A US-based Nigerian academic, Dr. Farooq Kperogi has advised former Aviation Minister, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, not to go ahead with his planned defamation suit against Media Trust Limited, publishers of Daily Trust newspapers.
Kperogi gave the piece of advice in a Tuesday Twitter thread explaining the ramifications of Fani-Kayode’s threat to sue the company and a columnist, Illyasu Gadu over a supposed “defamatory” publication.
Daily Trust had on August 29, 2020, published Gadu’s opinion piece titled, “FFK, The Drug Addled Thug In Designer Wears” in which the writer made some shocking allegations against the ex-minister.
In a pre-litigation letter, Fani-Kayode described the article as libellous and demanded an apology from the newspaper.
He also charged the newspaper company to enter into a negotiation for possible payment of N6 billion for defamation of his character.
However, in his Twitter thread, Kperogi said the ex-minister was chasing shadows.
In the thread titled, “Fani-Kayode’s Libel Suit Against Daily Trust is Needless Self-Injury”, the media lecturer wrote, “Whoever advised Femi Fani-Kayode to sue Daily Trust over a scathingly unflattering opinion article that an occasional contributor to the paper’s opinion pages wrote about him doesn’t love him.
“Most of the unsparingly virulent things the writer wrote about Fani-Kayode qualify as opinion and fair comment in media law and are not actionable.
“The only potentially libelous statement in the piece is the claim that Fani-Kayode is a drug addict who had been treated, without success, in psychiatric hospitals in Ghana (and other places) but who hasn’t recovered from his drug addiction.
“That’s not an opinion that enjoys constitutional protection; it is a statement that implies a definitive habit of moral turpitude that can be proven to be either true or false.
“Nonetheless, truth is a defense in libel. If FFK goes ahead with the lawsuit, Daily Trust would be compelled to prove that he was indeed a drug addict who had been treated at psychiatric hospitals. In proving this, Daily Trust’s legal team would expose FFK to even more public ridicule.
“But, even worse, if Daily Trust finally proves it, Fani-Kayode’s reputation would be so irretrievably sullied that he would become what defamation lawyers call a “libel-proof plaintiff,” that is, someone whose reputation is already so thoroughly damaged that no libelous statement can damage it further.
“Plus, he is a public figure who seeks out the media, who willfully thrusts himself into public consciousness, who seeks to influence national conversations, and who has the capacity to respond to whatever dirt that is thrown at him.
“Such people have a hard time winning a libel case. If the man is wise, he should just lick his wounds quietly and withdraw his threat against Daily Trust. It would hurt him more than it would help him. I may write further on this in my back-page column in the Saturday Tribune.”