Juju loses round 1 to Zille

CAPE TOWN – The African National Congress Youth league and its members, including former president Julius Malema, have been penalised for failing to comply with High Court rules in an application lodged by Western Cape premier Helen Zille.

Zille applied to the Western Cape High Court to compel the ANCYL, Malema, Floyd Shivambu and Andile Lili to provide her with the documents she needs to prepare for the R1.4 million defamation action she has lodged against them.When the matter was called before Judge Nathan Erasmus on Tuesday, it emerged that Zille’s legal team has been struggling to ensure that the trio and the ANCYL hand over the necessary documents.In addition, the trio’s legal representatives have withdrawn and Zille’s attorney has not been able to serve the court papers on them.Judge Erasmus said he found it ‘amazing’ that no one could serve the papers on them when all three had recently been in the news.He also lambasted Malema, Shivambu and Lili for not complying with the rules of court.’Courts must sanction litigants who fail to comply,’ he said, ordering the trio and the youth league to pay punitive costs.This means they will have to fork out Zille’s legal costs in Tuesday’s application.He also gave them until April 24 to provide Zille with the information she requires in preparation for the defamation case.In the action, Zille is claiming R350 000 in damages from each of the three as well as the ANCYL.The action relates to comments made about Zille during 2009, in which they called her ‘a fake racist girl’ and ‘apartheid agent’, and criticised the number of white males in her cabinet.In her papers, Zille alleges that Shivambu said some of the male cabinet members were her boyfriends and ‘concubines’ and that she had appointed them so that she ‘can continue to sleep around with them’.In addition, Zille says in her papers, at a rally in Durban Malema referred to her as a racist, colonialist and imperialist, and had called her an ‘enemy of the revolution’, who wanted to declare the Western Cape for whites only.In responding papers, Malema said the action should have been lodged in the South Gauteng High Court.He also said that both he and Zille were politicians and that, should she prove that he made the defamatory statements, it amounted to robust criticism of an unfair exercise of public power.Malema said he had a right to freedom of political expression.He added that, in April 2009, Zille had insulted him by calling him an ‘inkwenkwe’, which is a young African boy who has not been circumcised.A date for the action has not yet been allocated.- Cape Argus