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08 August 2019 | Story Valentino Ndaba | Photo Sonia Small
Student Safety
The university continues to make concerted efforts to increase student and staff safety on and off campuses.

Protection Services monitors all campuses around the clock to ensure the safety of students and staff. Safety is at the top of the agenda of the University of the Free State (UFS), as it is crucial for maintaining an environment conducive to teaching and learning. A number of on- and off-campus security measures are in place that are constantly being reviewed as the need arises. 

On-campus security measures

Members of Protection Services man the Operational Centre on a 24-hour basis. This office can be contacted by students and staff members to report incidents on and off campus. Security patrols on foot and by vehicle are conducted by members of Protection Services along with contracted security officers on a daily basis on all campuses. In addition, dedicated security officers are deployed at female residences at night.

State-of-the-art CCTV cameras are monitored around the clock by members of Protection Services. These cameras play a vital role in the investigation of incidents as well as the real-time detection of criminal activities taking place on campus. A number of arrests have been made using CCTV footage. A process is underway to enhance the current CCTV capacity by installing new cameras at identified hotspots on campus and at student residences.

Red-pole panic alarms linked to cameras were installed on the three UFS campuses. A security-response vehicle is dispatched to locations when the alarm is activated. Intruder alarms were also installed at various buildings on all the campuses. It alerts Protection Services in the case of unauthorised entries or burglaries.

There are three dedicated Investigation Officers in the Department of Protection Services – two on the Bloemfontein Campus and one on the Qwaqwa Campus – who are responsible for investigating cases on campuses, as well as working in collaboration with SAPS Investigating Officers on all off-campus reported cases. One of them is always on standby to respond to cases reported after hours. The university also appointed a staff member who is responsible for threat detection, investigations, and liaising with external law-enforcement agencies. He is also responsible for the coordination of off-campus safety and security operations.

Safeguarding the off-campus environment

Although the university has no jurisdiction off campus, several measures were implemented in collaboration with external law-enforcement agencies such as the South African Police Service (SAPS), Community Policing Forum (CPF), and private security companies. 

The UFS is represented on the CPF committees for sector 2 and 3 of the Park Road Police Station, and sector 4 of the Kagisanong Police Station, and joined operations are conducted from time to time. A Student Safety Collaboration Forum for both on- and off-campus students is currently being established and several Crime Stop WhatsApp groups consisting of students, SAPS and CPF members, sector policing, armed security companies, and Protection Services are being used for real-time reporting and response.

The Department of Protection Services also appointed an off-campus Security Liaison Officer to assist students in reporting crime incidents to the SAPS and obtaining the necessary social and psychological support. This officer also liaises with the SAPS and private security companies on an ongoing basis to enhance security around the campus.

Members of SAPS, CPF, and security companies conduct regular patrols in areas where students reside. 

Protection Services and the Department of Housing and Residence Affairs have already accredited several off-campus residences, and are working together to accredit more in line with the guidelines of the Department of Higher Education and Training. More than 3 000 beds in Bloemfontein have been accredited so far. 

The Sexual Assault Response Team is at your service

All students and staff members can now report incidents related to gender-based violence, sexual harassment, and any act of prejudice or discrimination directly to the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART), which was recently officially launched by the Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice.  Members of Protection Services also recently received training in assisting victims of sexual-violence incidents.

Incidents may be reported from Monday to Friday, 07:30-16:30 on +27 51 401 7777, and after hours on the 0800 204 682 toll-free line. This initiative is proudly sponsored by the Office for Gender Equality and Anti-discrimination, together with the UFS Social Support Unit. 

On combating academic anxiety

The Office for Student Counselling and Development (SCD) is launching the Student Toolkit on the Bloemfontein Campus on 23 August 2019. Students will now have a step-by-step guide that contains all the information needed to ensure a healthy mental-health status.

Should students need professional individual or group counselling, support is available from the SCD. Visits can be arranged by calling +27 51 401 2853 or emailing scd@ufs.ac.za 

Emergency contact details are available with the click of a button on the KovsieApp or at the back of all access cards.

News Archive

Media: Sunday Times
2006-05-20

Sunday Times, 4 June 2006

True leadership may mean admitting disunity
 

In this edited extract from the inaugural King Moshoeshoe Memorial Lecture at the University of the Free State, Professor Njabulo S Ndebele explores the leadership challenges facing South Africa

RECENT events have created a sense that we are undergoing a serious crisis of leadership in our new democracy. An increasing number of highly intelligent, sensitive and committed South Africans, across class, racial and cultural spectrums, confess to feeling uncertain and vulnerable as never before since 1994.

When indomitable optimists confess to having a sense of things unhinging, the misery of anxiety spreads. We have the sense that events are spiralling out of control and that no one among the leadership of the country seems to have a definitive handle on things.

There can be nothing more debilitating than a generalised and undefined sense of anxiety in the body politic. It breeds conspiracies and fear.

There is an impression that a very complex society has developed, in the last few years, a rather simple, centralised governance mechanism in the hope that delivery can be better and more quickly driven. The complexity of governance then gets located within a single structure of authority rather than in the devolved structures envisaged in the Constitution, which should interact with one another continuously, and in response to their specific settings, to achieve defined goals. Collapse in a single structure of authority, because there is no robust backup, can be catastrophic.

The autonomy of devolved structures presents itself as an impediment only when visionary cohesion collapses. Where such cohesion is strong, the impediment is only illusory, particularly when it encourages healthy competition, for example, among the provinces, or where a province develops a character that is not necessarily autonomous politically but rather distinctive and a special source of regional pride. Such competition brings vibrancy to the country. It does not necessarily challenge the centre.

Devolved autonomy is vital in the interests of sustainable governance. The failure of various structures to actualise their constitutionally defined roles should not be attributed to the failure of the prescribed governance mechanism. It is too early to say that what we have has not worked. The only viable corrective will be in our ability to be robust in identifying the problems and dealing with them concertedly.

We have never had social cohesion in South Africa — certainly not since the Natives’ Land Act of 1913. What we definitely have had over the decades is a mobilising vision. Could it be that the mobilising vision, mistaken for social cohesion, is cracking under the weight of the reality and extent of social reconstruction, and that the legitimate framework for debating these problems is collapsing? If that is so, are we witnessing a cumulative failure of leadership?

I am making a descriptive rather than an evaluative inquiry. I do not believe that there is any single entity to be blamed. It is simply that we may be a country in search of another line of approach. What will it be?

I would like to suggest two avenues of approach — an inclusive model and a counter-intuitive model of leadership.

In an inclusive approach, leadership is exercised not only by those who have been put in some position of power to steer an organisation or institution. Leadership is what all of us do when we express, sincerely, our deepest feelings and thoughts; when we do our work, whatever it is, with passion and integrity.

Counter-intuitive leadership lies in the ability of leaders to read a problematic situation, assess probable outcomes and then recognise that those outcomes will only compound the problem. Genuine leadership, in this sense, requires going against probability in seeking unexpected outcomes. That’s what happened when we avoided a civil war and ended up with an “unexpected” democracy.

Right now, we may very well hear desperate calls for unity, when the counter-intuitive imperative would be to acknowledge disunity. A declaration of unity where it manifestly does not appear to exist will fail to reassure.

Many within the “broad alliance” might have the view that the mobilising vision of old may have transformed into a strategy of executive steering with a disposition towards an expectation of compliance. No matter how compelling the reasons for that tendency, it may be seen as part of a cumulative process in which popular notions of democratic governance are apparently undermined and devalued; and where public uncertainty in the midst of seeming crisis induces fear which could freeze public thinking at a time when more voices ought to be heard.

Could it be that part of the problem is that we are unable to deal with the notion of opposition? We are horrified that any of us could be seen to have become “the opposition”. The word has been demonised. In reality, it is time we began to anticipate the arrival of a moment when there is no longer a single, overwhelmingly dominant political force as is currently the case. Such is the course of history. The measure of the maturity of the current political environment will be in how it can create conditions that anticipate that moment rather than seek to prevent it. We see here once more the essential creativity of the counter-intuitive imperative.

This is the formidable challenge of a popular post-apartheid political movement. Can it conceptually anticipate a future when it is no longer overwhelmingly in control, in the form in which it is currently, and resist, counter-intuitively, the temptation to prevent such an eventuality? Successfully resisting such an option would enable its current vision and its ultimate legacy to our country to manifest in different articulations, which then contend for social influence. In this way, the vision never really dies; it simply evolves into higher, more complex forms of itself. Consider the metaphor of flying ants replicating the ant community by establishing new ones.

We may certainly experience the meaning of comradeship differently, where we will now have “comrades on the other side”.

Any political movement that imagines itself as a perpetual entity should look at the compelling evidence of history. Few movements have survived those defining moments when they should have been more elastic, and that because they were not, did not live to see the next day.

I believe we may have reached a moment not fundamentally different from the sobering, yet uplifting and vision-making, nation-building realities that led to Kempton Park in the early ’90s. The difference between then and now is that the black majority is not facing white compatriots across the negotiating table. Rather, it is facing itself: perhaps really for the first time since 1994. Could we apply to ourselves the same degree of inventiveness and rigorous negotiation we displayed leading up to the adoption or our Constitution?

This is not a time for repeating old platitudes. It is the time, once more, for vision.

In the total scheme of things, the outcome could be as disastrous as it could be formative and uplifting, setting in place the conditions for a true renaissance that could be sustained for generations to come.

Ndebele is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town and author of the novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela

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