FOR months now Scrutator has been complaining bitterly about people who masquerade as journalists.
I have shouted my voice hoarse as these gatecrashers — because of their lack of skill — have resorted to peeing on basic journalism ethics.
We have become a profession that unquestioningly takes on board rejects from other lines of work.
The result is that journalism has become a “septic tank” for disgraced lawyers, pathetic teachers, failed politicians and defrocked pastors.
Journalism has become the profession of choice for born-losers, over-ambitious taxi drivers and conductors as well as overrated disc jockeys.
Standards have plummeted but these mafikizolos don’t give a damn because they know nothing about journalism in the first place.
Scrutator has had enough of these scatological antics.
From now on the gloves are off.
Some years ago our all-embracing profession gave refuge to a reject from the legal fraternity — one Thulo Hoeane.
Let me paint a picture of this professional vagrant.
Tumblebugs, better known as dung beetles, are quite fascinating creatures.
Many of us, whether we have herded cattle or not, are surely familiar with these creepy-crawlies that create dung balls and roll them with their hind legs.
But Scrutator is not sure if many of us are familiar with a wise African adage that says a dung beetle, simply because it stays in dung, can presume itself to be a cow too.
Hoeane has just been doing that.
Simply because he has had the opportunity to hobnob with journalists — and string sentences in Sothonglish — he now sees himself as a journalist of note.
Thulo reminds Scrutator of the proverbial hen that lays one egg and cackles as if it has laid a whole planet. Holy dung!
If he had any shame, he would not even tell his children what he does for a living.
But because he doesn’t have any iota of it, he has been running and hiding from a money-lending club that came to his rescue over a dozen of months ago.
And he’s the same boy who, a week after successfully begging — knees and elbows on the floor — for a job with this paper, begged again for a loan.
Scrutator will leave it to the disgraced barrister to tell us why he was struck off the lawyers’ register.
It certainly must take the shamelessness of Thabana Ntlenyana proportions for one to soil one’s reputation in one profession, gatecrash into another and mess it up even worse.
Dear readers, you might be wondering why I am attempting to expose this pseudo-journalist for the scumbag that he is.
Well, it’s because if he’s not running away with a poor money lending club’s cash he’s busy rolling dung which he passes off as news stories.
I will not watch him silently as he tarnishes our esteemed profession.
Not when I’m still breathing.
The good thing is no one — including his friends — takes the ageing media greenhorn seriously.
By the way, thanks for finally telling us your news sources are broom hawkers.
The mystery has been solved: that’s why your work is dung.
We will forever rue the day we accepted the reject into our profession.
The failed barrister has delivered gaffes, misquotations and blue lies.
Ethics have been butchered.
The failed lawyer has adamantly refused to let facts get in the way of a “good story”.
Take his piece titled “Nitty Gritty: Zimbabwe, give me lizards and porridge 24/7” for instance.
Surely everyone who is not under the influence of some intoxicating substance knows that Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister is Morgan Tsvangirai.
But not this disgraced lawyer who called him Tsvangarai a record four times in his 586-word article that turned out to be just another ball of dung.
It would have been pardonable had the spirit medium not tried to justify his otherwise bigotry-filled article with total fabrications and half-truths.
“Nobody knows anything about him (Tsvangirai) beyond that he is a nobody with a little known and almost non-existent trade union background,” Thulo shamelessly reveled.
“I am reliably informed by one of my broom selling friends from Salisbury (oops! Harare) that Tsvangarai is a political fly-by night and academic minnow very much on the Julius Malema side. He is not where he is today because of any credentials that go with the job but in spite of them,”
I almost fell off my chair, with laughter, after reading that blatant falsehood.
Lawyers, like journalists, must have a good grasp of basic historical facts.
The bar is even higher when the writer is both a lawyer and a journalist moonlighting as an editor of an online rumour mill.
But Thulo is in a class of his own.
Tsvangirai was active in the labour movement by his mid-20s and that was way back in the 1970s.
He was the secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions for more than a decade after taking over in 1988.
Which means by the time he was 36 he was leading a union that had nearly two million members.
In fact Tsvangirai was last year in the running for the internationally acclaimed Nobel Peace Prize which was eventually won by US President Barack Obama.
Any journalist who does not know this is a fool.
In any case Google confirmed all this to Scrutator in a flash.
But Thulo didn’t want to know this because it would have interfered with his inane argument.
As for the “academic minnow” part, Scrutator knows no word to describe a journalist who relies on a legion of broom sellers for news from another country.
His bragging that he had gleaned the information from broom sellers clearly indicates what a myopic journalist he is.
Were they the same broom sellers who told him that the education minister had “allegedly” resigned a few weeks ago?
Were these the same broom sellers who whispered lies into his ears while he misquoted the chief justice’s speech recently?
Watch this space for more on the boy who, if he’s not busy making a fool of himself by applying for jobs clearly beyond his capabilities, he’s busy abusing the people who have taught him the ABCs of journalism.
This is not a threat but a promise.
