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04 September 2018
Photo Thabo Kessah
Industrial Psychology Head of Department and lecturer, Thinus Delport; final-year BAdmin student, Nandi Radebe; and Jacobus Nel during the SABPP event on the Qwaqwa Campus.
The South African Board for People Practices (SABPP) recently visited the University of the Free State’s Qwaqwa Campus to welcome new members to its Student Chapter. Over 100 Industrial Psychology students were issued with certificates of registration and membership.
Talking during the ceremony, the Assistant Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, Jacobus Nel, congratulated all the students and the newly-elected executive committee on campus.
“You have taken the right step in advancing yourselves in the profession you are studying for, and we are pleased to see that you recognise that your future is in your own hands. Your future is not in the hands of the university, nor is it in the hands of the SABPP,” he said.
The SABPP was represented by the Chief Operations Officer, Xolani Mawande, who advised the new members and students in general to keep doing their best, even when conditions do not permit.
“The Human Resources profession wants individuals who do not just give up because there are challenges. Challenges will always be there, especially in a workplace. Being a member will expose you to other HR professionals as well as give you the opportunity to network with other students,” he added.
Mawande also announced that the new Chairperson and Deputy Chairperson of the Qwaqwa Campus SABPP Student Chapter would be attending a national convention in Johannesburg that was scheduled for 30-31 August 2018.
Zama-geza Goba, a final-year BAdmin student, was elected as the Chairperson while Musawenkosi Mazibuko, a BA Industrial Psychology student, was elected as her deputy.
Expert in Africa Studies debunks African middle class myth
2016-05-10
From left: Prof Heidi Hudson, Director of the Centre for Africa Studies (CAS), Joe Besigye from the Institute of Reconciliation and Social Justice, and Prof Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor at the CAS and guest lecturer for the day.
Photo: Valentino Ndaba
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Until recently, think tanks from North America, the African Development Bank, United Nations Development Plan, and global economists have defined the African middle class based purely on monetary arithmetic. One of the claims made in the past is that anyone with a consumption power of $2 per day constitutes the middle class. Following this, if poverty is defined as monetary income below $1.5 a day, it means that it takes just half a dollar to reach the threshold considered as African middle class.
Prof Henning Melber highlighted the disparities in the notion of a growing African middle class in a guest lecture titled A critical anatomy of the African middle class(es), hosted by our Centre for Africa Studies (CAS) at the University of the Free State on 4 May 2016. He is an Extraordinary Professor at the Centre, as well as Senior Adviser and Director Emeritus of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Sweden.
Prof Melber argued that it is misleading to consider only income when identifying the middle class. In his opinion, such views were advanced by promoters of the global neo-liberal project. “My suspicion is that those who promote the middle class discourse in that way, based on such a low threshold, were desperate to look for the success story that testifies to Africa rising.”
Another pitfall of such a middle-class analysis is its ahistorical contextualisation. This economically-reduced notion of the class is a sheer distortion. Prof Melber advised analysts to take cognisance of factors, such as consumption patterns, lifestyle, and political affiliation, amongst others.
In his second lecture for the day, Prof Melber dealt withthe topic of: Namibia since independence: the limits to Liberation, painting the historical backdrop against which the country’s current government is consolidating its political hegemony. He highlighted examples of the limited transformation that has been achieved since Namibia’s independence in 1990.