The Sunday Times has hit back hard at communications minister Dina Pule, who on Monday accused three of the newspaper’s top investigative journalists of running a smear campaign against her.
Sunday Times editor Phylicia Oppelt has rubbished accusations, made by Pule at a press conference held at an upmarket Johannesburg hotel, that one of its journalists, Mzilikazi wa Afrika, tried to blackmail her.
“The Sunday Times takes exception to … Pule’s unusual press conference today in which she accused this newspaper of running a deliberate smear campaign against her, orchestrated by unnamed handlers on behalf of unnamed people,” Oppelt said.
“We find it unfortunate that rather than dealing with the essence of the claims against her, [Pule] proceeds to attack the messenger of the stories. We also find it disturbing that the minister would use her office to call an ‘important’ press conference, as she did today, to launch a personal attack on both the Sunday Times and its journalists.”
Oppelt said the series of articles her newspaper had published about Pule in the past year were “in the public interest, with no other motivation in mind”.
“If the minister has any evidence to the contrary, we invite her to give this to the newspaper so we can deal with it appropriately.”
Concerning the allegations against Wa Afrika, Oppelt refuted Pule’s claim that he had business interests in a company importing Chinese-manufactured cellphones and the meeting Pule claimed Wa Afrika arranged for 19 June 2012 was, in fact, initiated by the minister’s alleged boyfriend, Phosane Mngqibisa.
“Mngqibisa had, in fact, asked the businessmen whom the minister describes as ‘handlers’ to attend. If the minister has evidence that these businessmen were somehow attempting to influence the Sunday Times, please can she name them and their interests in an open forum. Wa Afrika did not offer to suppress any further stories in exchange for information. Such an offer would be absolutely unethical.”
Pule claimed, too, that one of Wa Afrika’s relatives was so desperate to meet with her that he did so at a Pretoria hair salon and even professed his love for the minister. Oppelt disputed the minister’s version of events. “Wa Afrika came to know, a number of months after our first stories were published, that a distant relative had been involved in a relationship with Pule – a relationship she now denies ever taking place. However, Wa Afrika was not aware of this relationship when researching and writing our initial stories. He obtained no information from this relative at all.”
Pule alleged that another Sunday Times journalist, Stephan Hofstatter, tried to secure employment for a friend in the minister’s office.
Oppelt said: “Stephan Hofstatter is accused of trying to plant an individual in Pule’s office to extract information. The truth is that this person contacted Hofstatter and informed him that Pule had asked her to take a job as a ‘reputation manager’, and said that should this happen, she would not be able to provide him with information about the minister or her department.”
A third journalist, Rob Rose, who now edits Business Times, is accused of having friends at the companies that sponsored the ICT Indaba from which the minister’s alleged boyfriend is said to have benefited. “Rob Rose supposedly has a ‘close friend’ at a telecommunications company, who has friends with business interests. He has no such close friends at these places, only contacts and sources who he speaks to regularly in the normal course of his job,” Oppelt said.
“Pule continues to avoid clarifying the key issue: the nature of her relationship with Mngqibisa, who was then paid R6m by the organisers of the ICT Indaba. She has threatened to sue and report the newspaper to the press ombudsman. Even though our stories have been published for the past 10 months, she has done neither.”
Mngqibisa’s complaint to the press ombudsman last year was dismissed. “The ombudsman said that ‘in light of their silence about the nature of their relationship, the newspaper cannot be blamed for thinking that the facts pointed to a personal one’.
“We urge the minister to provide the Sunday Times and the public with proof to substantiate the allegations she made today. If she cannot, she should do the right thing and publicly apologise.” — (c) 2013 NewsCentral Media
