Mail & Guardian reporter
The press ombudsman has rejected a complaint lodged by Public Protector Selby Baqwa against a Mail & Guardian report on his efforts to protect a senior academic accused of impropriety. The academic, the former vice-chancellor of the Vaal Technikon, Aubrey Mokadi, was fired last November.
Press ombudsman Ed Linington found that Baqwa’s complaint had “no substance. Allegations that the article was reckless, malicious and unethical and that the reporters acted in total disregard of the truth were not substantiated,” he said.
“On the contrary, it must be said, they produced an article that fairly reflected the factual evidence at their disposal.”
The judgment added that the article was “fully within the bounds of the role of the press in a democratic society in that it revealed matters of public interest and importance and did so in a reasonable and responsible manner”.
The article was published with a front-page headline “Mr Clean tried to shield dirty professor”.
It said Baqwa had tried to shield Mokadi, going as far as to seek legal aid for the academic, who was subjected to a lengthy disciplinary inquiry by the technikon.
Mokadi had been suspended in 1997 after being accused of financial impropriety and abusing his position. He approached Baqwa for help shortly afterwards.
Over the next year, Baqwa wrote several letters to the council. His intervention culminated in a letter he wrote to the technikon in the week that the disciplinary inquiry found against Mokadi and recommended his dismissal. In that letter, dated November 9 1998, Baqwa instructed the council not to expel Mokadi.
Baqwa also endorsed a threat by Minister of Education Sibusiso Bengu to cut off the technikon’s funding if it went ahead and sacked Mokadi. The disciplinary inquiry found Mokadi guilty of five of the 12 counts against him.
The M&G’s article was based on previously unpublished letters sent by Baqwa to the technikon’s council. The M&G’s counsel, Derek Spitz, argued in an open hearing before the press ombudsman earlier this month that the letters had grown increasingly “strident’.
Baqwa explained his intervention in the case on the grounds that he was merely concerned that the correct “process” was followed in the proceedings against Mokadi.
However a representative of the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration endorsed the legal process several months before the disciplinary ruled against Mokadi.
Linington effectively rejected this defence, saying that Baqwa’s “later interventions become progressively less neutral”.
The M&G article, published the week that the disciplinary inquiry ruled against Mokadi and Baqwa issued his final threat, recorded that during that same week Baqwa had been accorded a much bigger budget at a government conference on corruption.
The juxtaposition of Baqwa’s intervention in the Mokadi matter and the government’s declared “zero tolerance” on corruption in the same week was recorded in a blurb on the front page of that edition.
Baqwa’s office did not comment in time for the M&G’s deadline. He told The Citizen the following day the article had been “gutter journalism devoid of any journalistic ethics”.
Linington rejected Baqwa’s claim that the M&G had failed to give him enough time to comment.
In that section of his judgment, the press ombudsman said: “In short, it is inappropriate for Mr Baqwa to complain that he was not given the opportunity to comment before publication when he was given such an opportunity,” he said. “It is apparent from his own remarks that he was unlikely to have gone beyond what was already in the article.”
Linington said Baqwa’s intervention “appeared aimed at preventing implementation of the recommendations of the disciplinary inquiry that he [Mokadi] be dismissed, at least by the current council, even though the disciplinary proceedings conducted by advocate [Roland] Sutherland were not alleged to be improper or prejudicial to Professor Mokadi”.
The press ombudsman said that even on the public protector’s own interpretation of the extent of his powers, and conceding for argument’s sake that he acted within them, the M&G article accurately stated that the interventions amounted to an attempt to protect or shield Mokadi.
“It seems to me that the complaint is really not that the M&G article was inaccurate, but that it accurately exposed what the public protector had done. Such exposure cannot be characterised as reckless, malicious and unethical.”
Linington said the M&G was justified in having raised the question whether or not the public protector’s office “used its discretion reasonably in deciding to take up Professor Mokadi’s complaint against a background of a backlog of 2 500 cases and limited funds”.
n Mokadi appealed the findings of the disciplinary hearing earlier this year, and then sought a postponement of the appeal on the grounds that he was suffering from an anxiety disorder.