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UFS hosts International Conference on the Right to Development

01 October 2019 | Story Ngang Carol | Photo Stephen Collett

International conference delegates — International delegates attending the International Conference on the Right to Development hosted on the Bloemfontein Campus.

The International Conference on the Right to Development was held in Bloemfontein for the first time from 25 to 27 September 2019, hosted by the Free State Centre for Human Rights at the University of the Free State. This is the third in the international conference series launched in 2017 with the aim of advancing the right to development both in Africa and internationally. This year’s conference follows the previous two that were held at the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, in September 2017 and August 2018.

Based on the theme, ‘The right to development and natural resource ownership’, the 3rd International Conference on the Right to Development offered the forum and opportunity to participants from a diversity of backgrounds and disciplines to interact and share knowledge on their research outputs, which extensively explored questions on how natural resource ownership could contribute to the realisation of the right to development. The keynote address was delivered by Prof John C Mubangizi, Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of the Free State.

The three-day conference registered a total of 35 participants and 27 presentations out of the 33 that were scheduled. Participants came from different countries, including South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and the United Kingdom. Some of those who were unable to attend had the opportunity to present their papers through Skype. The presentations stimulated exciting and robust debates.

The International Conference Series on the Right to Development is jointly organised and co-sponsored by the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria; the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, University of South Africa; and the Free State Centre for Human Rights, University of the Free Sate. In its three years of existence, it has progressively established a steady track record of publications, including journal articles in special editions of selected journals and collections of chapters in edited volumes.

The next (fourth) conference is intended to be much bigger and is scheduled to take place in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2021.

News Archive

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

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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