For anyone lost in the thickets of moral ambiguity, paranoia and sheer craven nonsense that have sprung up around the path between Jacob Zuma and his day in court, this week offered a strange kind of clarity.

There is a right way to reach the decision around whether to prosecute him and a wrong way. Mokotedi Mpshe, the acting head of the National Prosecuting Authority, is clearly under terrible pressure to choose the wrong way and drop the charges against Zuma on the basis of top-secret representations handed to him in recent weeks.

Some in the increasingly fractious team around the ANC presidential candidate clearly believed that he needed a final nudge on to that path, which was no doubt the reason for the coordinated leaking on Tuesday of the "news" that a decision had already been reached.

As our lead story this week makes clear, the representations by Zuma and the ANC to the NPA are also designed to exert pressure, rather than to elucidate the legal position.

There are large unanswered questions about Thabo Mbeki's possible role in the corrupt backroom dealings that surrounded the arms deal and we believe that if Zuma can help to answer them he should. It is the least we expect of a would-be president, especially one who purports to lead a party purged of Mbeki's influence.

That he is prepared to do so only in secret, in a move designed to frighten Mpshe with the prospect of trying both sitting and former presidents and possibly destabilising the country in the process, is frankly not good enough.

The door has always been open for Zuma to make such representations: the fact that he is doing it only now, when the NPA is at its most vulnerable, speaks volumes about the bona fides of the process and, coming so late, should do nothing to deter the NPA.

Two national directors -- Vusi Pikoli and Mpshe -- came to the conclusion that there was sufficient evidence against Zuma to charge him. The Supreme Court of Appeal has made it clear that it agrees.

And there should be no doubt: Zuma has a case to answer. To argue anything else is simply to engage in propaganda.

Zuma received money from Schabir Shaik and his businesses. He was party to meetings that were intended to benefit Shaik and his businesses.

Zuma's attitude to Shaik was sufficiently mercenary that when Shaik cancelled building operations on Zuma's Nkandla homestead because Shaik did not know how he was going to find the money to pay for it, Zuma countermanded him.

This much is public knowledge, thanks to the Shaik trial. This doesn't make Zuma guilty -- it means he must answer the charges, and in court,in public, not behind closed doors.

If there is evidence of a political conspiracy against Zuma, if there is evidence of serious abuses by the Scorpions in their investigation of him, if there is evidence that others committed far greater sins in the arms deal process, then that evidence should be disclosed, and in court, in public not behind closed doors.

If all this evidence exists then it should surely be enough to convince a judge to order a permanent stay of prosecution. And if it exists, it goes right to the bottom of what Mark Gevisser has called the "poisoned well" of our democracy. We all have a right to know.

Not only that, there is no way that the citizens of this country can trust a decision to drop the prosecution that is reached on this basis and in secret.

No less a Zuma loyalist than Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, the chair of the ANC subcommittee set up to offer support to Zuma, made the same point this week.

Sisulu told Independent Newspapers that the ANC wanted to have the prosecution set aside in court: "We want to win on legal grounds. We have expended a lot of energy and money and we want a clean victory -- in the interests of both the country and the ANC."

If he is acquitted, she suggested, or the Constitutional Court sets aside his prosecution, the decision would have been arrived at in a clear and transparent manner "so that everybody can buy into it -- as the ruling party, that is absolutely essential to us".

That may or may not be damage control -- clearly the premature announcement quickly backfired because it called into question whether justice was truly being served.

But her point is well taken. The national prosecutor's discretion should not be stretched this far. Mpshe should not be expected to take private decisions about the alleged national interest that have nothing to do with normal prosecutorial policy.

If there is mischief, then let it be exposed in open court. If the ANC is bent on a political solution, then let them show us all how far they have departed from their own principles by passing a law to protect Zuma. We will oppose it vigorously, but at least it will be done in the open. In the meanwhile the NPA must be left to do its job, without fear or favour; it is the only way out of the woods.