Some time ago I wrote on this very page that Judge Chris Nicholson could still be vindicated. I just thought I should mention that.

If it is indeed true that there are tapes implicating Mbeki in the decision to charge Zuma, we have a real crisis on our hands. As then US senator Howard Baker memorably asked of disgraced president Richard Nixon during Watergate: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

But if the allegations against Mbeki are true, then the next question would be, what it is that would have him do something like that and expect to get away with it? The easy answer is power. A sense of invincibility is more like it.

It is in light of this question that I try to interpret Judge Louis Harms’s statement that the motive behind the laying of charges does not matter, and that the only thing that matters is that a crime was committed.

But is this not the kind of statement that enhances the sense of invincibility in powerful politicians?

Their opponents would be in jail while they live it up in post-presidential Nirvana.

There is surely something wrong about that in a country which prides itself on the rule of law.

In my book, political interference with the criminal justice system is a far greater crime than most legal misdemeanours.

The latter can be solved by locking up the culprits. A solution has yet to be invented for the former.

This is not for lack of trying, but because of the extent of the damage.

It took the US a decade before it could recover from Nixon and Watergate.

P.S: MAHATMA Gandhi once took India’s prime minister at the time, Jawaharlal Nehru to a gathering teeming with millions of poor people. Nehru asked Gandhi: “What do I have in common with these people?” Gandhi told him to build bridges with them.

The Eton and Cambridge-educated Nehru would have been as baffled as I was at the sight of naked taxi drivers wielding knobkerries this week.

Sussex-educated Thabo Mbeki would also have been baffled. Zuma may have just blended in.

That could still be his secret weapon ­ building bridges with “these people”.

With acknowledgements to Xolela Mangcu and Business Day.