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Lively vaccination drive encourages students on the Qwaqwa Campus

17 February 2022 | Story NONSINDISO QWABE | Photo Thabiso Mdakana

Qwaqwa Campus vaccination drive — Andile Tshabalala and Theodore Hlalele, CSRC Qwaqwa Campus.

As the University of the Free State is encouraging staff and students to be vaccinated in order for all of us to return to campus life as we know it, the Qwaqwa Campus held its first in-person vaccination activation drive for its first and returning students. The drive was to further encourage students to vaccinate, and to keep themselves and others safe by educating themselves.

The cheerful and excited crowd of more than 100 students were gathered at the Amphitheatre on campus, where they got to know more about the COVID-19 Regulations and Required Vaccination Policy and interacted with Department of Health officials to understand more about the jabs and booster shots.

No one is forced, but everyone is encouraged

The university’s approved policy came into effect on 14 February, requiring staff and students to be vaccinated as a measure towards ensuring everyone’s smooth return to its three campuses. However, as Qwaqwa Campus Principal Dr Martin Mandew highlighted, “no one is being forced to vaccinate, but we are all strongly encouraged to do so”.

Dr Mandew said the student experience is too rich and vibrant to be confined to virtual learning. He showed students his own vaccination certificate, quoting a Zulu proverb, ‘indlela ibuzwa kwabaphambili’, which loosely translated means ‘those who have gone before you can show the way’.

“If you are not vaccinated, it will be impossible for us to enjoy face-to-face interaction again. Ask yourself: ‘If the principal is vaccinated, who am I not to be?” he said.

The lively drive also kept students entertained through live performances by local artists.

Students could also raise pressing issues and questions with Department of Health officials – including common side effects, apathy against vaccination due to religious beliefs, the efficacy of the vaccine to protect against COVID-19, and the implementation of the UFS Vaccination Policy.

The programme line-up also included messages of support from the Director: Student Affairs, Zoleka Dotwana, the Deputy Director of Housing and Residences, Zakhele Mdluli, and UVPERSU Vice-Chairperson, Dr Grey Magaiza.

The operating days of the on-campus vaccination site have been extended to accommodate streams of incoming students who still want to be vaccinated.

News Archive

The TRC legitimised apartheid - Mamdani

2010-07-20

Prof. Mahmood Mamdani

“The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) accepted as legitimate the rule of law that undergirded apartheid. It defined as crime only those acts that would have been considered criminal under the laws of apartheid.”

This statement was made by the internationally acclaimed scholar, Prof. Mahmood Mamdani, when he delivered the Africa Memorial Lecture at the University of the Free State (UFS) last week on the topic: Lessons of Nuremberg and Codesa: Where do we go from here?

“According to the TRC, though crimes were committed under apartheid, apartheid itself – including the law enforced by the apartheid state – was not a crime,” he said.

He said the social justice challenges that South Africa faced today were as a result of the TRC’s failure to broaden the discussion of justice beyond political to social justice.

He said it had to go beyond “the liberal focus on bodily integrity” and acknowledge the violence that deprived the vast majority of South Africans of their means of livelihood.

“Had the TRC acknowledged pass laws and forced removals as constituting the core social violence of apartheid, as the stuff of extra-economic coercion and primitive accumulation, it would have been in a position to imagine a socio-economic order beyond a liberalised post-apartheid society,” he said.

“It would have been able to highlight the question of justice in its fullness, and not only as criminal and political, but also as social.”

He said the TRC failed to go beyond the political reconciliation achieved at Codesa and laid the foundation for a social reconciliation. “It was unable to think beyond crime and punishment,” he said.

He said it recognised as victims only individuals and not groups, and human rights violations only as violations of “the bodily integrity of an individual”; that is, only torture and murder.

“How could this be when apartheid was brazenly an ideology of group oppression and appropriation? How could the TRC make a clear-cut distinction between violence against persons and that against property when most group violence under apartheid constituted extra-economic coercion, in other words, it was against both person and property?”, he asked.

“The TRC was credible as performance, as theatre, but failed as a social project”.

Prof. Mamdani is the Director of the Institute of Social Research at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; and the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Department of Anthropology at the Columbia University in New York, USA.

Media Release
Issued by: Mangaliso Radebe
Assistant Director: Media Liaison
Tel: 051 401 2828
Cell: 078 460 3320
E-mail: radebemt@ufs.ac.za
20 July 2010

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