecuting cases.

But Zuma has not, in fact, been cleared. Msimang did not dismiss the case. He hadn’t heard it yet. His decision was not based on the merits of the case, but on the technicalities of whether a further postponement was justified.

So there is no legal reason the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) should not go ahead, completing the indictment that it had promised by October 15 and launching the case anew.

Read between the lines of the NPA’s statement, which emphasises it has “a strong and winnable case” against Zuma, and it seems that’s what it plans to do. And whatever the political pressures, that is exactly what the NPA should do if it wants to preserve its credibility. If it had a strong case to start with, it should have as much of one now. For Zuma, the trouble is that now that the case is no longer on the roll, there’s no judge calling the shots about timing.

The NPA could in theory take as long as it likes to file new charges. For its own sake — and ours — it must avoid that. If it is going ahead, it must do so as soon as possible. That is the only way to allay questions about its independence and credibility and put an end to the uncertainty and political volatility yesterday’s judgment has created.

With acknowledgements to Business Day.