He runs a blog at www.juliusmalema.co.za – not a bad looking one, actually. Short on words, big pic (and who said the internet doesn’t reflect real life?) Check it out while you can…because it could well get deleted in a week or two. A WHOIS search for the ownership of the domain juliusmalema.co.za shows that someone hasn’t being paying the bills – and the domain is earmarked for deletion. That means that it goes back into the mighty domain pot in the sky and it is first come first served….and with, apparantly, a national fixation around impersonating the mighty Twitter-killer, I reckon there are dozens of wannabees sitting with fingers poised to snap up the domain the second it becomes available. Then it’s anybody’s bet as to what will happen, and what the reaction will be.

Fortunately for Mr Malema there is a precedent and cybersquatting on domains is (marginally) easier to fix than a flood of Twitternators (my word, feel free to use it or, in the ANCYL’s case, miss-spell it in a press release). They could do a Madonna (no, not wear pointy nipples and sing about being a virgin….although that does have a certain appeal) and appeal to ICANN, as she did in 2000 to retrieve her name from a squatter.

Or they could just pay the bill. It’s only R50 and, really Mr Malema, it is probably a lot easier.

Here’s the screengrab, click to see it full size (ANCYL – that’s, um, the little clicky buttony thing on the LEFT hand side (the hand you don’t shake with) of the mousy looking thing with a wire coming out of it next to your computer, which is the shiny thing in front of you….no, not your BMW….oh never mind. Ask someone else to show you.)

PS Love the email address given as the invoicing address. The optimism of Youth. But it does explain why they haven’t been getting the invoices – they’re arriving in Kgalema Mothlanthe’s inbox.

WHOIS Screengrab

A Facebook friend linked to an article in the UK’s Daily Mail titled: “He has four wives and he faced 783 counts of corruption: PETER HITCHENS on South Africa’s next president” and, after wading through the patronising, smug, biased, drivel that followed I wanted to board the next plane, find Mr Hitchens and choke him with his own phlegm.

Let’s be clear – I am not an apologist for either the ANC or Jacob Zuma. I have been – in public and in private – highly critical of both. But something in the region of 60% of our country’s population have voted for them in this election. But yet Peter Hitchens knows better than all of them combined. So I can’t stand by and watch him parade a series of right-wing opinions disguised as journalism like the worst kind of pedagogue and pretend that it is ok. It’s not.

Hitchens’ basic premise is that South Africa is a failure, and it is only a matter of time before we go down the toilet. Because that’s what happens to all African countries. Because Africans cannot survive without the learned guidance of the “civilised” West.

To back up his argument he cites a shopping list of what he seems to think are disasters of the New South Africa. While factually some of what he writes may be true, he embarks on shameless hand-picking of events and selective focusing on some events to prop up his racist arguments. He ignores some of the truths he finds inconvenient, he dismisses that which argues against him. His world view is a simple one – he is right, everyone else is wrong, and Africa will be a disaster because it cannot be any other way.

Mr Hitchens – it is precisely because the West has, for decades, seen Africa as a one-stop shop for slaves and mineral wealth, and a place for adventure, shameless resource pillaging and colonial mischief that the continent has battled to find its own feet.

Yes, there is corruption on the continent. Perhaps it is more obvious, less underhand and sophisticated than the influence-peddling and corruption that happens in the West, but it is no different in essence. Africans are no more inherently corrupt or evil than any other people anywhere else in the world. Yes, we had Idi Amin. But Germany had Adolf Hitler. Yes, there were massacres in Rwanda (that the West and the UN ignored), but there are regular reports of kids in America taking guns to school and mowing down their classmates. We have wars and genocide over political power. The UK and USA go to war over oil. Every society has good, and every society has evil. Neither the good nor the evil defines the whole society, but the way society deals with the evil can offer insight into its true nature.

Let’s ignore, for a moment, how the West has chosen to deal with the evil it has encountered over the decades. It is not beyond reproach but I suspect you wouldn’t appreciate being lectured by a mere African so let me stick to something I can talk about – my own backyard.
How did South Africa dealt with the joint evils of British Colonialism and Apartheid? We had decades of misery, deprivation of basic day-to-day services and non-existent human rights for the vast majority of our population. Then the apartheid government, giving in to internal and external pressure, began making a tentative move toward democracy. It was smoother than most would have imagined it could have been. There were negotiations, there were arguments, there was a referendum. Then within four years of the start of that process we had our first democratic election, followed by the mature purging of the country’s conscience led by the Truth and Reconciliation commission. There was minimal bloodshed and since then we have had more similarly peaceful elections.

You refer to today’s election as “hopelessly one-sided and rather crooked” as if those terms are interchangeable. Why does having one party dominate immediately imply that it is crooked? There has not been a single international observer, commentator or analyst at any of our elections who has concluded that our polls are anything other than free and fair. I too would like a more robust multi-party democracy. But others disagree with me and since they outnumber me they will prevail. It’s called democracy, Mr Hitchens, and if the people of South Africa want one party to dominate, then please respect that. Yes, even if you disagree with that party or dislike the individual at the top of it. Even if that person is steeped in a culture that confounds you, Mr Hitchens, or is outside your own frame of reference.

A culture that is accepting of polygamy and respects traditional medicine. That is celebrated by people wearing clothes different to yours, and who have ways of behaving that, through your colonial eyes, may appear quaint, amusing or primitive. South Africans are proud of their culture and just because some of us choose to celebrate life through traditional dance carrying a spear and wearing traditional clothes rather than putting on a tuxedo and heading off to the Royal Albert Hall, does not make us inferior to you, just as your expression of your culture does not make you inferior to us. Such Cultural imperialism is as despicable now as it was when the continent was blanketed with colonial do-gooders trying to “tame the savages” by sharing their civilised world with us.

In your article you make much of the shockingly poor conditions in which many South Africans live. You are right. It is shameful and it is unacceptable that so many live in shacks without proper sewage, running water or electricity. It is devastating that so many people don’t have access to decent education or basic healthcare. And, yes, someone should be held accountable for that.
But you are too quick to lay all of that blame at the ANC’s door. Those conditions – or at least the roots of those conditions – extend back to long before 1994. Things were not rosy for black people under white rule, as you seem to imply they were. Bantu Education, to give just one example, had as its’ basic premise that black people did not need education and so it was wasteful to spend money educating them. So suddenly, come 1994, we not only had millions of children attending schools with rudimentary facilities and overstretched teachers, but we also had millions of adults who for decades had been deprived of access to decent facilities.

Play that same basic scenario out in virtually every other field – healthcare, policing, water, electricity, sport and the arts.

How do you fix that sort of legacy? Where do you begin? I have no idea. Nor, frankly, did our politicians and, yes, a lot of South Africans are deeply pissed off that that is the case and that more hasn’t been done. We also hold out the hope that it will still get fixed. Meanwhile spare us your patronising tone and the implication that we are to be a basket case because, well, we’re African.

There’s an assumption there that all African countries will eventually collapse. Your language betrays your prejudices – in one paragraph you juxtapose Africa with what you call “the civilised world”…as if poor Africans could not possibly be civilised, at least not to the standard by which you measure civilisation.

You refer to Nelson Mandela as “politically ineffectual and naive”. Just the opposite is true. Only a genuine statesman and adept politician could have steered this country away from civil war to peace as he did. I cannot imagine George W Bush or Margaret Thatcher coming close to achieving anything similar.

You state that last year “Violent xenophobic rage against uncontrolled mass immigration was played down … in South Africa”. Where were you, Mr Hitchens when it dominated every single radio, television and newspaper news story in this country for weeks on end?

You refer to Koeberg and how it has caused “fears of an African Chernobyl”. Not in anything I have read or in any conversations I have heard.

You repeatedly refer to squatter camps that have “sprung up” around the country, implying that they were not there before the ANC came to power. No, Mr Hitchens, they were here. But if you visited the country in the 80s you presumably stayed far away from the dire poverty in the rural corners of Kwazulu-Natal and the squalor in the “homelands”. The only reason you are seeing them now is that people are free to move where they want. And where they want to be is close to the cities and the jobs they might offer.

Now to Jacob Zuma, the main focus of your article. You dismiss him as a “populist one-time Zulu herd-boy”. Um, so what, Mr Hitchens? Ronald Reagan was a populist one-time B-grade Hollywood actor. John Major had three O levels and failed in his first job application to be a bus conductor.
Yes, Jacob Zuma has not answered corruption charges against him in court. Most South Africans would have preferred it if he had, and are angry that he hasn’t. But politicians the world over have a way of sliming out of trouble. The implication is that Zuma got away with it because he is no better than the rest of Africa’s leaders, and so South Africa will go the same way as many other countries on the continent.

Presumably the same standard doesn’t apply to Silvio Berlusconi, Bill Clinton or any one of the dozens of other Western leaders who have faced corruption allegations against them in the course of their careers. Or, worse, the ones who get away with it completely – those who take money from big oil companies to embark on a multi-billion dollar war with Iraq, for example.

The point, Mr Hitchens, is not that Jacob Zuma is African and therefore gets off scot free. It is that he is African, and therefore you feel you can use him to prop up your prejudiced assertion that all Africans are corrupt.

I repeat what I wrote earlier – I have been, and will continue to be, critical of Jacob Zuma and the ANC when I feel I have something to say about them. I would never, however, demean a fellow South African’s culture, belittle things they hold dear or claim any sort of cultural high ground because, in 2009, the world has no space for such narrow-minded arrogance.

All is not doom and gloom in Africa, just as all is not perfect in the West. Spare us your proselytising and your sanctimonious “holier than thou” attitude. We’ll get by without your ill-informed perspective and your cultural bigotry, thank you very much.

That’s how I feel now. Please read this statement issued today by the ANC Youth League. Cut and pasted, with no additions or deletions from me. Yet.

ANC YL instructs Nandos to promptly withdraw their disgusting advertisements.
The African National Congress Youth League calls for the immediate withdrawal of the disgusting Nandos television and radio advertisements which uses cheap satire to undermine electoral politics in South Africa. Whatever is the lousy explanation of the Nandos advertisement, the ANC YL is fully aware that the advertisement is intended at mocking the President of the ANC YL, and in a racist fashion portrays political leaders as Cartoons.

The ANC YL has commissioned our Lawyers to investigate the legal issues that could arise around the whole advertisement, and they will soon advise us on action. While awaiting the legal advice, the ANC YL instructs the Nandos Company and those who did the advertisement to promptly withdraw the advert from all television screens and radio channels. If Nandos does not withdraw the adverts, the ANC YL will mobilise the people of South Africa to take militant action against Nandos and anything associated with Nandos.

Oh where to start???? Other bloggers like Matt Buckland have had their say on the ad and I am largely in agreement that it is average at best. If you haven’t yet seen it, do yourself a favour and view it now.

Let’s now go through this little gem of a press statement piece by piece

ANC YL instructs Nandos to promptly withdraw their disgusting advertisements.

The African National Congress Youth League calls for the immediate withdrawal of the disgusting Nandos television and radio advertisements which uses cheap satire to undermine electoral politics in South Africa.

OK we’ll ignore the contorted grammar/confused singularisation of “uses”. I love the fact that the ANC YL genuinely believe that they have the right to “instruct” anyone to do anything. When did they become so powerful? And they’ve missed the point – the ad in question does use satire, but not to “undermine electoral politics in South Africa”. It uses satire to illustrate what a complete and utter buffoon Julius Malema is. On the one hand the nation’s joker laughably sets himself up as the party’s “decoy”, providing political cover for his masters to continue their race to the Union Buildings unhindered. In so doing he is happy to verbally harangue and demean whoever comes across his path without a hint of decorum or dignity. On the other, he gets cross when a puppet makes him look, well, like the blustering buffoon that he is.

Whatever is the lousy explanation of the Nandos advertisement, the ANC YL is fully aware that the advertisement is intended at mocking the President of the ANC YL…

Again, some fearless mangling of the English language and distortion of logic. But isn’t it great that they feel compelled to articulate how aware they are of the purpose of the ad. “You can’t pull the wool over our eyes…we know you’re taking the piss” they assert. Well….duh. Well spotted guys. If you didn’t get that the ad was intended to mock Mr Malema then you really would be in serious trouble. Well done on getting the joke.

…and in a racist fashion portrays political leaders as Cartoons.

I enjoyed the random use of capitals here. It makes the word stand out – again in a “we spotted that this wasn’t really our beloved President” kind of way. But hang on a second, let’s take another look at the ad – it wasn’t a Cartoon or even a cartoon. It was, in fact, a puppet. Or, more accurately, a ventriloquist’s doll. The person standing next to it pretending to be the operator was a clue. But what I’m missing here is this: The sentence construction might be at fault here but it seems to say that portraying a political leader as a Cartoon (puppet) is a racist action. I’m sorry? I’m just not getting it.

The ANC YL has commissioned our Lawyers to investigate the legal issues that could arise around the whole advertisement, and they will soon advise us on action. While awaiting the legal advice, the ANC YL instructs the Nandos Company and those who did the advertisement to promptly withdraw the advert from all television screens and radio channels.

Let’s put this another way: We phoned our Lawyers (like Cartoons, deserving of a capital. Quite right too. ) and told them we were unhappy. They are presently locked in the law library desperately trying to find some justification for legal action. But whether or not they find anything, we still want you to pull the advertisement. No, scratch that, we don’t want you to…we are instructing you to. We’re hurt and feel betrayed by Nandos and we’re going to put the word “Company” after their name, again with a capital, just to show how serious we can be. And at the same time we are going to enjoin those who “did” the advertisement just for good measure. Note that advertisements are “done” these days, not made or produced or created. Done.

If Nandos does not withdraw the adverts, the ANC YL will mobilise the people of South Africa to take militant action against Nandos and anything associated with Nandos.

This is my favourite bit. Not only are we so overwhelmingly pissed off with Nandos, but we are convinced that the “people of South Africa” agree and will join our “militant action”. But wait – there’s more. Not only are we going to take this action against Nandos, but “anything associated with Nandos”. Anything? Anything at all? Just to help the ANC YL here is a list of things “associated with Nandos” that they need to make sure to include in their action:

• Chicken (obviously)
• Peri Peri (ditto)
• Mozambique (their map is on every wall in every branch)
• Chicken livers (from the Starter menu)
• China (who make the toys that come in the kiddies packs)
• Mealies, mealie farmers and all people everywhere who sell, eat or look at mealies (including the lady in the Madam & Eve Cartoon…yet again clearly racist and the ANC YL’s next target)
• Wet wipes (who do a roaring trade when people eat Nandos in their cars)
• The Nandos branch in London
• The Lusitoland Festival and, by extension, everyone living in the South of Johannesburg
• Potato Wedges, potato farmers and people who look like potatoes
• Me (because I had Nandos for dinner tonight)

There’s more, obviously, but let’s not get picky. To battle people. Our leader’s dignity has been attacked. Not by him (this time) but by those cocky people who did the advertisement. At last, something meaty to complain about.

Look, on a serious note, the ad is lame. Not up to Nandos’ usually high standard. It plays to stereotypes, isn’t particularly well acted and lacks a fiery punchline. But deserving of militant action? Hardly. If Julius Malema ever wants to be taken seriously as a politican, it is time he grew up. Seriously. Or else he will continue to be the national joke, the laughing stock of all and a continued source of shame to millions of intelligent and rational ANC members. And he will, therefore, never be a serious contender for high office. But at least there will be lots of laughs on the way.

http://multimedia.timeslive.co.za/audio/2009/04/duarte-blows-her-top/

A more deeply patronising, arrogant assault on a young guy just doing his job you’re unlikely to hear anywhere. What makes it even more disturbing is that it also displays a deep ignorance of new media on the part of the ANC’s chief communicator.

First she gets all defensive about whether or not the ANC is emulating Barrack Obama. She denies this, which is clearly absurd. When someone has paved the way in a new field, i.e. using social media to drive a political campaign, and you do the same thing a few months later, of course you are emulating them. You may be doing it slightly differently, possibly even better in some areas. You’ll almost certainly adapt the model for local conditions. But you are emulating, and that’s ok. Duarte then embarks on a mini lecture with Mr Nombembe about whether or not Social Media practitioners create emotional connections with their audiences. “I think that for us “the blogs are more…a conversation with voters…and whether it creates an emotional [link], that’s taking it a bit far. In an election campaign its really unlikely to have emotional links with 12 000 – 13 000 people.” Tell that to the couple of million people who were sufficiently emotionally moved by their interaction with Barrack Obama to open their wallets to him. Of course there’s an emotional link – that’s what happens in the world of social media. That’s why it works. That’s why political parties use it. Duh.

In the course of the conversation Duarte calls the journalist a member of the third force, and implies that he is racist (because, as we all know, any criticism of the ANC President is racist. It’s not an honest expression of a man’s shortcomings). There’s no way she would have adopted that approach and tone were she dealing with a more senior Times journalist or more influential columnist, like Fred Khumalo or Mondli Makhanya. In Nombembe she found a weak victim, a young relatively unknown journalist without the stature and experience of some of his colleagues. And so she moved in for the kill, making her nothing more than an arrogant bully. There’s no other way to put it. And as a professional communicator and media “handler” she has proven to be hopelessly incompetent.

Similarly in her performance on the BBC’s Today programme, Duarte came across as defensive, arrogant and insulting. Granted the programme’s style of interviewing is more robust and direct than the ANC expects from a State Broadcaster, but hurling accusations of colonialism at your interviewer and claiming the high ground because South Africa doesn’t take photographs of its citizen’s dustbins (WTF???) is simply immature and petulant.

I worked as a media relations manager in a big company for a couple of years and if I had ever spoken to a journalist like Duarte did to Nombembe or Humphreys I would have, quite rightly, been fired on the spot. Perhaps we can hope that, when he is President, Mr Zuma will remember his election promise to weed out non-performance wherever he finds it. In Ms Duarte’s case, he doesn’t have to look far.

While on Social Media, the same Ms Duarte sat down to Tweet with the non-emotionally-connected middle class on Twitter on Friday. And proved yet again that she (and/or the party) is ignorant about the way medium works. They invited questions from Twitter users, tagged @ANC_Debate. I watched for a while, even submitted a few questions of my own. I soon realised – as did many others watching and commenting – that it was a pointless exercise and there was no actual debate happening. Only questions that gave Duarte a chance to repeat the ANC’s manifesto were actually responded to. The rest, the ANC hoped, would disappear into the ether. Of course they didn’t.

Here’s a sample of some questions that were responded to, and some that weren’t. Draw your own conclusions about how bold the ANC was to enter the world of social media:

I’m still on holiday – on the tail end of a relaxing two weeks in Kimberley (is there any other way to be in Kimberley?) and while I have spent hours staring at my screen, I haven’t spent any time actually writing any actual words. Which isn’t great for a blogger and explains the dip in my Google stats over the last few weeks.
What I do have instead is a list of things I’d like to blog about. Here it is (in no particular order):

1. A rant about the quality of cheap Chinese toys. This rant will invariably descend into a mini-rant about how, when I was a kid, we used to make all of our own toys from left over poodle and bits of string. This is just curmudgeonly and boring, so I probably won’t actually write it.

2. Some thoughts around the ANC Youth League, asking why the party needs a Youth League anyway. Granted it had a role to play in the struggle days when underground mobilisation of the youth was everything – but surely a sophisticated party in a modern democracy should be about cohesion and strength in numbers? And having a separate body just adds to the noise? The Youth League will invariably agree with the “Mother Party”, when it doesn’t it gets slapped on the wrists, so why do we need something that simply echoes agreement all the time? Ah yes – let me answer my own question: It’s about the comedic value of giving Julius Malema sufficient status and power to ensure that he stays in the headlines and provides us all with a good laugh as the economy, the arms deal, AIDS and OBE conspire to undo the great work of the elder statesmen of the ANC.

3. Decaffeinated coffee. I mean, really. You can’t be serious? It’s like marketing erection-free condoms.

4. A list of the Christmas presents I received in ascending order of how much I liked them.

5. I had a head-on collision with a pigeon the other day and arrived at my destination to find it buried head first in my radiator grill. It’s tiny grey arse was flapping and feathering in the wind, even though it must have been dead for several hours, and I refused to touch it. Next morning it was gone. Where?

6. I wish Fred Khumalo, Ndumiso Ngcobo, Ferial Haffajee and Mondli Makhanya  would all stop writing. Forever. They’re showing me up and, seeing how they cut to the heart of hugely complex issues with razor-like precision and articulate their essence makes me want to curl up into a little ball and sob quietly to myself. What’s the point of even trying to be a blogger or writer when they’re the competition?

7. A rant about the warmongering in the Middle East. I actually began writing this one, and got as far as giving it a title. But reading how perfectly Mondli Makhanya articulated the issue in last week’s Sunday Times (see 6 above) made me give up before the first sentence was written. (For lovers of pointless information, the blog was going to be entitled “Israel: Grow Up”)

8. The stupidity of New Year’s resolutions. What is it about 31 December that turns people into fun-loving, stranger-kissing, self-improvement wankers? I blame Dr Phil. And Oprah for the other 364 days a year.

9. A list of things I’d like to blog about.
Oh well, happy new year. I’ve achieved one out of nine. And probably won’t get to the rest, so come back soon for something fresh.