The President Keeper promises to expose “the darkest secret at the heart of Jacob Zuma’s compromised government . The South Afr...
Security Agency (SSA) has beef-up actions dare to silence the latest source of the copyright. The South African authority wants to ban completely "President’s Keepers; those keeping Zuma in power and out of prison", warning the publishers in writing to withdraw the book or face "criminal charges" under the Intelligence Services Act on Tuesday. The South African Revenue Service (Sars) had hinted that it too might go to court to “ban” the book.
The letter said the book was “replete with inaccuracies” and that it “compromise[s] the security of the state”, calling on Pauw and NB to withdraw the book and retract “all those parts which are inaccurate”. Should they “fail to adhere to the above demands”, says the letter, the SSA will take the issue to the high court, and institute criminal charges. The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has also threatened legal action over Pauw’s investigation into Zuma’s tax affairs, blackmailing according to South Africa’s Sunday Times.
But NB said that it stands by Pauw, with lawyers acting for the publisher and for Pauw telling the SSA’s lawyers that they will “not desist from making the book available to the public, will not withdraw the book from the market, and will not retract anything therein contained”. Pointing out that the book has been publicly available for more than a week, with thousands of copies already sold, the letter says that there is “no basis for an urgent court application to prevent the further distribution of the book”.Willem De Klerk Attorneys’ letter adds: “Your generalised statement that the book is ‘replete with inaccuracies’ is not backed up by a single reference to any specific statement in the book that is alleged to be inaccurate.
It is about your support that is going to enable us to legally lock horns with SARS and whoever else drag us to court. We face the potential of a multitude of legal challenges, both criminal and civil. If you read the book, you will realize that it is a tried and tested strategy of the state to legally wear out their enemies. This might well be another of those cases,” he wrote. Pauw added that he expected the SSA to approach the high court on Tuesday. “There is no way they are going to be successful. No court is now going to ban this book. If they charge me criminally, we will fight the charges tooth and nail,” he said.
Death Threat: “If you don’t stop writing about Jacob Zuma‚ you are going to be dead.” That is the message investigative journalist and author of The President’s Keepers‚ Jacques Pauw‚ says he received from an anonymous caller on Monday evening. “I received a call from a private number while I was speaking to Ronnie Kasrils about his book. The person said: ‘I you don’t stop writing about Jacob Zuma‚ you are going to be dead’‚” Pauw told SABC 2’s Morning Live viewers on Tuesday. Pauw said the threat was the third he has received since his book was published‚ but that he was not “overly” concerned about them. “I suppose it comes with a book like this.
There are a lot of unhappy people out there. If someone threatens you‚ they are not going to do it.” He and NB were supported by the International Publishers Association, which called on the SSA and SARS to stop their attempts to have the book withdrawn, describing their efforts “to harass and intimidate Mr Pauw and his publisher [as] reminiscent of the old apartheid regime in South Africa”.
“The cruel irony cannot be lost on anyone observing these shameful actions,” said Kristen Einarsson, chair of the IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee, calling the threatened legal action “crude and ham-fisted attempts at censorship”. Mpuka Radinku, executive director of the Publishers Association of South Africa, said that the moves “could be seen as a betrayal of the vision of a post-apartheid South Africa that the international community had welcomed.
We are appalled that the SSA is trying to suppress freedom of expression through intimidation and threats of a cease-and-desist letter as a means to shield the government from embarrassing revelations.”