Zuma Drops All Charges Against Zapiro

ZAPIRO DECLINES TO RECIPROCATE

Africartoons welcomes the news that President Zuma has dropped all charges against cartoonist ZAPIRO in what appears to be a response to the best legal advice the president has received on the matter.

And if recent reports of Zuma's legal budget are anything to go by, that advice hasn't come cheaply. Who knows how much of the cost of this suit is to be picked up by the taxpayer?

Hopefully that issue will soon be brought to light by our thriving investigative journalists, and then duly addressed by Zapiro and his fellow editorial cartoonists. Because an important detail of this withdrawal of the president's case against the cartoonist is that Zapiro, with the backing of his newspaper, has refused to compromise in his stand for free expression.

No apology will be given and no retreat will be made in terms of any future commentary. This much is made abundantly clear by Zapiro's latest cartoon in the Sunday Times, which shows beyond any doubt that the cartoonist has not dropped his moral charges against the president.

And so it is, that despite the best efforts of the Zuma regime to intimidate the media and curb its freedoms, we live in a country where the freedom of expression still thrives. This is evidenced by examples of fearless investigative journalism accompanied by a culture of hard hitting cartooning, which could easily claim to be amongst the freest in the world.

Zapiro and The Sunday Times have done South Africa a great service in defending our freedom of expression, the existence of which ironically adds legitimacy to the government of the day. Unfortunately the present government cannot be relied upon to maintain this legacy, and so it is incumbent on all of us to protect it.
- JOHN CURTIS, Editor, africartoons.com.

*Disclosure:  Story edited for purposes of clarity and to correct a factual error about the legal costs.


DRAWING INFERENCES: Zapiro sketches Zuma at the 2007 WAN conference in Cape Town.
[Photo: WAN]

ZAPIRO AND SUNDAY TIMES EDITOR RAY HARTLEY RESPOND TO THE NEWS IN THIS eTV NEWSCLIP. [1.5 mins]

MEDIA LINKS:
EWN: Zapiro and Sunday Times' legal council Dario Milo argues that Zuma 'stood to lose far more than he would have gained'.
BDLive: SA Chairman of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, Raymond Louw, asks, 'Was Zuma’s cartoon case an attempt to intimidate media?'

Posted on Oct 29, 2012 by Africartoons