If you want to have a defence force, you have to equip it. If you're going to equip it, you may as well do the job properly. And while there is no enemy at the gates right now, there may be in the future.

These were just some of the arguments the government and defence officials put forward to try to explain the decision to sink billions into buying new corvettes for the Navy in 1995.

I know, because I was one of the journalists trying to make sense of it all at the time. I remember interviewing then deputy defence minister Ronnie Kasrils, and finding him to be about as hawk-like as an overfed budgie. It was true that at the time, the Navy (as well as the Air Force) had become run down through years of neglect: the apartheid government had focused most of its defence spending on its army, busy waging war in defence of what PW Botha called the "total onslaught".

But the ANC had swept into power in the first democratic elections only the previous year. Surely there were more important things to spend taxpayers' hard-earned rands on - such as the crippling poverty in which most newly enfranchised citizens found themselves trapped?

As Paul Holden reminds us in his superbly researched book, the corvettes deal was scuttled by both the public outcry and the way the deal was pursued. But just two short years later, in 1997, a Defence Review had been completed, which concluded that modern new equipment was essential. And just two years after that, in 1999, the loan agreements had been signed for a military shopping list that carried a R30 billion price tag.

South Africans are still paying for it today: both through taxpayers' rands and politically. As Holden shows, the arms deal was the starting point for the long, slow series of seismic tremors that would shake the ANC and government. If not for the arms deal, former president Thabo Mbeki would not have had to sack his deputy, Jacob Zuma, in 2005 - and, arguably, Zuma would not then have set out to avenge himself by mobilising the support which saw him toppling Mbeki as party leader at Polokwane last December.

What Holden has done is scour the public domain for every available piece of information on the arms deal and its repercussions: more than 10 000 newspaper articles *1 for starters, but also the Joint Investigation Report that cleared the government and the slew of court papers generated by the court cases that saw first Tony Yengeni, then Schabir Shaik, convicted, as well as those concerning the charges against Zuma himself.

Holden, a freelance writer, researcher and historian, allows it to unfold chronologically, with each chapter carrying a helpful "info box" summarising its contents. He notes that one of the major difficulties in understanding the arms deal - "a complicated beast" - is that it has wrangled on for the best part of 18 years. "If you were born in the year of Mandela's release and you look forward to casting your first vote in the 2009 election, the Arms Deal has been in the background all your life," he writes.

Arranging the information available in this way does two things: it provides an accessible, reliable explanation of what the arms deal was all about, and it makes for scary reading. For we still do not have the answers that we as citizens deserve.

It's an essential companion to other books on the arms deal, such as that by former ANC MP Andrew Feinstein.

For shame it is: a shame that the billions the deal was initially supposed to cost have since escalated into many billions more - money that could have been spent on education, on building homes, on HIV/Aids treatment and prevention. The arms deal lies at the heart of the splintering of the ANC - a "cancer in our society *2", as Judge Chris Nicholson observed in the judgment that effectively quashed Zuma's prosecution.

That judgment is now under appeal; President Kgalema Motlanthe has meanwhile turned down an appeal by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and others to establish a judicial commission of inquiry to lance the festering wound once and for all. To guide your speculation as to why, read this book - and the others it leads you to.

Davis is group deputy political editor of Independent Newspapers.

With acknowledgements to Cape Times.