The City Press this morning, in its front page article headlined It's Jomo vs Dina, alleges that football legend Jomo Sono is at the centre of a blackmail bid against communications minister Dina Pule.
The paper says that Pule was referring to Somo on Monday when she said that she was being blackmailed by people with close ties to Sunday Times reporters. Pule said the reporting by the newspaper over the past ten months was a "simple, yet highly sophisticated" blackmail plot.
The "blackmailers", alleges Pule, are business people after the multibillion-rand tender for set-top boxes in SA's migration to digital television. She alleges they have close ties to the Sunday Times newspaper journalists responsible for the almost weekly stories claiming corruption, mismanagement and cronyism on her part.
City Press reports that Somo's is one of 36 companies in the running to land a lucrative set-top box tender to make around five million subsidised decoders. The paper says Somo and Pule have met, but Somo has denied this happened.
South Africa is moving to digital television using the European DVB-T2 standard, which will require about 11 million homes to buy set-top boxes to convert the signal for viewing on analogue television. The state is set to subsidise about 70% of the cost of the box, and the aerial, for around five million homes.
Although the department last year issued a request for proposals for what will be a multibillion-rand deal to make subsidised boxes, it has yet to be awarded. Several issues have held up SA's migration to digital television, including a court wrangle between the department and etv over who handles the controls in the boxes, which will prevent grey imports as signals from Sentech will be decrypted at the decoder.
Pule declined to name the businessmen, saying this was up to the Sunday Times. "After careful consideration, I have now decided to reveal the real reasons behind this persistent smear campaign against me.
"This campaign is not and was never a genuine journalist endeavour. It was a highly sophisticated plot to blackmail me. It is all about business and political interests related to the set-top box tender and related issues."
Pule says the Sunday Times "handlers" are high profile business people and politicians who thought they could force her into a corner "by threatening to make injurious revelations or accusations against me".
The Sunday Times hit back at communications minister Dina Pule following an "unusual" press conference on 22 April, in which the minister slammed the newspaper's series of accusations against her, accusing the media house of complicity in a bribery plot.
"We find it unfortunate that rather than dealing with the essence of the claims against her, she 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," said the Sunday Times editor, Phylicia Oppelt, in a statement issued after Pule's press conference.
Oppelt said the "numerous" articles that had been featured in the newspaper about Pule over the past year had been in the public interest, "with no other motivation in mind". If Pule had any evidence to the contrary, she said, the newspaper invited the minister to reveal it, "so we can deal with it appropriately".
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