Journalist Vuyo Mvoko wins case against SABC

Former SABC senior freelance journalist, Vuyo Mvoko, on Friday won his legal case against the public broadcaster at the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in Bloemfontein.

The SABC has been ordered to pay the costs of the case.

Mvoko approached the SCA to appeal the SABC’s decision to terminate his contract as the broadcaster’s contributing editor after he spoke out against the SABC’s controversial editorial policy not to televise visuals of violent protest action in May last year.

The ban on the airing of images of destructive protests was subsequently found to be illegal by the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa).

In August last year, the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg dismissed Mvoko’s application to have his contract protected. His three-year contract with the SABC, reportedly signed on April 1, 2016, expires in 2019.

“We were not given a hearing at the high court. The judge felt that we were putting the cart before the horse because the SABC had not taken a final decision on what to do with me. We tried to argue for all intends and purposes, the SABC wanted to get rid of me,” Mvoko told his current employer eNCA on Friday.

He was one of the so-called “SABC 8” journalists – Foeta Krige, Krivani Pillay, Thandeka Gqubule, Busisiwe Ntuli, Lukhanyo Calata, Jacques Steenkamp, and the late Suna Venter – who challenged the protest ban and got fired in July 2016.

Seven of the SABC 8 were later re-instated after they filed an urgent application to have their dismissals set aside by the Labour Court. However, Mvoko was the only journalist who was not employed permanently by the national broadcaster.

“There were bigger issues as the so-called SABC 8 we were involved in. That was to make sure that no journalist at the SABC ever gets to go through what we had to go through,” he said.

“People should no longer be afraid to speak out. What the court today [Friday] underscored was the fact that the SABC belongs to all of us, not a Hlaudi Motsoeneng [former SABC COO], not minister Faith Muthambi [former communications minister] or some other person who may think they are more powerful than the other.”

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