Former Nigerian Aviation Minister, Femi Fani-Kayode, has threatened a defamation suit against Media Trust Limited, publishers of Daily Trust newspaper and a columnist, Iliyasu Gadu, over an opinion article he deems defamatory.
In two separate letters dated August 30, Mr Fani-Kayode described an article written by Iliyasu Gadu as a “spurious publication aimed at denigrating his person”.
Adeola Adedipe, Fani-Kayode’s lawyer, said the article which was a response to FFk’s verbal assault against a Daily Trust reporter, Charles Eyo, painted his client “as a man of low esteem without dignity or reputation and disgrace to his state of origin.”
The letters demanded a response within 14 days from Media Trust Limited, the publisher and Mr Gadu while also asking for a retraction of the said article, an apology on two national dailies and the sum of six billion naira as compensation.
Mr Adedipe also said the failure of Media Trust Limited, the publisher and Mr Gadu to publish the retraction and apology will ”leave our Client with no preferred alternative than to seek redress in Court. This redress shall also include a claim that you are unfit to function as a journalist because your defamatory and slanderous remarks were borne out of an inept appreciation of basic codes of journalism.”
In the said article published by Daily Trust on Sunday, Mr Gadu the columnist referred to Fani-Kayode as a “Drug Addled Thug In Designer Wears.”
“Last week, FFK was at his yobbish worst during a press briefing in Calabar where in response to a question from a Daily Trust reporter, Eyo Charles as to who was financing the trips he (FFK) had been embarking on round the country, he let rip at the poor reporter.
Suddenly FFK who takes it as licence to hurl volleys of invectives at just about anyone in Nigerian public life had his thin skin exposed. Like a boxer with a glassy jaw, which the gentlest of jabs was all that was needed to shatter his thinly covered veneer of respectability was ruthlessly exposed,” the article read.
By Melvin Tarlue