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Thought-leader webinar: Crime in South Africa-Who is to blame?

16 May 2022 | Story Dr Nitha Ramnath

As a public higher-education institution in South Africa with a responsibility to contribute to public discourse, the University of the Free State (UFS) will be presenting the webinar in collaboration with News24 and the Free State Literature Festival. The aim of the webinar series is to discuss issues facing South Africa by engaging experts at the university and in South Africa.

Some of the topics discussed by leading experts in 2021 included, among others, reimagining universities for student success; corruption in South Africa – the endemic pandemic; South African politics and the local government elections; is South Africa falling apart: where to from here; predications for 2022; and why vaccinate?

First webinar presented on 31 May 2022
There is a perception that the presence of migrants in South Africa is compromising job opportunities and is the source of crime and inadequate service delivery, among other things. People are being stopped on the street by private citizens and forced to produce identification to verify their immigration status. Some political leaders are exploiting people’s grievances for political gain and are making unfounded pronouncements about immigrants. Businesses of migrants are being looted, burned, and destroyed. People’s homes are being invaded and raided for evidence of criminal activity. Frequent attacks are being levelled and people are even killed because of how they look and because of their accent.

Is the focus and targeting of foreigners merely a smokescreen for government’s failures?
These are some of the aspects we look forward to discussing in the forthcoming webinar.

Date: Tuesday, 31 May 2022
Topic: Crime in South Africa – who is to blame?
Time: 12:30-14:00
RSVP: Alicia Pienaar, pienaaran1@ufs.ac.za by 29 May 2022

Facilitator:

Prof Francis Petersen
Rector and Vice-Chancellor, UFS

Panellists:

Adriaan Basson
Editor-in-Chief
News24

Gareth Newham
Head of the Justice and Violence Prevention Programme
The Institute for Security Studies

Prof Joy Owen
Head of Department: Anthropology
Faculty of the Humanities, UFS

Justice Dennis Davis

Judge at the High Court of Cape Town and Judge President of the Competition Appeal Court

Bios of speakers:

Adriaan Basson

Adriaan Basson is the editor-in-chief of News24, South Africa's biggest website. Before that, he edited Netwerk24 and the daily newspaper Beeld. He is a recipient of the CNN African Journalist of the Year award for news, the Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalist of the Year award, and the Taco Kuiper award for investigative journalism. He has reported for Beeld, the Mail & Guardian, and City Press. In 2010, he co-founded the M&G Centre for Investigative Journalism, nicknamed amaBhungane. Basson has authored four non-fiction books, the latest being Blessed by Bosasa: Inside Gavin Watson’s State Capture Cult (Jonathan Ball Publishers).

Prof Joy Owen

Prof Joy Owen is an academic, mother, and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Free State. The former head of department and deputy dean (Humanities) at Rhodes University, Prof Owen spent some time as a visiting lecturer at the University of Münster (Germany) in 2016, and as a TORCH Global South visiting professor at the University of Oxford (UK) in 2019.

Prof Owen’s primary research love is African transnational migration. Her monograph, titled Congolese social networks: Living on the margins in Muizenberg, Cape Town, detailed the lives of transnational Congolese migrants residing in Muizenberg in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Her work homes in on the complex ways in which African transnational migrants create and maintain belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. Focusing particularly on social networks, Prof Owen demonstrates how contingency, strategy, love, and habitus support onward migration (or not).

A second research flirtation is embodied in critical pedagogy that recognises students as knowledge holders and producers through their experiences prior to and during higher education. Students are critical teaching and learning collaborators in classroom spaces, however defined. As an invisible pioneer, ‘Just Joy’ – as described by one of the students she supervises – merges both head and heart in her teaching, as she encourages students to become critically conscious of the world they have inherited and are creating, and the ways in which all forms of oppression can and need to be collectively addressed.

Prof Owen’s work, including her research, teaching, and administrative work, unobtrusively pulls apart academic and social binaries, making the world safer for the appreciation and celebration of difference – the primary marker of humanity.

Gareth Newham

Gareth Newham has spent the past 26 years working to promote public safety and justice in South Africa. In January 2010, he joined the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), which is an independent Pan-African organisation that undertakes policy research, technical support, and capacity building to enhance human security across Africa.

Newham currently heads the Justice and Violence Programme, which consists of a team of people working to inform government policy and practice, and to promote public awareness on effective responses to preventing and reducing violence, crime, and corruption, and improving the performance of the criminal justice system in South Africa.

He regularly publishes both nationally and internationally, and regularly briefs various government departments, parliamentary committees, civil society organisations, the private sector, international audiences, and the media on his areas of work. From 2016 and 2018, he served on the independent ‘Panel of Experts on Policing and Crowd Management,’ appointed by the Cabinet. More recently, he was a contributing author to an internationally published book, titled ‘Police Integrity in South Africa.’

Prior to joining the ISS, Newham held the positions of Strategic Adviser and Special Projects Manager to the Gauteng Provincial Minister (MEC) for Community Safety (2006-2009). He also served as Project Manager in the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (1999-2005), and Project Manager in the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (1995-1998).

Justice Dennis Davis

Judge Dennis Davis, who retired from the bench in December 2020, was educated at the Herzlia School and the Universities of Cape Town and Cambridge. He served as judge of the High Court of Cape Town (since 1998) and Judge President of the Competition Appeal Court (since February 2000). He is honorary professor at the Universities of Cape Town, the Western Cape, Wits and is an extraordinary professor in the University of the Free State Centre for Human Rights. He is also Chair of the Davis Tax Committee and was one of the drafters of the Competition Act 1998 and the Companies Act 2008. He authored 11 books and held visiting professorial posts at the universities of Toronto, Melbourne, Harvard, Florida Brown, Georgetown and New York University. Judge Davis received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Free State in April 2022.

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.

Download Valedictory lecture of Prof. Kalie Strydom (Pdf)

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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