Shut him up!!!!

Call me frustrated and ticked off!!!

It is a well known and acceptable fact that the best way to help a junkie…pardon my political incorrectness - an addict- is to stop enabling him/her. Addiction is an illness that spares no one nor chooses sides. We are all susceptible to it, some of us are just luckier than others to get away with more socially acceptable addictions.

It comes in many ways, the most notorious kind obviously being substance abuse and I repeat; anyone can become an addict because everything can turn into an addiction. Be it an indescribable passion for cars (especially when you keep buying even when you can’t afford them), a love for beautiful people and the “service” they provide (enter Tiger Woods), the more acceptable (though exclusive of the more full bodied mammal) love for chocolate and all things sweet or fat, or think back to when you were a child (though some of you don’t particularly have to think that far back), remember how you just loved attention? Yes my friends even that can be an addiction. An addiction which continues to plague you today and is to me the most logical explanation to actions of the man in question: Juju Malema.

As said before, enabling the addict is the one sure way to feed their addiction, allowing them to continue to subject the rest of us who’ve chosen more socially acceptable addictions to their destructive, at times hurtful and even disgusting behaviour. Julius is an attention seeker, he thrives off of reports about his antics and re-works and refines them time and time again. How else would you explain why each month we’re sure to read, see or hear about him saying or singing something even more offensive, ludicrous and dimmer than the last time?

The man craves and thrives on attention and continuing to give him airtime or print space is merely feeding his addiction, we – those who print, broadcasts and even read about his latest antics – are enablers. He is getting exactly what he wants as he figures out his next move. I am not the first to suggest what I am about to (Sarah Britten from the Mail&Guardian titled her column: this is the last time I write about Julius). The woman has seen the light.

Look at the headlines: Julius out of control, or Juju – kill the boer – Malema, the list goes on and on, and all of them are saying the same thing: The man is an nutcase and needs to cut his *ish* out. Bloggers, columnists, reporters and the like, all write about the same thing – the man is an idiot and should be ‘called to order’. So why are you still writing about him? Why are you still giving him a voice by writing and reporting what he says if it repulses you so much? Why are you feeding this little boys’ cry for attention?

You want him to shut up? You want the addict to quit and get his affairs in order – then stop giving him what he wants. He is playing everyone for a fool. You don’t like him or what he says yet you continue to give him a voice through writing and reporting about him.
Stop! Sometimes to beat your arch nemesis you need to play them at their own game.

So, pitch up at his rallies just to document his utterances for future references (and you will eventually see the pattern, each month and sometimes weekly, the man will say, sing or do something worse than what he did last). But don’t report on these, let him think you will because you came to the press conference, or meeting or continue to give him the attention he is so desperately addicted to. And then instead of the front page that’s become the official Malema page of late, leave it blank but for a note stating: THIS IS WHERE JUJU WOULD BE…IF WE STILL GAVE A $***!

Do this every week or for as long as it takes to get the message through his thick skull: South Africa does not need the likes of him, he needs US! To put it in his words, “we must mobilise” the mass media, boycott this man and watch as his life spirals out of control and his tender bloated potbelly shrinks. The man will not know what to do with himself. Shut him up by playing his game, “mobilise comrades” and stop wasting paper and airtime on this lunatic.

Maybe then we will report on real issues affecting real South Africans; poverty, crime, lack of housing, corruption, or unity, justice, social development, human interest stories about actual working class off spring who work hard to make something of their lives and the lives of those without means to do so. Let’s go back to reporting about us, about what matters, filling up the space previously looted by this man by putting issues affecting South Africa in constant view of politicians’ minds. Maybe then, they will do something about it once they realise their cover is no more.

Today I read he insulted a journalist, called him a bastard and ordered him out of the press conference. This was a clear mobilisation moment media comrades, to stand together united as one and walk out. Let the headlines read, Journalists walk out on Julius instead of yet again giving him the lime light. Shut him up! Shut him up!