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After South Africa’s battle with the record-breaking drought of 2015, Prof Andries Jordaan from our Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa(DiMTEC) saw room for improvement in dealing with this kind of disaster.
Drought impact
Commercial farmers who are usually net exporters of food crops and communal farmers who own the bulk of the country’s livestock, were all hit hard in 2015. Most of the latter had no resources to spare as the drought progressed. The concern about the drought’s impact on the country’s food production and availability resulted in a joint goal of preventing food scarcity during future droughts.
Prof Jordaan’s visit to the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the US, several years ago prepared him to better equip communities in South Africa to deal with drought situations. “I recognised that in spite of the impact DiMTEC has been able to make on disaster preparedness, a gap remained in disaster response in South Africa.”
Sharing knowledge
In August this year Prof Jordaan again visited the NDMC. This time he requested a few key players in South Africa’s agriculture and disaster response communities to join him. With him were Janse Rabie, head of Natural Resources at AgriSA, a nonprofit organisation that functions as an interface between the government and about 28 000 South Africa farmers, and Moses Musiwale Khangale, director of Fire Services for the South African Ministry of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs.
The South African delegation met with and learnt from climatologists, geospatial technologists, and outreach and planning analysts.
UFS holds memorial service for Prof Benito Khotseng
2015-01-09
Prof Benito Khotseng |
The management of the University of the Free State is saddened by the passing away of Prof Benito Khotseng, former Vice-Rector: Student Affairs at the UFS.
Prof Khotseng died from a heart disease on Sunday 4 January 2015 at the age of 67.
He joined the University of the Free State as a senior manager more than two decades ago.
According to family and colleagues, his death has left a void in the education fraternity.
Prof Kalie Strydom, who has been a colleague of Prof Khotseng for more than 20 years, described him as a principled leader who did not promote and argue educational issues in his own interest.
“His focus was never on benefitting opportunistically in the short term, whether professionally or financially. I had the privilege of participating with Benito in many meetings and fundraising efforts where the correct values/principles and the organisations/institutions for which he worked benefitted, but other than so often happens in life, Benito did not benefit personally. We celebrate him forever, though with tears in our eyes.”
A memorial service for Prof Khotseng will be held at the UFS’s Bloemfontein Campus:
Monday 12 January 2015
10:00
Albert Wessels Auditorium, Bloemfontein Campus, UFS