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01 October 2019 | Story Nikile Ntsababa (Registrar)

The nomination process for the election of two representatives to serve on the UFS Council was finalised on Tuesday, 17 September 2019 – the closing date for nominations.
 
Here are the names of the nominees (listed alphabetically):
 
Representative from the Qwaqwa Campus:
None
 
Other representative:
Mr Christo Dippenaar
Dr Pieter du Toit
Mr Lefa Mabaso
Dr Walter Matli
Mr Zama Sigwebela
 
Please note that no nominations were received for representatives from the Qwaqwa Campus.  Since this scenario is not legislated in the Statute, Institutional Rules, and Convocation Constitution, the Registrar will, after consultation with the President of the Convocation, open another round of nominations for Qwaqwa representatives to Council (with the closing date 8 October 2019) to ensure that the campus is also represented on Council.
 
Convocation and Alumni members from the Qwaqwa Campus are therefore given a second opportunity to nominate one representative from among their members for the Qwaqwa Campus.  All nominations must reach the office of the Registrar no later than 16:30 on Wednesday, 9 October 2019.
 
Every nomination form  shall be signed by four (4) members of the Convocation and shall contain the written acceptance of the nomination by the nominee under his/her signature as well as an abridged CV and a motivation of more or less 200 words.
 
Nominations are to be submitted to:  email: registrar@ufs.ac.za or delivered by hand to Nikile Ntsababa, Main Building, Room 51, Bloemfontein Campus.
 
Kindly take note that late or incomplete nominations will not be accepted or considered.
 
Further information regarding the election process will follow in due course.

News Archive

Expert in Africa Studies debunks African middle class myth
2016-05-10

Description: Prof Henning Melber Tags: Prof Henning Melber

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

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.

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