greater illogicalities. If all the various defendants had been brought before the court at the same time the approach would have been to consider one total compensatory award and apportion this between the various defendants according to the extents to which the various publications were held to have been responsible for the total loss; thereafter for the purposes of any awards of exemplary damages the court would have considered the case of each defendant individually. The position having been created that the various defendants have come before the court at different times we just do our best to consider the compensatory damages as if the actions had in fact been consolidated, and for this purpose we cannot take into account awards of exemplary damages made in the earlier actions. In considering what sum to award as compensatory damages in the case before him the learned judge considered what total compensatory sum should be awarded in respect of the dissemination of this libel throughout Zambia by all the media in question. He arrived at a figure of K30,000, and while I might regard this as somewhat on the high side in the Zambian context I would not be able to regard it as "an entirely erroneous estimate" of the compensation to which the plaintiff was entitled. Having arrived at this total figure the learned trial judge deducted the compensatory damages awarded to the plaintiff in the previous actions and awarded the balance in the present action; in my view this approach was correct. Turning to exemplary damages, I cannot accept the learned judge's reasons for awarding K20,000. He said that his disapproval of the conduct of the defendants was "the greater because the defendant is the State with a monopoly in the field of radio and television broadcasting''. The reason why the conduct of the radio and television services was reprehensible to the extent that an award of exemplary damages was fitting is that there was a failure to make any effort to check the facts before publication and a failure to apologise after publication, even when the decision had been made not to-defend the action on the merits, and the court felt that the compensatory award was