Daily Maverick wins defamation case as court slaps guest contributor Modibe Modiba with R100,000 damages

An erstwhile guest columnist at Daily Maverick, who accused the media outlet of “racism” and of paying him, and other students, a weekly stipend to write articles critical of Independent News and its owner, Iqbal Survé, the EFF, and others, has been ordered to remove his defamatory comments and apologise.

Johannesburg high court Judge Keoagile Matojane said Modibe Modiba’s statements were defamatory and ordered him to pay Daily Maverick R100,000 in damages.

Daily Maverick sued Modiba for damages following his “series of false and defamatory” tweets and articles.

Despite being served with the summons, to which Modiba tweeted, “We’ll meet in court”, and then, “No place to hide as all they does is threaten and threaten but never act”, he did not file a notion of intention to defend the court action and did not attend court when the matter was argued.

Judge Matojane said it was clear that he had made a choice not to engage, and thus Daily Maverick was entitled to apply for default judgment against him.

Read the judgment, dated Monday 15 August 2022,  here.

In its complaint, Daily Maverick said Modiba had first tweeted that he had decided to stop writing for it because “they only publish articles where you criticise black leaders/ANC or EFF. Once you start writing about anything else, which is seen as ‘anti white’, they have a problem”.

In another tweet he accused Daily Maverick of briefing him to write negative articles about Survé and former Public Investment Corporation CEO Dan Matijila, to “spy on the EFF” and to “create false stories”.

He said Daily Maverick was using bogus Twitter accounts and using students to “influence the narrative”.

Independent Online then posted an article quoting Modiba claiming that Daily Maverick recruited students and paid them to write and tweet negative stories in a smear campaign against prominent people viewed as proponents of transformation.

Daily Maverick editor, Branko Brkic, in his affidavit and in evidence, said he had published four of Modiba’s “unsolicited” articles during 2019. He had not been paid.

Others had been rejected because they were poorly written, lacked depth, were incoherent and, as “opinion pieces”, lacked real conclusion.

Modiba’s tweets, which began in January 2020, had reached more than 50,000 followers and were extensively retweeted and “liked”.

The IOL article was retweeted by, amongst others, EFF leader Julius Malema, with 3.6 million followers. The EFF then published a statement saying it was “not surprised that political hitmen Daily Maverick had been paying columnists to write negative articles against those they disagree with”.

Then IOL published another article, asking why the  SA National Editors Forum (Sanef) was defending Daily Maverick.

The Information Communication Technology Union called Daily Maverick “a third force masquerading as a media house”.

Judge Matojane, in his ruling handed down on 12 August, said the statements were obviously defamatory.