I am sorry if this comes across as cold and heartless. But do me a favour, please. This is ridiculous now. I am tired of seeing facebook groups and junk websites that are selling products for profit and sponsored by corporates.

I don’t even know how long this poor little girl has been missing for. In fact, I don’t think it matters. This is a very simple matter of rich folk getting media attention for something that happens to poorer people everyday.

Remember when Leigh Matthews was abducted a few years back? That hit the papers. In the same period of time a coloured girl from a less fortunate background was also abducted but never hit the papers. I don’t even know her name. This is so typical and I am as much to blame as anyone else.

It has now been a while since Maddy went missing. We have heard the soap opera-like stories on Sky and BBC and followed like gossip hungry voyeurs waiting for the parents to be convicted. Get over it. And for that matter, let’s maybe try to focus our energy on the bazillion children that go missing everyday around the world. How bout starting a search for one of them – oh wait, did you hear that? That was another child going missing – instead of continuing to pump money and man hours in to a case that seems to be a run around.

My basic point is this: It’s been close on 160 days since Maddy went missing and we are still talking about it at dinner parties and on Facebook. Why do we, as South Africans, not talk about our own missing children with such intense opinion and vigour?