I vividly remember the year and the events of it. It was on September 3 2007, the day Gift Leremi was involved in a car accident. I was still a first-year media studies student at the University of Limpopo. That day our media law lecturer Vusimusi Mabuza prepared a media ethics lecture for us as it coincided with the death of Leremi.

What prompted him to familiarise us with the to-do and what-not-to-do as a journalist was the way in which journalists reported about the death of Leremi. We were ordered to divide ourselves into groups for a media ethics debate. One of the groups was led by the recently disgraced Aubrey Mothombeni...