The Paris-based Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has warned African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma that he is setting a bad example for African dictators with his defamation lawsuit against the media.
”A successful lawsuit by you would give a blank cheque to Africa’s authoritarian regimes, which would use your example to attack their own press,” the organisation said on Tuesday in an open letter it had written to South Africa’s former deputy president.
RSF defends journalists facing prosecution for doing their work; fights to reduce the use of censorship; and opposes laws designed to restrict press freedom, according to its website.
It has a network of more than 100 correspondents around the world.
RSF secretary general Robert Ménard said his organisation, based in France, has told Zuma that should the mechanisms that ensure pluralism and free expression seize up in South Africa, it would put the entire region’s press in danger.
This is because South Africa is seen as ”the peacemaker and development model for all of Southern Africa”, Ménard added.
Zuma is suing media owners, publishers, editors, reporters, cartoonists and newspapers over reports during his recent rape trial. He was found not guilty.
”If you think you have been defamed, then it is entirely legitimate that you should seek compensation. But in our view you have not chosen the right way to go about it, and you are liable to do further harm to your image rather than restore it,” RSF said.
”The exorbitant amounts in damages that you are demanding from the media seem more like an attempt to intimidate them than the response of an injured party,” read the letter to Zuma from the organisation.
”This approach will only encourage the privately owned press to turn their sights on you, and will in no way help you obtain reparation for any wrong you may have been done.”
Ménard pointed out to Zuma that the independent press used its right to free expression but also gave him the right of reply.
”We urge you to support the independent press by engaging it in a dialogue rather than brandishing the threat — one that is out of all proportion for a political leader at the national level — of financial and judicial penalties that would prove fatal for all the media concerned.”
RSF ”is amazed by the manner in which you have demanded damages from the newspapers The Star, The Citizen, Sunday Sun, Sunday Times, Sunday Independent, Sunday World and Rapport, from Radio Highveld Stereo [94.7 Highveld Stereo] and from cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro, who uses the pen name Zapiro”, the letter said. — Sapa