Home » Gus Silber: Helen Zille Bankrupts the ANCYL & New Defamation Fund Launched

Gus Silber: Helen Zille Bankrupts the ANCYL & New Defamation Fund Launched

Say what you want about Helen Zille, but here is a reminder that you can’t say what you want about Helen Zille, at least not on a public platform… writes Gus Silber. Well, you can, constitutionally speaking, but it may come at a price, the bill, in this case, being R93,218.09, plus interest. That’s the […]

By Guest Contributor
30-07-18 22:27
in News

Say what you want about Helen Zille, but here is a reminder that you can’t say what you want about Helen Zille, at least not on a public platform… writes Gus Silber.

Helen Zille – “It is a nice cosmic quirk that the ANCYL now has to get my go-ahead to spend any money…” The Youth League was declared bankrupt on Thursday because it failed to pay a legal bill. Source: Twitter/Helen Zille

Well, you can, constitutionally speaking, but it may come at a price, the bill, in this case, being R93,218.09, plus interest.

That’s the amount of the costs order in a defamation case instituted by the Western Cape Premier, then DA leader, against the ANC Youth League, all the way back in 2010.

As part of the High Court finding, Julius Malema and Floyd Shivambu, then voluble stalwarts at the forefront of the league, were ordered to apologise to Zille for their utterances. [They had called Zille a ‘racist girl’.]

The costs order means that the Youth League is now effectively bankrupt, incapable of committing to any financial transactions without the approval of Zille’s liquidators, making this a Floydian slip of the highest order.

Even in a constitutional democracy such as ours, you defame someone at your own peril, as the activist and media entrepreneur Shaka Sisulu, also made clear when he took the PR executive, Sihle Bolani, to court for her public comments in the so-called “War Room saga” in 2016.

This involved allegations that Sisulu was in charge of a covert “black ops” unit designed to win electoral support for the ANC in the municipal elections that year. Sisulu went on to win R3m in his defamation action against Bolani and her PR company, Bolani Communications.

In a video posted on Twitter yesterday, he announced that he would be using this money not to buy a house or a car, but rather to set up a defamation fund to finance legal action “against people who have rubbished your name, or trolled you online with lies and damaging allegations”. [Zille also took on the trolls on Twitter yesterday, issuing a “timeous warning to the trolls and bots” following the High Court’s decision to declare the ANCYL bankrupt.]

The fund, known as #TheDefamationFundZA, will pay the legal fees and any required investigations of one applicant a month, for 12 months.

You can find out more on: www.shaka.africa/shaka-sisulu-defamationfundza.html

In the meantime, say what you want on social media, but with these two judgements in mind, from diverse points on the political spectrum, be equally sure to watch what you say.

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GUS SILBER is a fantastic South African journalist, author, scriptwriter, speechwriter and tweeter. He “plays with words and sometimes works with them too”.
Follow Gus on Twitter: @gussilber or on Facebook: Gus Silber

https://twitter.com/ShakaSisulu/status/1023526541274300417