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10 December 2018 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Supplied
UFS CMD team at the MACE Awards
The team from the UFS which attended the Mace Excellence Awards function in Cape Town this year, are from the left: Rulanzen Martin, Valentino Ndaba, Lacea Loader, Lelanie de Wet, Maria Venter; back: Zama Feni, Vivek Daya and Eugene Seegers.

The Department of Communication and Marketing won seven awards during the 2018 Excellence Awards presented by the National Association of Marketing, Advancement, and Communication in Education (MACE), which took place in Cape Town on 29 November 2018. It is the third consecutive year the department has brought home seven and more awards for its work in communication and marketing.

Lacea Loader, Director: Communication and Marketing at the University if the Free State (UFS) says: “Being recognised by our peers for quality and innovative work is most rewarding. This year, 172 entries were received from 12 institutions across the country. Although the competition was tough the UFS also received the Severus Cerff Award, one of three special awards. This award is made to the institution with the highest success ratio and for consistent excellence.” Loader serves on the MACE Board of Directors as Excellence Awards Coordinator.

Promoting best practices

MACE plays a vital role in adding value to practitioners in marketing, advancement and communication through high-quality development programmes, facilitating networking partnerships and transformation, as well as promoting best practices among these professions at member institutions.

The awards ceremony is part of the MACE Annual National Congress, which took place from 27-29 November 2018 at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town. The MACE Congress is a platform on which experts from the fields of marketing, advancement, and communication share experiences and best practices.

This year’s programme included speakers such Thabang Chiloane (executive head of Nedbank’s Group Public Affairs), Dr Marina Joubert (senior science communication researcher at CREST), Karyn Strybos (Marketing Manager at Everlytic), Bruce Dube (Managing Director of Nine80 Digital Media) and Brendan Cooper (head of New Media’s internal communications division).

Recognising hard work and innovation

Lelanie de Wet, Manager: Digital Communication received the Platinum award in the Division Campaigns with her entry for the Website Re-launch Awareness campaign. The Platinum award is bestowed on the best entry in a specific division.

The Digital Communication Unit in the Department of Communication and Marketing walked away with four more awards. De Wet also received a Gold award in the Design for Digital Media category for her work on the KovsieLife student web design.

Moeketsi Mogotsi received a Gold award in the category Design for Visual Media for his entry: UFS Women’s Month Billboard.

Barend Nagel, who joined the department this year, received a Gold Award for his photographs for the Africa Month Awareness campaign in the category Photography: Feature and Documentary. Nagel also received a Bronze award in the category Videography Skills, for his video entry: UFS Exam Hack.

In the Unit: Internal and Media Communication, Valentino Ndaba brought home a Bronze Medal for her entry of the BSafe Take Action campaign which was entered in the Issue Management Campaigns category.

IABC Gold Quill Merit Award

The Department of Communication and Marketing earlier this year also received an International Gold Quill Merit Award for the Website Re-launch Awareness campaign.

“The fact that we were also again acknowledged by the International Assocation for Business Communicators  is also commendable. "I am immensely proud of the national and international recognition my team received this year,” said Loader.

News Archive

African historian honoured at UFS Library book launch
2016-08-23

Description: Library book launch Tags: Library book launch

The UFS Library, in collaboration with the Department of Political Studies and Governance, launched This Present Darkness, a book by the late Stephen Ellis on 23 August 2016 at the Sasol Library on the Bloemfontein Campus.

Stephen Ellis was a Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden. He wrote ground-breaking books on the ANC, the Liberian Civil War, religion and politics in Africa, and the history of Madagascar.  He died in 2015.

The book explores how Nigerian criminal syndicates acquired a reputation for involvement in drug-trafficking, fraud, cyber-crime, and other types of criminal activity. Successful Nigerian criminal networks have a global reach, interacting with their Italian, Latin American, and Russian counterparts. Yet in 1944, a British colonial official wrote that “the number of persistent and professional criminals is not great in Nigeria” and that “crime as a career has so far made little appeal to the young Nigerian.”

Ellis, a celebrated Africanist, traces the origins of Nigerian organised crime to the last years of colonial rule, when nationalist politicians acquired power at regional level. In need of funds for campaigning, they offered government contracts to foreign businesses in return for kickbacks, a pattern that recurs to this day. Political corruption encouraged a wider disrespect for the law that spread throughout Nigerian society. When the country’s oil boom came to an end in the early 1980s, young Nigerian college graduates headed abroad, eager to make money by any means. Nigerian crime went global, and new criminal markets are emerging all over the world at present.

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