Some years ago while editor of Business Day (. @LukanyoMnyanda hopefully you can find the piece) I argued that "the ANC is in an invidious position of its own making. It has to choose between itself and its president (Zuma at the time). It has never really made that choice.

Now things are coming to a head. I believe that Zuma understands the ANC perfectly, and is playing on its vulnerabilities. For the ANC, the calculus is not that our constitutional order may collapse, but that its unity cannot be preserved if Zuma is arrested

Various senior cadres will brief many a naive journalist about the "implications for national instability" if Zuma is arrested. This will be the same ruse Mbeki used to try and save Selebi from arrest. It's bollocks. Selebi was arrested and jailed, but at a cost.

But it is true that Zuma's arrest, if it ever happens, may more than likely divide the ANC. But that is for ANC members to worry about, not the population in general. For the rest of us there must be a different calculus...

That calculus is whether we are willing to trade our constitutional order and accountability in general so that a paralyzed ANC doesn't get divided. Ultimately, that has to be the choice for us non-members, too. What do we choose? Zuma and others like him, or a system that works?

Therefore, the reckoning the ANC has avoided for years, contorting itself to explain and justify the actions of its most problematic leaders, cannot be delayed longer. The Constitutional Court will rule that Zuma must be arrested for contempt of court.

For the rest of us, we have to ask a different question, and that is, will the SAPS Commissioner instruct the VIP Protection detail, a division of SAPS, that is guarding Zuma to handcuff him and bundle into the same taxpayer-funded cars he uses and bring him to justice?

We will know whether we still have a republic or a place for the ANC in any considerations about the future, by the choices President Ramaphosa, Bheki Cele and the Police Commissioner make in this respect. We will know by the actions of the VIP protection detail..

Either way, any actions from any of these people that are in defiance of the law and the courts must be the tipping point beyond which we must no longer accommodate the ANC as a democratic force in our consciousness. We must write all of them off, whatever pleadings they make.

Significantly, and given the number of political actors who know that if the Hawks and NPA do their jobs properly, they will be arrested, have the same interests as Zuma. They will denigrate the judiciary in advance, just like it happened in 2005.

The non-ANC public also has a reckoning, and that is the burden of organizing to protect the Republic from anarchy. There is no real world in which the rule of law has collapsed that a brighter future can be fashioned. None!

Notwithstanding, the ANC has over the years relied on the elastic tolerance and excuse-making of supporters outside its membership and their deluded hope. Hope that "somehow" things will get better. They haven't and won't be. The question is: What are you gonna do?

Over the next few weeks the ANC will make its decision, to choose itself or the rest of us. That moment, that very moment, will be the Big Moment for everyone of us - for that will be the point at which we either lose or regain our Republic. There is nowhere to hide.