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03 July 2019 | Story Leonie Bolleurs
KovsiesCare - Clean Up Read More
Tsietsi Ngobese, through the Wesolve4x Cleaning My Planet Campaign, motivated citizens to collectively fill over 23 000 refuse bags to date.

The mission: To collectively fill 20 million refuse bags every Saturday with the help of 20 million people who are cleaning their own communities and our planet for an hour. The message: My planet, my responsibility.

The mission and message that the Wesolve4x Cleaning My Planet Campaign wants to convey, is based on a simple premise: Get community members to donate one hour of their time to cleaning duties every Saturday for the next 20 years until 2039. At the same time provide a continuous educational programme about waste management to the general public and to schools in order to empower them to take responsibility.

Address trash blindness


Tsietsi Ngobese, Chief Executive Officer of this initiative and BSc Actuarial Science graduate, says he understands the transformative power of education and the role it plays in transforming diverse communities. Through outreach programmes in our community and schools, we are slowly eliminating generational trash blindness. We also tackle some of the social determinants of health by encouraging healthy living conditions within our communities through good waste management and recycling. 

It is important for Tsietsi to add value to society. He believes that the Wesolve4x Generation will transform the world for the better through education and empowering all citizens.

The campaign – officially endorsed by Miss Earth South Africa, Catherine Constantinides – was launched on the UFS Bloemfontein Campus as well as the Abram Hlope Primary School in Katlehong on 4 May 2019.

“We want to promote the benefits of a clean and healthy environment for future generations,” said Tsietsi. 

Since their inception, the group has collectively filled over 23 000 refuse bags with the help of active citizens. 

Challenge accepted

When former lecturer, Jan Blomerus, once challenged his Actuarial students to protect the environment in order to decrease the mortality rate (from natural disasters because of the effect of climate change), Tsietsi accepted the challenge. “By inspiring excellence and transforming lives, the UFS plays an important role; I started to believe that I can address societal challenges in the communities I am an integral part of,” he said.

When Tsietsi saw trash piling up everywhere and children playing at illegal dumping sites, he became concerned about the health risk to society. He believes the dumping area is contaminating the air and water around the dumping site. 

“I had to be part of the solution to start cleaning up, and most importantly, educating myself and others to continuously take responsibility for our own waste and change our thinking about littering. This is a generational issue and needs a generational approach to unlearn all habits of littering,” Tsietsi pointed out. 

As part of his vision, Tsietsi plans to reduce the waste taken to landfill sites and to increase that which is taken directly from households to recycling plants. He also wants to encourage people to find creative ways of converting what has previously been wasted into something useful. “This action can encourage individuals to generate an income from waste,” he said.

Take action

Tsietsi invites all members of the Mangaung community to get involved in the project. This is your opportunity to make a difference on Mandela Day. You can;
provide sponsorship for educational content on effective waste management, economic opportunities, and health issues to the general public and to schools;
provide refuse bags, plastic gloves or hand-washing soap (used by community members in every clean-up session);
join in a collective effort to clean your community by meeting at designated schools or any designated community assembly point on a Saturday (contact 011 307 2005 or info@wesolve4x.com for more information).


News Archive

SA universities are becoming the battlegrounds for political gain
2010-11-02

Prof. Kalie Strydom.

No worthwhile contribution can be made to higher education excellence if you do not understand and acknowledge the devastating, but unfortunately unavoidable role of party politics in the system and universities of higher education and training (HET).

This statement was made by Prof. Kalie Strydom during his valedictory lecture made on the Main Campus of the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein recently.

Prof. Strydom, who was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the UFS in 2010, presented a lecture on the theme: The Long Walk to Higher Education and Training Excellence: The Struggle of Comrades and Racists. He provided perspectives on politics in higher education and training (HET) and shared different examples explaining the meaning of excellence in HET in relation to politics.

“At the HET systems level I was fortunate to participate in the deliberations in the early nineties to prepare policy perspectives that could be used by the ANC in HET policy making after the 1994 elections.  At these deliberations one of the important issues discussed was the typical educational and training pyramid recognised in many countries, to establish and maintain successful education and training. The educational pyramid in successful countries was compared to the SA “inverted” pyramid that had already originated during apartheid for all races, but unfortunately exploded during the 16 years of democracy to a dangerous situation of 3 million out-of school and post-school youth with very few education and training opportunities,” he said.

In his lecture, Prof. Strydom answered questions like: Why could we as higher educationists not persuade the new democratically elected government to create a successful education and training pyramid with a strong intermediate college sector in the nineties?  What was the politics like in the early and late nineties about disallowing the acceptance of the successful pyramid of education and training?  Why do we only now in the latest DHET strategic planning 2010–2015 have this successful pyramid as a basis for policymaking and planning?

At an institutional level he explained the role of politics by referring to the Reitz incident at the UFS and the infamous Soudien report on racism in higher education in South Africa highlighting explosive racial situations in our universities and the country.  “To understand this situation we need to acknowledge that we are battling with complex biases influencing the racial situation,” he said.

“White and black, staff and students at our universities are constantly battling with the legacy of the past which is being used, abused and conveniently forgotten, as well as critical events that white and black experience every day of their lives, feeding polarisation of extreme views while eroding common ground.  Examples vary from the indoctrination and prejudice that is continued within most homes, churches and schools; mass media full of murder, rape, corruption; political parties skewing difficult issues for indiscrete political gain; to frustrating non-delivery in almost all spheres of life which frustrates and irritates everyone, all feeding racial stereo typing and prejudice,” said Prof. Strydom.

A South African philosopher, Prof. Willie Esterhuyse, recently used the metaphor of an “Elephant in our lounge” to describe the syndrome of racism that is part of the lives of white and black South Africans in very different ways. He indicated that all of us are aware of the elephant, but we choose not to talk about it, an attitude described by Ruth Frankenberg as ‘colour evasiveness’, which denies the nature and scope of the problem.

Constructs related to race are so contentious that most stakeholders and role-players are unwilling to confront the meanings that they assign to very prominent dimensions of their experience; neither does management at the institutions have enough staff (higher educationists?) with the competencies to interrogate these meanings, or generate shared meanings amongst staff and students (common ground).  A good example that could be compared with “the elephant in our lounge” remark is the recent paper of Prof. Jonathan Jansen, Rector and Vice-Chancellor of the UFS on race categorisation in education and training.

According to Prof. Strydom, universities in South Africa are increasingly becoming the battlegrounds for political gain which creates a polarised atmosphere on campuses and crowds out the moderate middle ground, thereby subverting the role and function of the university as an institution within a specific context, interpreted globally and locally. 

Striving for excellence, mostly free from the negative influences of politics, in HET, from the point of view of the higher educationist, is that we should, through comparative literature review and research, re-conceptualise the university as an institution in a specific context.  This entails carefully considering environment and the positioning of the university leading to a specific institutional culture and recognising the fact that institutional cultures are complicated by many subcultures in academe (faculties) and student life (residences/new generations of commuter students).

Another way forward in striving for excellence, mostly free from politics, is to ensure that we understand the complexities of governing a university better.  D.W. Leslie (2003) mentions formidable tasks related to governance influenced by politics:

  • Balancing legitimacy and effectiveness.
  • Leading along two dimensions: getting work done and engaging people.
  • Differentiating between formal university structures and the functions of universities as they adapt and evolve.
  • Bridging the divergence between cultural and operational imperatives of the bureaucratic and professional sides of the university.

Prof. Strydom concluded by stating that it is possible to continue with an almost never ending list of important themes in HE studies adding perspectives on why it is so easy to misuse universities for politics instead of recognising our responsibility to carefully consider contributions to transformation in such an immensely complicated institution as the university within a higher education and training system. 

Media Release
Issued by: Lacea Loader
Director: Strategic Communication (acting)
Tel: 051 401 2584
Cell: 083 645 2454
E-mail: loaderl@ufs.ac.za
29 October 2010

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