If you haven’t heard already, the spectacularly embarrassing news from M-Net (South Africa’s leading Premium Channel) is that they have had to award the South African Idol crown to both finalists.
After what M-Net claims was an unprecedented amount of voters, (2.4 Million) a large amount of votes that were sent through before the cut off time only arrived well after the cut off time, easily 600 000 votes. Sasha Lee was crowned at the end of the finale but her victory was short lived. On Monday morning during some internal investigating the M-Net crew knew something was wrong. They called in an auditing firm, KPMG, to audit the results. It was found that Jason had in fact won by a resounding 200 000 votes.
They have now decided to give both contestants a recording contract and car, with the rest of the prizes being split equally. The news yesterday afternoon made many people angry. Many people are now arguing that Jason should be the sole winner because he is the true winner.
Let’s look at it from M-Net’s point of view. This is a huge mistake. How do they keep all the viewers, who voted 2.4 million times, happy and willing to vote again in the next competition? If they had taken it away from Sasha Lee it would have been humiliating for her, and they would be in trouble. They couldn’t ignore it either because viewers had been complaining for most of the week about not being able to send through their SMS for Jason.
Nobody seems to be taking the blame; everybody is pointing fingers at everybody else. So the really serious question is whose fault was it that such a monumental mistake could be made?
I’m finding it more and more difficult to not be ‘deep’ about everything lately. I think I’m just realising how the consequences of our actions, no matter how small, are huge. I was chatting to some classmates in a lecture recently and the subject of ‘religion’ came up. I mentally rolled my eyes, if that makes sense, as the very mention of the word irritates me. The word religion has come to mean some section of your life that you devote to a god or cult or something similar. What I believe is so much more than that.
Tonight I went to home cell, that’s basically a meeting of people from the church who get together in their homes to talk about God. One of the guys had just gotten back from a trip to Mozambique and he was telling us some amazing stories he had heard. As I listened I felt so disconnected, like I was living such a different life. I wanted to jump into the next car and go wherever and tell people about God. Yet, in my own lectures there are people who are so dead inside. They have the world but no soul.
