Court rejects UKZN official’s defamation claim — again

University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) communications head Dasarath Chetty’s attempts to prove that he was defamed have been squashed in court again.

Last week the Grahamstown High Court dismissed Chetty’s appeal against the Grahamstown Magistrate’s Court’s rejection in March of his defamation suit against fellow sociologist Jimi Adesina, a professor at Rhodes University.

The action originated from an open letter Adesina circulated in February last year responding to a communique Chetty had sent to UKZN employees in the run-up to the then-impending staff strike. The communique requested all staff to refer any media inquiries regarding the strike to Chetty’s office.

Adesina’s emailed response was that this was a gagging order and was a ‘grave danger to the essence of a university”. He compared Chetty’s communique with a banning order former Transkei bantustan leader Kaiser Matanzima issued in 1976, writing that Matanzima’s ‘nice and orderly” language ‘fooled no one; [and] neither will you!”

Chetty’s court papers said Adesina’s email was ‘offensive and insulting” and that it was defamatory to accuse him of behaviour comparable with that of the apartheid regime and bantustan leaders.

Grahamstown magistrate IM Ristow said in March that the email was ‘prima facie defamatory”, but did not ‘show malice”, did constitute ‘comment” and was about ‘matters of public interest”. He accordingly dismissed Chetty’s suit.

Last week Grahamstown High Court Judge J Froneman upheld the finding. He noted the threefold argument of Chetty’s counsel that Adesina’s email ‘amounted to an unwarranted and baseless assertion of fact” and so did ‘not constitute comment”; that ‘if it amounted to comment it was not fair comment”; and that even if the email ‘passed muster on [the first two grounds] it was nevertheless actuated by malice”.

Froneman found, though, that Chetty’s communique ‘may reasonably be read (as a matter of opinion and comment) as an attempt to stifle debate; that [Adesina’s] response to it was clearly such an opinion and comment; and that it was an opinion honestly held”.

He found too that freedom of expression, ‘which includes academic freedom as a fundamental right under our Constitution, is of particular importance in university life”. This includes ‘an unfettered debate on issues surrounding the autonomy of a university and the roles that managerial and academic staff, respectively, should play in that regard”.

Adesina told the Mail & Guardian that his ‘starting point is that is not about me or Dasarath”, but ‘about something so foundational to the essence of a university [its raison d’être] and a democratic society that we neglect it at our peril. Without academic freedom … we don’t have a university worth the paper on which its name is written.”

He said ‘there are serious ethical problems with using public resources to pursue an issue that could have been dealt with using the scholarly space of robust exchange of ideas. In any case, I take Noam Chomsky’s line on this. Intellectuals should use ideas to resolve differences, not the courts or institutional or political power.”

The M&G reported in July that the South African Sociological Association, of which both Chetty and Adesina are past presidents, had formally censured Chetty for bringing the action. In the same month, Chetty confirmed to the M&G that UKZN was picking up his legal tab. This week he did not respond to the paper’s written questions. Vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba did not answer queries about the university’s payment of Chetty’s bills.