An understanding of the interaction of humans with technology and technology with humans are key to grasp the impact of the fourth industrial revolution.
The term “fourth industrial revolution” is understood in various ways. Some people are excited about it. Others are cautious. Some assume it means that technology and robots will take over every human activity. And still others imagine that this “revolution” will lead only to joblessness and automation.
There are also those who are sceptical and insist it’s no revolution at all. They argue that it’s just an improvement and fusion of various technologies – like artificial intelligence and 3D printing – and acceleration in productivity.
In all these instances, the interaction of technology with humans and humans with technology is underestimated. The emphasis on interaction is key to understanding the fourth industrial revolution. And this epoch will, like all times of change, require universities to push the boundaries of teaching and learning.
Universities will need to ensure that students are equipped with approaches to learning that involve agility, adaptability and curiosity. It will be a challenge for us all.
The fourth industrial revolution will also raise many questions for universities to consider. What needs to shift in how lecturers teach and how students learn and will be learning? What does the blurring of the lines between the physical, digital and technological mean for social relationships and for student learning? What do these shifts mean for different countries? Is learning in an environment with peers (virtually or in a class) better than learning online?
In seeking answers, societies must create the space to have conversations across social, academic, industry and community boundaries. The purpose of these conversations is to determine priority areas that need to be improved by the rapid technological changes we are currently experiencing as well as thinking about how we redefine the human condition.
Universities have a crucial role to play in these conversations. And a humanities education has a lot to offer when it comes to preparing students for the fourth industrial revolution.
Harnessing the humanities
A humanities education inculcates the importance of reflecting on the vast array of methodological and societal issues that arise from any practices. These include the technological and computational practices that underpin the fourth industrial revolution.
Critical thinking, debating and creative problem solving are taught in the humanities. This kind of critical orientation allows students to explore the complex human-to-human relations and the human to robotic relations that we are already encountering and that will become ever more common.
This isn’t to suggest that only the humanities are relevant. Cross-disciplinary communities of researchers and educators matter and will matter now more than ever.
This is particularly true in South Africa where the education system hasn’t provided for the breaking down of boundaries between the sciences, let alone between the disciplines in the humanities. Collectively we will need to do more when it comes to drawing on approaches from various disciplines, which will allow for quantitative reasoning, problem solving and systems thinking that are socially relevant.
Such partnerships are already happening in small pockets, and are yielding promising results.
Collaborating and mutuality
For instance, the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg collaborates with the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment to offer a joint undergraduate programme that meshes engineering with arts to make a programme in game design and digital arts.
Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Engineering students work alongside each other in courses that are team-taught to design innovative high tech games. It’s not all fun: games, after all, are a means of challenging ourselves, controlling outcomes, competing, and figuring out successful strategies of doing things.
Students from this programme draw on a variety of skills like problem solving, inferential thinking and visualisation. They have produced games that are frequently downloaded from various app stores.
Similarly, the university’s faculties of science and humanities offer a postgraduate programme on e-Science or Data Science. The programme brings together science and humanities students and staff to work on complex, big data problems. They’re also taught to think of ways to visualise and communicate this information and to question the predictive powers of big data.
Students are exposed to various interdisciplinary approaches like statistical computing and modelling, data visualisation, text analysis, and geographical information systems. Master of Arts students take courses in data privacy and ethics alongside MSc students. This course is team-taught and students engage with complex problems from two or more science and humanities disciplines.
These and other examples of innovative teaching and learning help to disrupt the current techno talk that dominates conversations about the fourth industrial revolution. It’s essential that we bring our ideas to the fore and reshape the conversations in ways that resonate with who we are, where we are located and what this means for us and our futures.
The key ethical issues doctors grappled with in the world's first liver transplant from HIV+ living donor to negative recipient.
South Africa has a dire shortage of organ donors. This means that doctors struggle to find suitable donor organs for critically ill patients who would die without receiving a transplant. Sometimes they have to make tough calls such as using a blood group incompatible organ to save a patient’s life – even if this comes with additional risk.
About a year ago we made a tough call of our own: we could save a child’s life by giving the child a liver transplant – but risked infecting the child with HIV in the process. The donor was the child’s mother, who is HIV positive and the child was HIV negative. The procedure came with a risk of transmitting HIV to the child.
South Africa’s law does not forbid the transplantation of an organ from a living HIV positive donor to an HIV negative recipient, provided that a robust informed consent process is in place. But this isn’t universally accepted as best clinical practice because of the risk of HIV transmission to the recipient.
The young recipient had been on the organ donor waiting list for 181 days. The average time on the waiting list in our transplant programme is 49 days. The child’s mother had repeatedly asked if she could donate a part of her liver, but we could not consider this because it was against the policy in our unit at the time. Without a transplant, the child would certainly have died.
After much consideration, and with permission from the Medical Ethics Committee at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, we decided to go ahead with the transplant. With careful planning we were able to give the child antiretroviral drugs in advance, with the hope of preventing HIV infection.
The transplant, which happened at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Donald Gordon Medical Centre, was a success. The child is thriving, but at this point we are unable to determine the child’s HIV status. In the first month after the transplant we detected HIV antibodies in the child and it looked like HIV infection might have taken place. But as time went by the antibodies declined and are now almost undetectable. We have not been able to work out for certain whether the child has HIV or not. Even with ultra-sensitive, specialised testing, we have not been able to detect any HIV in the child’s blood or cells.
It will probably still be some time before we can be sure. However, the child is doing very well on antiretroviral treatment. And we know from cases where HIV was transmitted inadvertently that people who get HIV from an organ transplant do as well as those who get an HIV-negative organ.
This operation could be a game changer for South Africa. The country has a large pool of virally suppressed HIV-positive people who have previously not been considered for living liver donation. Viral suppression is when a person with HIV takes their antiretroviral medication as prescribed and their viral load – the amount of virus in their blood – is so low that it is undetectable.
Ethical and legal considerations
Organ transplant comes with many ethical and legal challenges. In this case, some unique and complex issues were carefully considered.
We took great care to consult widely before doing the transplant. This included speaking to the members of the transplant team, bioethicists, lawyers, experts in the field of HIV medicine and Wits University’s Medical Ethics Committee. The committee’s function is - among other things - to protect patients in medical research, and to make sure doctors are doing procedures for the correct reasons.
It was clear that a transplant was in the child’s best interests. The bigger ethical question was whether it was right to deny the mother the opportunity to save her child’s life. A fundamental principle of ethics is to treat people fairly. People with HIV should have the same health care options as everyone else.
We, along with the Ethics Committee, agreed that as long as the child’s parents understood that there was a risk the child could acquire HIV, it was acceptable to go ahead with the transplant.
Then, to ensure that the child’s parents were properly informed and in the best position to make a decision, we used an independent donor advocate. The advocate was not employed by the hospital and their main role was to support the parents by ensuring that they understood exactly what the risks were for the mother as a donor. The advocate also engaged with the transplant team on the parents’ behalf, if needed.
In this case, the parents were committed to go ahead with the operation, and had already come to terms with the risk of HIV transmission to their child. They were appreciative that the team were willing to carefully consider this option for them, given that there were no alternatives available and their child was critically ill. We asked both parents to consent to the procedure, as both are responsible for taking care of the child going forward.
Lessons and opportunities
This operation has shown that doctors can do this type of transplant, and that outcomes for the HIV positive donor and the recipient can be good. It has also created a unique opportunity for scientists at Wits to study HIV transmission under very controlled circumstances.
For now, doctors will not be able to tell parents whether or not their child will get HIV from this type of transplant. This is because this is a single case with many unanswered questions that will hopefully be answered through ongoing research.
Going forward, we will continue to ensure that parents are fully aware of the uncertainty in this situation. All future cases will be part of an ongoing research study that will investigate HIV transmission in children in more detail and the ways in which HIV may or may not be spread through organ transplantation.
Does sunny South Africa really have an ideal climate for tourism?
- Jennifer Fitchett and Gijsbert Hoogendoorn
This is how TripAdvisor reviews provide insight into tourists’ experiences of weather, from which adaptation plans can be successfully implemented.
South Africa’s climate is perfect for tempting tourists. Sunny skies are common. The average temperature is just right for long days on the beach and early morning game drives.
Even scientific indices that measure the weather’s suitability for tourism classify the country as “ideal”. But that doesn’t mean that every tourist leaves satisfied with the weather they experienced.
In a study published in the International Journal of Biometeorology, we looked at how often tourists commented on the weather across a total of 5898 TripAdvisor reviews of 19 destinations across South Africa. TripAdvisor is an online platform where tourists can post reviews of a destination. The website is considered to be the worlds’ leading information platform for travel related decisions, representing the largest global network of tourists. The reviews considered in this study were posted in 2016.
We found that only 7.9% of the reviews mentioned the weather. Tourists visiting Durban in KwaZulu-Natal were the most satisfied with the weather conditions. Belfast, a town in the Mpumalanga province, and Bethlehem in the Free State received the most frequent complaints about the weather.
Reviewers from the UK mentioned the weather most frequently: although they represented only 9% of the 5898 TripAdvisor reviews, a significant number of UK visitors – 14.2% – mentioned the weather. European visitors frequently commented on the hot weather, compared to visitors from Africa, the Middle East, the Americas and Australasia.
This study reveals important nuances in tourists’ experiences of South African weather. Many of these confirm common sense assumptions. But data is valuable because it allows policymakers to develop concrete climate change strategies that can be implemented in different parts of the country.
Climate change forecasts indicate that global temperatures are likely to increase by about 4°C by 2100. This means that extreme weather conditions will be more frequent and more severe. Tourists are likely to feel more dissatisfied by the weather, and online platforms mean that their word-of-mouth complaints will be far reaching.
What must be done?
Regions that rely heavily on outdoor tourism must adapt to counter climate change threats and survive as tourist attraction sites. The study proposes two ways in which this can be done.
The first strategy is marketing – advertising should better prepare tourists for the weather they’re likely to experience during their vacation to enhance satisfaction. While marketing sunny skies and comfortable temperature attracts tourists, misinformation increases the likelihood of negative reviews and poor word-of-mouth when visitors return home.
Playacar, in Mexico, faced similar challenges in the wake of global climate change where beach erosion resulted in a very different aesthetic to what was advertised in travel brochures.
The second is accommodation. Accommodation establishments must address the climatic stresses their visitors feel most acutely if they want to increase the chances of their return. Service providers should manage indoor temperatures, reduce the noise levels of wind in the upper floor rooms and assist guests in avoiding the rain when they arrive at the hotel. Reduced water usage should be managed without being a hindrance to the guests.
Afriski, one of Africa’s two ski resorts, successfully managed to provide a ski experience while moderating the indoor temperatures to provide guests with comfortable sleeping conditions.
The climatic factors mentioned in TripAdvisor reviews depended heavily on the quality of the accommodation. Those who stayed in backpackers, bed and breakfasts or guesthouses that were either unrated or had a Tourism Grading Council of South Africa 1 star rating cited hot and cold conditions more than any other climatic factors. They represented the group that mentioned temperature most often.
This is probably because these service providers don’t have air conditioners to moderate temperatures and often don’t even have fans, electric blankets or effective insulation. Visitors who stayed in hotels with a 5 star rating mentioned the wind, rain and drought most frequently; they very seldom had issues with the temperature.
These tourists could likely control the temperature of their hotels rooms and the vehicles they were travelling in but would not have been able to escape the rain and wind while out and about. They experienced drought conditions more acutely because water restrictions mostly affect the use of baths, jacuzzis and swimming pools. Tourists in 1 star accommodation wouldn’t have access to these facilities.
Interestingly, hot conditions were mentioned most frequently by visitors from Europe, accounting for 30% of all of their climatic mentions. Cold conditions were mentioned mostly mentioned by visitors from the Middle East and Australasia. This can broadly be explained by the climate that tourists experience in their home country, which in turn determines their thermal sensitivity outside of this range.
Mentions of cloud cover and a lack of sunshine were more common than reports of rain for visitors from Europe, the Middle East and Australia. This could be because of aggressive of marketing campaigns targeting these regions that create an impression of year-round sunshine across the country.
Research into climate change and tourism in South Africa faces a considerable challenge from a lack of data. Models developed in the global North are often impossible to run as we do not have a sufficient records of the required data. This study reveals the value of TripAdvisor reviews and provides insight into tourists’ experiences of weather, from which adaptation plans can be successfully implemented.
We have heard it said many times before: the SA electoral system does not provide a sufficient link between the citizen and the elected representative.
The daily protests across the country point to a failure of participatory democracy where citizens clearly do not believe their voices are being heard. After 24 years of democracy, state capture, other forms of corruption and a lack of care have created deep tensions within communities.
Many have argued that our proportional representation-list system diminishes levels of accountability. Yet, we have also seen our local government system, which has greater built-in accountability, fail dismally in relation to links with citizens and accountability.
So, it’s a tricky issue and one which South Africa has been grappling with for a number of years. Nevertheless, the South African electoral system is characterised by simplicity, inclusiveness and a strong sense of fairness. These characteristics have, arguably, helped to strengthen our democracy and ensure the legitimacy of democratic processes among South Africans.
However, since the 1999 general elections, a significant weakness has emerged within the electoral system. South Africa’s use of proportional representation based on a closed party list system seems to generate a deficit in accountability, particularly in the context of one-party dominance. This weakness was most notable during the ‘Arms Deal debacle’ of 2000 where it was clear that party loyalty trumped the need for accountability.
Those Members of Parliament who stood their ground, like Andrew Feinstein, found themselves in the wilderness and ostracised by the ANC. Sadly there have been many examples since then of the ANC doing exactly the same - whether it was covering up for former President Zuma’s corruption in relation to Nkandla or on state capture in general, the party exercised its influence over those who dared to speak out. If the party ‘owns’ the seat, the MP is pretty much beholden to the party, no matter what.
Initially, the South African electoral system, as crafted in the interim Constitution of 1994, was welcomed. Near-perfect proportional representation (PR) with no threshold mirrored the national and provincial electorate, thus ensuring that the national and provincial legislatures were directly and widely representative and afforded a strong sense of inclusiveness. The system followed recommendations from comparative institutionalists, on design for ‘divided societies’. The results of the first election were widely accepted and therefore had a moderating effect in a potentially volatile time.
In its founding provisions, the Constitution identifies ‘Universal adult suffrage, a national common voter’s roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness’ as essential components of any new electoral system.
In 2002 the Cabinet appointed an Electoral Task Team (ETT) to formulate the new electoral laws for the 2004 elections and beyond. The task team was chaired by Frederick Van Zyl Slabbert and consisted of members of government and civil society.
The ETT addressed whether or not an electoral system per se had the ability to guarantee accountability, as opposed to other institutional arrangements which govern representatives’ behaviour while in office like Chapter 9 Institutions. In a first-past-the-post system, representatives are individually scrutinised, but the party as a whole gets a less critical treatment.
With further deliberation, the ETT proposed a system that they felt did not drastically change the electoral system in a manner that would completely disrupt the administration of the elections, and could be modified in the future to continuously increase accountability. This system was supported by a majority of the task team, although there was a minority dissent. The majority proposal, better known as the '69 constituency option', proposes expanding the number of multi-member constituencies from nine to 69. The number of constituents per representative is drastically decreased. Three hundred of the 400 total seats would be assigned by this method. The remaining 100 would be decided according to national closed lists, in order to regain proportionality.
There were, of course, institutional constraints blocking the immediate implementation of these recommendations. The ETT pointed out the lack of time and funding available. The proposed model is sensitive to these constraints and presents itself as a compromise to ensure accountability.
It is worth noting that within the course of the ETT’s deliberations, an open list PR system was proposed to induce the correct balance between individual and party accountability. Voters would choose a party and then go on to rank candidates in the order in which they think they should be elected to Parliament, depending on the proportion of votes the party received. Candidates would be beholden to voters to rank them favourably. Proportionality would not be compromised. Challenges to an open list system arise with the sheer number of candidates (200+ in some cases), and the level of literacy required to vote in such a manner. The report was tabled in March 2003, and Parliament voted to revisit the recommendations after the elections.
Nevertheless, Cabinet adopted the ETT’s minority position, which was to not introduce any changes to the electoral system. The argument forwarded by Home Affairs Minister Buthelezi was that there was insufficient time before the 2004 election to implement the changes. This reason does not preclude the possibility for reform in the future, but the political possibilities for change are bleak. The recommendations have never been re-considered or adopted by Parliament. Attention was drawn again to the recommendations made by the ETT by the Report of the Independent Assessment of Parliament, who listed a reconsideration of the ETT’s report first on their list of recommendations for Chapter 9 institutions.
Overall, South Africa’s electoral system requires reform and the report by the ETT needs to be seriously addressed. The electoral system in its current form does indeed espouse and support democratic values of fairness and inclusivity, while maintaining its simplicity. But it is on the key democratic value of accountability where the system remains weak. The deficit in accountability found within South Africa’s electoral system has weakened key institutions and has enabled the emergence of a one-party dominant system and, more importantly, the dominance of party executives.
As seen in the infamous Arms Deal, party interests in the current system trump the public interest. If South Africa is to further the consolidation of its young democracy, ensuring greater accountability between the electorate and political parties is key. This will lead to a strengthening of the democratic fabric of South Africa’s society and perhaps ensure more responsive governance. That is needed more than anything else right now.
Judith February is based at the Institute for Security Studies and is also a Visiting Fellow at the Wits School of Governance. This article was first published online on https://ewn.co.za/.
Funding research-intensive universities should be a national priority
- Adam Habib and Mamokgethi Phakeng
Protecting research universities is key to growing the higher education sector and making South Africa globally competitive.
Universities are national assets and important catalysts for addressing inequality and enabling inclusivity in our society. But they can only do this if they are both nationally responsive and globally competitive.
To successfully and simultaneously undertake these twin mandates, universities have to form part of a differentiated system in which different institutions have distinctive mandates. All universities should deliver on their respective roles so that the diverse needs of the economy and society can be addressed collectively. In differentiated systems, some institutions produce vocational and technical skills, others develop first degree graduates and professionals, whilst graduate and research-intensive institutions foster masters, PhDs, research outputs and technological innovations. Each part of the system has a specific and important role to play in the development of our country. Across the world, the countries with the most successful economies are those with differentiated higher education systems.
South Africa’s multiple policy papers recognise the value of a differentiated system. Yet, the importance of differentiation does not seem to be internalised by stakeholders within higher education and government. The most recent manifestation of this disjuncture is the discourse emerging within some sectors of government and the higher education sector, which recommend that fee increases must be lower for research-intensive universities than for other institutions.
On the surface, it may seem fair because these universities have the highest fees in the sector and need to be lowered to equalise the fee structure in order to make the institutions more affordable. However, the logic of fairness ceases when one considers the distinctive mandates of research-intensive institutions. In South Africa for example, Wits and UCT together produce 20% of South Africa’s higher education research output. If one includes the other research-intensive universities – the University of Pretoria, the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Stellenbosch University – the percentage of research output is 52.1%. Further, the quality of research output from Wits and UCT - measured through the Category Normalised Citation Impact scores - is 72% higher than the global average.
Providing these institutions with a fee increase lower than other universities - and lower than CPI - would effectively reduce the net resources available to the research-intensive universities and undermine their ability to deliver the important contribution that they are making nationally. It will also reduce South Africa’s competitiveness in the global academy and the broader knowledge economy.
Those who are advocating for research-intensive universities to receive lower than inflation increases ignore the fact that a significant component of fees (approximately 70% at Wits) are paid through corporates, and other scholarships and bursaries. Whilst an increase below CPI will save money for corporates and other institutions, it will have a detrimental impact on the research-intensive universities who rely on this revenue stream.
This approach also neglects the fact that there are dissimilar cost structures for different universities based on their respective geographic locations and mandates. Universities located in urban settings have far higher cost structures than those in smaller towns. Similarly, universities with Engineering, Health Sciences and Science faculties have higher cost structures than those with smaller footprints in these disciplines. It is important to note that although the intention may be to equalise the system, the system in fact requires the differentiation in order for us to achieve the goals of equality, accessibility and global competitiveness.
We want to be clear that there is a need to develop other institutions that have been historically disadvantaged and we welcome government’s commitment to do so. But we cannot build a higher education system at the cost of compromising institutions at the apex of the system.
South Africa cannot build higher education in South Africa by taking resources from the research-intensive universities whilst still expecting South Africa to remain globally competitive. Instead, we should build the sector by demanding that Wits and UCT meet the national obligations of access and quality. It is worth indicating in this regard that at Wits and UCT, black students (African, Indian, coloured, international) comprise the majority of the student body.
Wits and UCT are fundamentally different institutions to what they were in 1994 and it is important that stakeholders acknowledge this fact. Moreover, Wits and UCT are increasingly accepting graduates from other universities into postgraduate studies, thereby enabling growing mobility in the higher education system which is exactly what is required to create an accessible, equitable and competitive higher education system.
As institutions committed to the socio-economic transformation of our society, we believe in building a higher education system that is accessible, equitable and differentiated because this is in the best interest of South Africa’s national development goals. Research-intensive universities comprise one component of this differentiated higher education system and it is a significant element of our national system which enables South Africa to remain competitive in the global academy and economy. Taking away resources from the research-intensive universities will not enhance the higher education system. Instead it will effectively push all of us into a system of undifferentiated institutions. The net effect would be a false equality in which all of us become the same and our ability to compete globally will be diminished.
It is worthwhile noting that in China and the South East Asian nations, selected institutions have been identified as research-intensive ones with resources poured into them to enable their competitive engagement in the global academy and economy. If we erode the research-intensive university, we would in effect undermine the very differentiation necessary to meet the distinctive mandates of the economy, and allow South Africa to be competitive globally.
Both Wits and UCT acknowledge that our relative advantage today is the product of an unequal history but we cannot address the historical injustices by destroying the relative advantage of these institutions. Rather we should address this issue by deploying these institutions to meet the objectives of the nation itself: class mobility, addressing inequality, demographic transformation of our professional classes and ultimately contributing to the inclusive development of our society.
This is the only way to address the historical injustices of our past. Any other way would be a false equality that pushes us towards a collective mediocrity in which South Africa and Africa will forever be subject to the whims and decisions of the more well-endowed parts of our world.
Professor Adam Habib is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand. Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng is the Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Cape Town.
The finance minister merry-go-round
- Judith February
We have a new Finance Minister. Again.Tito Mboweni takes over amidst a recession and with a tricky political tide ebbing and flowing precariously.
Even before former Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene began his testimony to the Zondo commission of inquiry into state capture last week, allegations were swirling around him. EFF leader Julius Malema, who has a distinct penchant for leaking inside ANC information, has for a while now sought to discredit Nene even – or maybe especially as - allegations about alleged links to cigarette smugglers and allegations of tax evasion surround Malema personally.
Nene has had a fraught political journey. As the ‘new dawn’ arrived in February, so a bit of poetic justice came with it. Nene was restored to his position as Finance minister. The decent man was back, we all said, relieved.
And so in the build-up to Nene’s testimony, allegations that he had used his influence as chair of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) to secure funds for his son’s business sat uncomfortably. He had also previously told a news reporter that his interactions with the Guptas were casual. Yet as Nene gave evidence and described in detail how he was axed for trying to save us all from the disaster that was the nuclear deal, it also became clear that he had had more than a casual ‘bumping into’ with the Guptas.
In fact, he had met them at Saxonwold 6 times in total. That’s more than casual.
Immediately afterwards Nene released a statement begging for our collective forgiveness and admitting to the folly of meeting the Guptas at their home. It was a sincere and heartfelt apology. He also pledged further assistance to the Zondo commission. What he neglected to deal with was the allegations regarding the PIC.
The immediate question after last week’s big apology was – ‘what do we do with this?’ Has any South African politician ever given the grand mea culpa, after all? We wait for the apology from Jacob Zuma for taking our country down a rabbit-hole of near-ruin, for Nkandla and laughing at us all, or from Malusi Gigaba for being found to have lied under oath, and from Bathabile Dlamini whose misdeeds are legion. It has never happened. And so when a politician apologises in such a heartfelt way, it puts us firmly in the ‘grey zone’ where there are no heroes or villians.
We must applaud Nene for his courage in not signing off on the nuclear deal. For that we owe him a debt of gratitude. South Africa may have been able to forgive him for meeting with the Guptas even though we do not know why he met with them so many times. But, it was the uncomfortable allegation regarding the PIC that became more urgent. The Democratic Alliance has asked the hapless Public Protector to investigate the matter. Thus far she has not inspired confidence, yet the institution must be utilised and itself held to account. Perhaps the Zondo commission will get to the bottom of the allegations too?
Malema seems to fly various kites yet has not offered this Nene information to the commission either. One wonders why he chooses to fight political battles in the media? Perhaps it is because he believes in the politics of populism and opportunism and because he is not an institutionalist despite pretending to be one?
Nene asked to resign and President Ramaphosa acceded to that request, pained as he may have been by the decision. A compromised Finance Minister just cannot ‘sell’ an economic stimulus plan or credibly talk about ethics or conflicts of interest in public finance when he himself may be compromised. ‘Team Treasury’ needs to be united on all matters including ethical issues. That is its power.
It’s been another rough and tumble week in South African politics, but Mboweni is a sound choice. His first job is to bring about stability within the National Treasury and then to deal with the economy - no easy task.
Moral courage and decency irrelevant as SA’s finance minister resigns
- David Everatt
If politicians see only personal advantage from other's 'weakness’ – defined here as honesty, seeking forgiveness, repentance – then the future is bleak.
South Africa’s once-lauded, lately beleaguered Finance Minister, Nhlanhla Nene, has had his resignation accepted by President Cyril Ramaphosa. His successor, Tito Mboweni, becomes the country’s sixth finance minister in four years.
The President is desperately trying to dig South Africa out of an unholy mess created by his predecessor Jacob Zuma and his multiple cronies in and out of the governing African National Congress (ANC). The particularly odious Gupta family have loomed large in what a succession of research projects, commissions of inquiry, books and investigative journalism projects, have labelled state capture.
Nene was formerly regarded as “clean”, having been fired by former President Zuma for refusing to fund his more ludicrous rent-seeking projects. He was replaced by Des van Rooyen for a weekend, and then left in the cold while Pravin Gordhan became Finance Minister (before in turn being fired by Zuma). Nene was rehabilitated by Ramaphosa – who defeated the entire Zuma strategy by winning the ANC (and then national) presidency. Nene’s reinstatement as Minister of Finance was widely regarded as both politically astute and market-friendly.
But then Nene dropped two bombshells: one, that he had met the Gupta brothers at their homes and offices between 2010 and 2014, but had not shared this with Ramaphosa; two, that he had refused to sign off a nuclear deal with Russia that would have simply broken the country financially for decades to come.
And now he is gone.
Did anyone pause to reflect on the fact that after a decade of impunity, this was an act of decency and moral courage? Ignore the party colours, and look at the human being. That is clearly a test all South African politicians failed abysmally. If they have a conscience they clearly forgot to dust it off and use it.
Widespread guilt
Almost by definition, anyone who is found to have past dealings with the Guptas – themselves now safely ensconced in mansions abroad – is unclean. And by definition that includes huge swathes of the political and business classes, whom the Guptas seem to have variously seduced, corrupted, cajoled, threatened or by-passed, depending on the strength of character at stake.
The brilliance of their state capture project – laid out recently by the investigative journalists as well as various academics – is a roll-call of virtually every senior political figure in South Africa, alongside many business elites.
Some stood up – but a great many folded, seduced by cash or a crass Sun City family wedding invitation or rotten contracts.
Many are in parliament, some are in civil society, others in the private sector – including the consultancy firm KPMG, and UK-based now defunct PR company Bell Pottinger – and elsewhere. Not all are sitting on ANC benches. Perhaps that is why the President had no option but to remove Nene. Politically, the liability was too great as an election approaches – national elections are due next year – and none are so shrill as those with something to hide.
Nene went to the Zondo Commission into state capture and ‘fessed up. Yes, he had met the Guptas. No, he had not taken bribes (well, he would say that, right?). Yes, he had been put under immense pressure to sign off on the nuclear deal which would have opened South Africa’ coffers to looters. Yes, he refused to sign, and was fired.
Remarkably, he had not told Ramaphosa about the earlier meetings with the Guptas. But, he took responsibility – unlike the lies and bluster of others caught in the act. Nene said to South Africa:
In return for the trust and faith that you have placed on me, I owe you conduct as a public office bearer that is beyond reproach. But I am human too, I do make mistakes, including those of poor judgement.
This was followed by his offer to resign. This is accountability and decency.
Lacking empathy
In any version of the world, this was a man seeking an honourable redemption. He acknowledged his own mistakes, sought forgiveness, and asked to be relieved of the trappings of office for which so many continue to drool and slobber.
Were there questions to be asked? Absolutely.
But what did he get in return? The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), whose leadership has repeatedly been accused of corruption, leapt to the offence, claiming Nene was “corrupt as hell” and promising to release more compromising details – which are yet to appear. The opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), desperately seeking the front foot it has lost since Ramaphosa’s ascendancy, demanded Nene’s axing and wanted other possible conflicts of interest investigated.
Empathy is the ability to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference. In simple terms, to put yourself in their shoes. It is singularly lacking in politics – from Trump mocking abuse survivors to South Africa today. Shout down the other side, win by volume and crassness, see honesty as weakness, but above all win – nothing else seems to matter.
Not one politician had the decency to say ‘that was a decent thing to do.’ The lack of empathy was deafening. A lack of empathy is part of narcissistic personality disorder – an inability or refusal to identify with the feelings of others. This is a rather neat description of politicians, confirmed repeatedly.
If politicians see only personal advantage, especially from the ‘weakness’ of others – weakness defined here as honesty, seeking forgiveness, repentance – then the future is bleak.
But to all those self-serving, smug TV chasing politicians and others, whose own meetings with the Guptas, or other corrupt activities, have yet to come to light, remember one aphorism: people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
What southern Africa needs to do to manage rising temperatures
- Robert Scholes
The climate situation is already worse in southern Africa than in most other regions, the region having crossed the 1.5°C warming level some years ago.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a special report outlining what would need to be done to keep the world from warming up by more than 1.5°C.
That target level came from deliberations in 2010, with countries around the world setting 1.5 degrees as the preferred limit for warming. In 2015, the Paris Climate Accord settled on 2°C, while leaving the door open that the goal might later be revised on the basis of new evidence.
Countries predicted to be highly vulnerable to climate change, including low-lying island states and many African countries, called for the panel’s special report because they insisted that the options for reaching 1.5°C be evaluated, along with the consequences of not doing so.
The climate situation is already worse in southern Africa than in most other regions. While the global average air temperature has risen by nearly 1°C since accurate weather records began a little over a century ago, in southern Africa temperatures have risen on average by twice this amount. This means that southern Africa crossed the 1.5°C warming level some years ago. These trends don’t bode well for the future.
Based on what emissions countries have voluntarily agreed to cut under the Paris Accord, the world is heading for an increase of 3°C by the latter half of the century, rather than a 2°C target. For southern Africa this would translate to around 5-6°C in the interior.
Warming of that magnitude would make many aspects of people’s lives and countries’ economies untenable. Life-threatening heatwaves would become more frequent. The productivity of staple crops such as maize and wheat would be severely impaired. Water resources, already at their limit throughout southern Africa, would be dramatically reduced in both quality and quantity. Dairy and livestock farming would not be viable over much of the subcontinent.
There is no sudden failure when the 1.5°C limit is crossed. But the risks of a whole range of undesirable consequences become progressively greater the further we stray from the climate under which our complex, interdependent world developed.
The problem is that we don’t know exactly where the thresholds-of-no-return lie, and probably won’t not know until it is too late to avoid crossing them. The sanest response is to stay as close to our comfort range as possible.
Staying below 1.5°C will require urgent, deep and radical changes in almost every aspect of our lives – from what we eat, and how we travel to where we get our power from and how we build our houses. Specifically, the world would need to eat less meat, commute less and mostly using public transport, generate energy from renewable resources and build energy-efficient homes, offices and factories.
There are also a few things that southern Africa can do to try and arrest the region’s climate crisis.
Focus areas
Southern African nations must encourage the global community to radically reduce climate change to lower the risks to particularly vulnerable social and ecological systems. Coral reefs are one example.
The panel’s report concludes that warming the world by 2°C would lead to the loss of nearly all coral reefs from their current locations. Limiting the warming to 1.5°C would save about 30% of coral reefs. Other examples are the melting of ice caps and the further drying of semi-arid lands.
A shallow coral reef in Sodwana Bay, South Africa.PhotoSky/Shutterstock
Renewable energy is another area that needs serious focus. For its part, South Africa needs to take urgent action to reduce its dependency on coal. The country has pursued an aggressive renewable energy drive. But, at the same time, it has built two large, long-lived coal-fired power stations, and is contemplating building more. This is not consistent with the goal of urgent and deep emission reductions.
It seems inevitable that the planet will overshoot the 1.5°C global mark, and probably also the 2°C mark. Cooling the atmosphere later in century would require the removal of up to a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide. The world doesn’t yet have affordable, proven technology to do this at the required scale. The approach that is most commonly punted – mass tree-planting – is a non-starter in most of southern Africa, where the arable land and water resources are needed for food production, and the marginal land is too dry to grow forests.
The challenge
The challenge for the world is that the effort – and money – required to keep the rise in temperature below 1.5°C is exponentially larger than what would be needed to keep it below 2°C.
The IPCC Special Report estimates the “marginal cost of climate abatement” – that is how much less climate change you get per unit of money you spend – at three to four times higher to stay below 1.5°C globally than it is to stay below 2°C.
Meeting the more stringent target would require spending an unprecedented amount of global financial resources on new energy, transport and urban systems over the next decade. The investment needed to stay within the 2 °C limit is less because it can take greater advantage of the falling price of renewable energy, without retiring existing technologies before they have reached their pay-back date.
The new finance minister must hit the road running
- Jannie Rossouw
The latest reshuffling of South Africa’s finance minister may have negative origins but it brings with it some positive energy.
Nhlanhla Nene resigned as finance minister after it emerged that he lied about the nature of his contact with the controversial Gupta family, the friends of former President Jacob Zuma who stand accused of championing massive misappropriation of public funds in a process branded as state capture.
In an initial response to a journalist’s question, Nene claimed that he had only met the Guptas in passing. But in his recent testimony to a commission investigating state capture he admitted that he’d met Gupta family members on numerous occasions, including a number of visits to their house and their offices.
The inconsistency tarnished his integrity and sparked massive public criticism. Within a week of making his admissions he resigned. South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa immediately appointed former South African Reserve Bank governor Tito Mboweni as the new finance minister.
On the one hand Nene’s departure must be hailed as setting a new tone for South African politicians, particularly for the cabinet. By falling on his sword, he has taken responsibility for his actions – a rarity in South African politics. It’s tempting to cast his action in stone as the “Nene Rule” that sets a standard for politicians to resign when in the wrong.
On the other hand the appointment of Mboweni brings back someone with considerable skills and the political finesse needed to steer South Africa out of its current economic quagmire.
Mboweni needs to hit the ground running. In late October he must present the country’s medium term budget policy framework. All eyes will be on how he steers the challenge of rebalancing the national budget. His political skills and ranking might come in handy.
Equal to the task
Mboweni takes over the finance portfolio at a difficult time. Tough decisions will be required in a hostile environment as a strong populist wave sweeps through the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC).
It’s therefore a positive that he commands a more senior political ranking than Nene had within the ANC. Mboweni claimed the 11th position in the tallying of the votes for the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC) during the ruling party’s 2017 elective conference that made Ramaphosa the President. The NEC is made up of 80 members and is the ANC’s highest decision making body between conferences.
In addition to this, Mboweni has a strong financial background. He served as governor of the South African Reserve Bank from 1999 to 2009. Prior that he served in Nelson Mandela’s first cabinet as minister of labour.
Both experiences should help equip him to meet the economic challenges facing the country. There’s no doubt that he’s knowledgeable about financial matters and is respected among investors.
His tenure at the Reserve Bank should ensure a smooth working relationship between the minister of finance, the national treasury and the central bank. As a previous governor, Mboweni understands this important relationship while valuing the autonomy and the independence of the various institutions and their responsibilities.
High expectations of Mboweni
Mboweni will need to be a quick study. He has only two weeks in which to familiarise himself with the details of the medium term budget.
He can’t afford to disappoint. This year’s budget will be watched more intensely than usual by key stakeholders, including investors and credit rating agencies because it follows closely on an economic stimulus and recovery plan announced by Ramaphosa. Details are expected to be unveiled in the medium term budget.
The medium term budget is also expected to signal how South Africa is dealing with its fiscal challenges. This is where government faces its very hard choices.
The ultimate aim must be to increase economic growth and eradicate unemployment. But to achieve these objectives the government must revise its expenditure priorities.
Expenditure on civil service remuneration, social grants and interest on government debt currently equates to 70% of the government’s tax revenue. This is clearly untenable. If not addressed, South Africa will face a fiscal cliff – the point at which these three expenditure items account for all government revenue and make spending on anything virtually impossible.
At the same time, Mboweni will have to work closely with Pravin Gordhan, the Minister of Public Enterprises, on the restructuring of state-owned enterprises. The precarious financial position of a number of state-owned enterprises is placing a heavy burden on taxpayers. Removing this burden will release resources that can be used to stimulate the domestic economy. Mboweni must therefore help with tough decisions about unaffordable vanity projects.
And, finally, Mboweni must sort out the challenges facing the Public Investment Corporation which is responsible for managing civil servants’ pension funds and is worth over R1,5 trillion.
Restoring trust
South Africa is in serious economic difficulty. It also faces a trust deficit owing to the state capture project of the Zuma administration. The golden triangle of trust between the government, the public and the business community has been broken. No country can succeed without this. Mboweni can play an important role in restoring it.
Giving communal land to individual households, rather than mostly corrupt traditional overseers, will unlock real value, energy and entrepreneurship.
Zimbabwe's failed populist-based land reform is a salutary lesson for South Africa on how land reform must be pragmatic, safe-guard commercial agriculture and focus on boosting ordinary subsistence, small, medium and emerging black commercial farmers already committed to farming.
In 2016, then Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe declared a state of disaster for agriculture, a declaration which allowed international donors to help. This declaration was also a clear and very public admittance that land reform had failed.
The effect of Zimbabwe's failed land reform programme is clear. According to the United Nation's children's agency, UNICEF, around 3 million Zimbabweans need regularly food aid. Around 40% of Zimbabwean households are hungry.
"We have not seen these levels of malnutrition in more than 15 years," said Jane Muita, UNICEF's Zimbabwe representative.
The World Food Programme (WFP) reckoned that over a million people in Zimbabwe's rural areas will face hunger during the 2018 and 2019 dry season, which is between October and March.
China has donated US$5m to help starving Zimbabweans in the rural areas over this year's dry season.
Ironically, in 2015 Mugabe maintained there was "no suffering" in his country. Mugabe, who addressed a Zanu-PF women's league meeting in Harare asked angrily: "But what is that the people are suffering from? Didn't we give them land?"
Giving back land a cathartic imperative
A decade ago Mugabe, with the country facing economic collapse and his own leadership being challenged within Zanu-PF, launched a populist land reform programme to strengthen his own waning position within the governing party, which saw white-owned land being expropriated. The land reform boosted his and Zanu-PF's popularity, particularly in the rural areas.
Because the act of colonialism started off by forcefully taken African land, the act of returning the land is an almost existential, deeply emotional and cathartic imperative, to undo, so to speak, colonialism.
This means that land reform can easily be used by opportunistic leaders to bolster their support among blacks – as Mugabe did. Furthermore, it also makes land reform susceptible to populism, revenge and ideological reasons.
For another, redistribution strategies are by their very nature highly prone to corruption, rent-seeking and manipulation – this is often one of the main reasons why redistribution strategies in almost all African and developing countries fail. All of this means that land reform will have to be done honestly, pragmatically and to expand, rather than destroy, the industrial base of a country.
In Zimbabwe, land reform was absolutely necessary to address past land injustices, but Mugabe's land reform was simply exploiting the necessity of land reform for purely selfish gain.
Last week new Zimbabwe president Emmerson Mnangagwa promised compensation to white farmers who lost their land during the disastrous expropriation of land by his predecessor. The white farmers are owed US$9bn in compensation for improvements made on the farms before they were expropriated.
However, Lands and Agriculture Minister Perrance Shiri, responding recently to opposition member questions in parliament said it is not the state that will be paying the compensation, but individuals who received the expropriated farms, will be expected to do so.
Shiri said: "It makes common sense that instead of labouring the tax payer, the person who is directly benefiting from those improvements contributes towards the compensation of the former farmers." He added: "The policy is that the new farmer pays for the improvement on the farm and that money is used to compensate the white farmer, and that is government's position."
Land reform undermined agricultural productivity
Before the land reform, the country was agriculturally almost self-sufficient, but land reform collapsed agricultural productivity to such an extent that the country now imports most products.
The land reform focused exclusively on taking successful commercial farms. This almost immediately undermined agricultural productivity. This meant Zimbabwe's exports income was immediately and devastatingly cut. Its food production was also immediately disrupted as productivity plummeted.
Although some of the land was transferred to poor blacks who had basic farming skills, a lot of the best land was transferred to Zanu-PF politicians. Even the ordinary Zimbabweans who got land and who had real farming skills often lacked the commercial management skills which modern commercial farming now demands.
But most importantly, land reform in Zimbabwe did not empower the genuine subsistence, small and medium and emerging commercial black farmers. It did not upscale them, give them access to finance, help them to adopt new production methods and diversify their products, or secure markets for them.
The Zimbabwean land reform failed, like black economic empowerment in Zimbabwe and in South Africa; because it did not transfer land rights to blacks already in business, especially in the SMMEs sector – the real black entrepreneurs – but transferred commercially successful assets to political capitalists with no business inclination or skills whatsoever. This undermined, rather than added value.
Land reform in Zimbabwe was not part of a long-term industrialisation strategy, which aimed to create entirely new commercial black farmers, develop a manufacturing sector aligned to it and establish industrially relevant technical higher education institutions to produce new agricultural related skills.
Assets not secure
The expropriation undermined market confidence in the credibility of the government's policies; it undermined the value of property and disrupted the financial system – because it disrupted the system of seeking credit based on one's assets. Foreign and local investors moved their money out of the country – and started divesting because their assets were not secure.
There was a jobs bloodbath in the commercial agriculture sector. This not only caused unemployment within the agriculture, but within the sectors that feed into the commercial agriculture economy.
The destruction of commercial agriculture also damaged the manufacturing sector aligned to agriculture. The sectors provided the inputs to commercial agriculture – which created jobs – which meant over and above the jobs on the commercial farms, jobs in the manufacturing sectors aligned to agriculture were also lost.
But as importantly, the populist, chaotic and vengeful land reform also undermined the financial system underpinning the economy, market confidence which is needed for new local and foreign investments and the credibility of the government's broader economy policies.
Zimbabwean economist John Robertson puts it succinctly: "By destroying the collateral value of a vitally important national asset, government removed billions of dollars' worth of collateral value from Zimbabwe's economy."
Competent public sector needed
Land reform is complicated and demands complex coordination and management of market perceptions. It therefore needs a competent public sector to manage it.
The state institutions, whether state development finance institutions or agricultural marketing boards, that were supposed to provide new finance or skills transfer to black farmers were all at near collapse, because incompetent Zanu-PF cronies were appointed to run them. The money for development of black farmers was corruptly siphoned off.
Zimbabwe's land reform did not include building housing in urban areas. Again, any meaningful land reform programme must include providing mass housing. A housing programme must be part of the industrialisation strategy – building a manufacturing sector, expanding industrially relevant technical skills and fostering technology development based on producing the materials for the built programme.
As importantly, in the rural areas, land controlled by traditional leaders through customary law remained untouched. This means that the vast majority of rural dwellers are still living as second class citizens, with little rights of tenure, on communal controlled by traditional leaders as if they personally own the land.
Although they technical "own" land, they cannot invest in it, use it for commercial purpose or to secure finance, because their property "rights" can be taken away from them the moment they disagree with the traditional leader or the Zanu-PF party or leader.
Giving communal land to individual households, rather than mostly corrupt traditional overseers, will unlock real value, energy and entrepreneurship not only in Zimbabwe, but across the continent.
William Gumede is Associate Professor in the Wits School of Governance. This article was first published on News24.
Ties between African countries and China are complex. Understanding this matters
- Yu-Shan Wu, Chris Alden and Cobus van Staden
The complex relationship between Africa and China has become even more complicated this year.
Initially, 2018 was set to reaffirm the bond through the latest Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summit held in Beijing in September. The summit delivered its usual pageant of African leaders, side deals, and the announcement of a USD$60 billion financing package. The year also saw the recurrence of misgivings about the relationship.
The most explicit theme of this conversation was debt. Donald Trump’s US administration added fuel to smouldering anxiety, and China found itself having to defend its lending to Africa – at home and globally. At the same time, African governments are battling rumours that they are about to hand over state assets to the Chinese.
The debt debate is flawed – not least for underestimating Western contributions to African debt. Nevertheless, it is revealing. In particular, the debate reflects an anxiety that has haunted relations between China and the continent since the beginning of this century: the massive power gap between China and individual African countries.
Power imbalances
The constant rhetoric of win-win cooperation between China and Africa has never adequately answered the simple structural question at the heart of the relationship. That is: how is an economy the size of Benin’s or Togo’s, for example, supposed to meaningfully engage with the Chinese behemoth? It’s a bit like trying to speed up your bicycle by grabbing on to a passing jumbo jet. It can take you to the next level, or it can simply rip off your arms.
The fundamental economic and power imbalance between China and African countries has led to the relationship being criticised as neocolonial. The truth, however, is that African governments exercise more agency than they are given credit for. This includes frequently playing China and traditional Western development partners off against one another.
The word “agency” is key here: to what extent is Africa able to freely make its own decisions and drive the best deals with China?
Our new research focused on this issue. We looked at two emerging areas shaping African agency in relation to China. These are reforms to the African Union (AU) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The initiative involves a massive infrastructure rollout aimed at linking China to Europe and beyond. The aim is to set up a zone of shared development that encompasses Central and Western Asia and Africa.
The AU and the Belt and Road initiative
The AU has proposed a set of reforms to streamline African negotiations at events like the FOCAC under the auspices of the continental body. This could be seen as a step towards the frequently repeated goal of Africa negotiating collectively with China. But, in fact, we show that it faces significant resistance from within the continent. This comes both from powerful states worried about losing control of their bilateral relationships with China, and from smaller states worried about being excluded.
China’s BRI reveals other aspects of African agency. It’s structured by numerous bilateral agreements, but is also subject to regional as well as local pressures. The way the initiative’s projects have been pulled into national debates involving opposition politics shows that the range of actors constituting African agency is potentially much wider than national governments.
We argue that before African agency can be maximised, this aspect of relations between China and particular African governments needs to be taken into account. Thinking about the issue has so far fixated on the role of national governments, to the exclusion of other actors. The biggest include regional economic communities such as Nepad and the AU. The smaller ones comprise opposition parties, civil society, local businesses and communities. All contribute to and constitute African agency.
What is this agency, how does it work and how can it be strengthened?
Understanding African agency
We identified three key areas where African agency can be located.
Firstly, African agency is expressed in the frameworks and documents that govern bodies like the forum. For example, in the early days arrangements paid relatively little attention to the issue of industrialisation. That changed after the formal adoption in 2015 of the AU’s Agenda 2063 – its blueprint for Africa’s sustainable development. The forum held that year saw an uptick in how many times the issue was mentioned.
By 2016, African industrialisation had become a key initiative of China’s presidency of the G20. Beijing directed an unprecedented level of G20 attention to the continent.
By 2018, the Beijing summit ended with fewer declarations of intent relating to industrialisation. Instead, it had become integrated into the continental and bilateral planning processes. In particular, it features regularly in discussions on development financing. Likewise the word “training” was mentioned over 40 times and in virtually every section of the Beijing Action Plan.
This suggests there is a shift from declarations of intent to more specific engagement towards industrialisation. This doesn’t necessarily guarantee the success of Africa’s industrialisation. But it shows that China responds to African agenda-setting.
Secondly, African agency is diffused across various levels and among various actors. Any analysis of African agency has to consider the complex interactions between continental bodies like the AU, regional economic blocs, national governments, civil society, business, and local communities. Each plays a role in shaping African decision making in relation to China. Partnerships that cut across the state-business-civil society divide are as important as state led initiatives in articulating policy initiatives in relation to China.
Thirdly, it’s important to think of the changing terms of agency as African governments face growing debt burdens via such initiatives as the BRI. For instance, rumours that the Zambian government offered its national electricity supplier as collateral in exchange for a new tranche of Chinese loans have reportedly caused political division at home.
Critics have focused on debt as diminishing African agency. What they’ve ignored are the significant financial and reputational risks to China.
Maximising African agency
As Africa becomes more involved in global initiatives, and as it moves towards greater continental integration via AU reforms and the Continental Free Trade Agreement, the need increases to think harder and more creatively about what African agency means. It isn’t enough to simply reiterate the call for Africa to negotiate collectively with China – not least because this disregards the complex interactions between African governments.
Rather, it’s time for more comprehensive thinking about how African agency manifests across actors and geographic scales. Only once we have a firmer handle on this can we move towards maximising it.
A reflection on the media: consolidation and convergence – or shrivelling and sinking?
Like a slow tsunami, South African newsrooms are shrivelling due to retrenchments. On Black Wednesday (19 October 1977) and Media Freedom Day, I will shine the spotlight on the usual threats to media freedom, but the more important question must be asked: if journalists all but disappear, whose freedoms are we worrying about protecting? And what does this mean for the public, considering journalism is meant to serve them through offering a voice, diversity and plurality to deepen democracy?
The number of journalists in full-time jobs has halved from about a decade ago when, some painful information gathering techniques show, it was about 10,000-strong. Some media researchers say that there could well still be about 10,000 “media workers” in South Africa – but some are freelance journalists and most are in public relations or part of the “gig economy”; a day here and a day there of editing or hustling.
Losses in the number of community newspapers have been easier to track: there were 575 in 2008, but in 2018 there are about 275. However, CEO of the Association of Independent Publishers, Louise Vale, feels that this number could be on the optimistic side: “It may be even less than that.”
Journalists are being retrenched as part of cost-cutting measures, with companies serving section 189 notices to meet their obligations under the Labour Relations Act. The SABC, the biggest employer of journalists and in debt to the tune of R622-million, said in September that it may be serving the 189 notice. Job losses from retrenchments – also voluntary packages, dismissal, being laid off, asked to take early retirement – have taken place in waves over the past decade, while media companies have come up with words that sound rational, and somewhat scientific: “consolidation”, “convergence” and “centralisation”. All these Cs sound politer than the S words which are more apposite descriptions of the reality: shrivel, shrink, sink and squeeze.
According to the New Beats project (an international project based in Melbourne, Australia), the South African arm of the research conducted in 2018 shows that most journalists who have been retrenched had no union support, were not trained for the digital age, even though they were keen, and the majority are part of the gig economy – “doing a mix of journalism and other things”, such as public relations. A small percentage is studying towards MAs or PhDs, while an even smaller percentage moved completely out of journalism to selling property or Bitcoins. The majority are earning less than and less and are mostly disillusioned with the media world.
One of the 163 respondents said: “Appallingly low freelance rates in journalism which haven’t kept up with inflation, and public relations work in the private and public sector. We take whatever we can get, really, after being chewed up and spat out by the company, which didn’t have the courtesy to even say thank you, never mind a farewell party after 20 years.”
The completed international research on what happens to journalists when they lose their jobs will be launched in 2019.
The Glass Ceiling 2018 research about to be launched on Black Wednesday/Media Freedom Day – on Friday 19 October – shows that women are experiencing a backlash in the newsroom and media companies. They say that while men understand sexism a lot better today than in the past, they know they earn less than men. They also cite sexist jokes, being ignored for promotion, and the old boys’ network that continues to exclude them.
On this 2018 Black Wednesday/Media Freedom Day, President Cyril Ramaphosa is the keynote speaker at a fund-raising dinner hosted by the SA National Editors Forum in Johannesburg. I wonder which of the myriad challenges the journalism industry is facing he will tackle.
On 19 October 1977 (Black Wednesday), about a month after Black Consciousness hero Steve Biko was murdered in detention, then minister of justice Jimmy Kruger arrested editors and bannedThe World, Weekend Worldand the church publicationPro Veritate. He also banned 19 Black Consciousness organisations: the Black People’s Convention, the SA Students’ Organisation (which Biko founded), the SA Students’ Movement, the National Association of Youth Organisations and its affiliates, the Black Community Programmes, the Medupe Writers’ Association, the Zimele Trust Fund, the Black Women’s Federation, the Union of Black Journalists and the Association for the Educational and Cultural Advancement of the African People of South Africa.
The apartheid regime detained key writers Joe Thloloe, Mathatha Tsedu and Don Mattera, who were tortured in prison and on their release were slapped with five-year banning orders.
What have job losses in journalism got to do with Black Wednesday/Media Freedom Day?
It is highly unlikely that any such gross and obscene mutilation of our human rights such as that which took place in 1977 could ever take place in South Africa today. But through loss of jobs in journalism we are also losing voices,plurality, context, and experience. As media companies “consolidate”, they hire young people who they can pay R10,000 a month or less, but provide no mentorships and training, so they swim or sink. Loss of plurality means you see the same story with the same quotes, intro, angles etc in a variety of “different” websites and newspapers, sometimes with the same byline, sometimes with different bylines, discombobulating readers in the process.
Some of the other threats and trends we face today are also serious.
Threats
Government interference in the SABC board. Once the new editorial charter is adopted it must be adhered to. Government tends to think it owns the public broadcaster, incorrectly conflating state, government, ruling party, SABC, the public.
Police bullying at crime scene behaviour: police need to know that journalists are allowed to be at crime scenes, to interview people, record events from outside the condoned off area.
Protesters and police are guilty of harassing journalists on their jobs, particularly photo-journalists and women.
The Protection of State Information (Secrecy) bill remains unsigned on the president’s desk. He should scrap it; information rights and media freedom activists have already sent it to lawyers to check for constitutionality: you can’t jail journalists for doing their jobs and uncovering “classified” information. Mostly “classified” information tends to be about covering corruption, not threats of being invaded by a neighbouring country.
The establishment of a Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT) remains a resolution of the ANC since its Polokwane (2007) conference, unimplemented, but some elements in the ANC would like journalists licensed (this is a joke in the digital world where everyone can publish and the definition of who is a journalist becomes more fluid every day). .
Surveillance: a number of investigative journalists have reported that their phones are being tapped.
Bullying and online trolling of women: this is increasing and the bullies have used sexualised images to shut women up when they expose investigations on corruption.
Fake news (misinformation/ disinformation/propaganda and lies) is a huge threat and will probably increase as we move towards the 2019 election; with politicians being accused of trying to “brown envelope” (bribe) journalists.
Loss of professional journalists means loss of institutional memory, loss of political memory and context, with more mistakes in print and online; subs desks have been radically cut back.
The police may not be throwing journalists into jail and the government is not closing papers. But media companies are discombobulated, and have resigned themselves to participating in the tsunami; they have not provided support or training either.
Trends
Collaboration and sharing: investigative journalists are sharing info and helping each other in the country and across borders. Competition is healthy, but media wars are a bit passé. The trend now is for collaboration to hold power to account to fight corruption, disinformation and lies.
Fighting corruption: could well be the biggest threat to poverty alleviation as President Cyril Ramaphosa said this month at the Jobs Summit. Therefore, investigative journalism must be supported.
Unless some news outlets have investigative units, their titles are likely to continue to shrink – with some that were once 64 pages now dowsized to 32 pages. News companies need to have a niche area to survive, otherwise they tend to be full of opinion, not based on research.
There’s a backlash against women. And it’s caused women to be more assertive in media companies about salary disparities and putting up their hands more for leadership positions. It is good news that two of the biggest television stations, SABC and eNCA, are headed by black women.
Social media usage is deepening democracy, yet data in SA is more expensive than anywhere in the world and most people in rural areas don’t have smartphones to access, Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter. It’s the middle classes who are addicted to their echo chambers.
Newsrooms will continue to hire younger people who have the skills of uploading videos with smartphones and “content producing”, which isn’t necessarily about telling a story skilfully. If you deconstruct the term “content producing”, it can be likened to a vase: pour anything in, including flowers, and it holds “content”.
Some academics, community and NGO activists liaise with journalists on stories without understanding the time and cost pressures they are under, with their editors often saying: “Sorry, you can’t do that story, there is no budget to travel.” How can a journalist get an insightful, in-depth story on a complex issue – such as hostel dweller violence, for instance – when he or she has to produce multiple stories a day, 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there?
It’s not just shrinkage, it’s also closures, and it’s not just in print. In 2018 we had the closure of the onlineHuffington Post SA, a television station,ANN7which becameAfro Worldview, andAfrovoicewhich wasThe New Age (these latter two were owned by the Guptas and represented the corrupt Zuma faction). At the end of 2017,The Timesclosed its print edition.
There has been some growth: South Africa has 108 online publications, which we didn’t have a decade ago, most of which are registered with the Press Council SA.1
Until broadband is rolled out, and made cheaper, as promised by the government 10 years ago, the unemployed, the poor, and rural folk will continue to be the losers in accessing information.
My Black Wednesday’s reflection for 2018 is thus that journalism’s job losses are a tragic tsunami. We need more voices and plurality if we are to call ourselves a deepening, robust democracy.
Glenda Daniels is an Associate Professor in Media Studies, Wits University. This article was first published on the Daily Maverick.
Democratic Alliance plays populist immigration card
- Loren B Landau
As elsewhere in the world, migration is increasingly at the centre of South Africa’s public and political debate.
For the first time, the country’s official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), has released a document outlining its “immigration plan” for the country. In advance of next year’s national election, this is the first of many policy documents intended to distinguish the party and win voter support. In a country where many citizens are uncomfortable with current migration patterns, this is an important, if contentious, move.
This pandering to populism signals heightening competition in South Africa’s electoral politics. The party is smelling electoral blood, most importantly the possibility of winning Gauteng, the country’s most populous province and its economic hub, in next year’s elections. In the 2016 municipal elections, the party made significant gains against the long dominant African National Congress (ANC). Following those elections, the party now governs the country’s most important cities– Johannesburg (the country’s largest city), Tshwane (administrative capital) and Cape Town (South Africa’s second city and legislative capital). In next year’s general elections, they look to expand their provincial mandates beyond the Western Cape.
After years as a small minority party, the DA is now seeking a platform that can reach beyond its traditional white, wealthy base. Against accusations of racism within the party and concerns that it is out of touch with the poor majority, the DA is grasping for policies to attract new black voters without alienating its current constituents. Given widespread popular concerns about the levels of immigration from neighbouring countries (particularly Zimbabwe and Mozambique), South Asia and China, this is an issue that can reach voters across the economic and racial spectrum.
The problem is that the DA’s new immigration proposal offers little new. Worse, with policies like this, the party is falling into the same trap as the ANC: offering policies that are vague and founded on fantasy not fact.
Like the ANC, the DA’s desperate politics plays to populism. There was a time when the DA tried to sell South Africans on a technocratic state founded on facts and bureaucratic capacity. This proposal reflects a shift to policy formation founded on myth and political expediency.
The plan
While the DA’s immigration plan
openly rejects all anti-immigrant sentiment and ‘build a wall’ paradigms
it nevertheless puts forward a flawed understanding of immigration, namely that South Africa’s considerable social problems – crime, unemployment, inequality, poverty – are somehow attributable to immigration and bad border control.
The party’s position reads like a post-hoc justification for its Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba’s continued rhetorical assault on undocumented immigrants.
Like him, the policy proposal recognises the contributions highly skilled migrants make in boosting businesses and creating jobs. But, apart from the wealthy and educated, immigrants remain unwanted. Here the policy echoes statements from across the political spectrum accusing foreigners of promoting corruption while eroding the country’s security, social cohesion and prosperity.
It is convenient to burden immigrants with the country’s social ills, but the facts simply do not support this. South Africa doesn’t have perfect data, but all scientific analysis indicates foreigners make up only between 3%-5% of the total population of the country’s 55 million residents.
And South Africa isn’t an exception – the numbers of immigrants are similar to many other countries. Even if it does receive the most immigrants of any African countries these are simply not enough people to explain the country’s high levels of crime, corruption and unemployment.
More of the same
The DA’s immigration policy reflects little empirical research. Nor does it distinguish itself from ANC policy as the party boasts. Instead, large sections of this policy appear cribbed from the ANC-drafted “White Paper” on International Migration. Perceived problems with porous borders and corruption are precisely why the ANC has proposed a border management agency.
For its part, the DA argues for a migration agency that would be nominally more democratically accountable. But this is much of a muchness. Even the DA’s big push for highly skilled immigrants to meet the needs of big business is reflected in ANC policy.
The DA’s policy also echoes the twisted humanitarian logic that has informed European responses to migration and the ANC’s own immigration policing efforts. Across all of them, the argument runs that protecting migrants demands that they are legally in the country. Yet rather than open channels for people to obtain legal documents and status, the DA proposes restricting them. Only those who come properly and in line with stringent admission requirements can stay.
This is why European countries have largely banned rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean lest they encourage unsafe migration. It is also the same impulse that motivated the ANC-led government’s “Operation Fiela” in 2015 that saw the arrest of tens of thousands of migrants to protect them from xenophobic attacks. This is a perverse humanitarian logic used to disguise an underlying isolationist nationalism. Although it intends this as a means of challenging the ANC, the DA is in fact very much on the same side.
Political expediency
The DA’s immigration policy is also without vision. It is reactive – primarily to the ANC’s perceived shortcomings.
Both parties are appeasing South Africans by promising a sense of control. In fact, lessons from other countries suggest that it isn’t immigration, per se that bothers voters. Instead, consternation arises from perceived threats to order. Immigration is a distraction.
There are real problems such as human rights abuses and corruption at the border, as well as challenges for low-skilled South Africans competing with undocumented migrants. But addressing these will not create the physical or economic security South Africa needs. Informed by the same sentiments of fear and exclusion that led to Brexit and US President Donald Trump’s election, they are distractions.
Bolsonaro’s victory is likely to see Brazil scale down Africa interests
- Amy Niang
Bolsonaro is a slavery-denialist, who claims that the Portuguese never set foot in Africa and that Africans themselves “delivered” slaves to Brazil.
His first son is a senator for the state of Rio do Janeiro. His second son a municipal councillor in the city of Rio, and his third is a federal deputy for the state of São Paulo. And he himself has served seven terms as deputy and as member of several political parties.
Yet Jair Bolsonaro, the favourite candidate for Brazil’s upcoming runoff presidential elections, likes to present himself as a new man who operates outside of the “system”.
The rhetoric of a new man, untainted by the culture of corruption that prevails among the political class, is a powerful device. It’s succeeded in folding the interests of disparate social categories into those of seasoned right wing politicians.
Bolsonaro is candidate for the Social Liberty Party. He’s the author of incendiary pronouncements, happily racist, misogynist and homophobic. The former army captain has managed to coalesce eclectic crowds whose commitment to democracy depends on the exclusion of entire sections of Brazilian society. He has colossal support among Brazil’s prolific evangelical communities. These have re-purposed their religious fervour to passionate hate and the demonising of adversaries.
Bolsonaro assuages the fears of a middle class that feels it’s lost privilege. He also confirms their aversion for Brazil’s internal “others” – namely black Brazilians and various Indian communities. In fact, he promises to keep privilege spaces of university education, residential suburbs and commercial spaces free from poor people.
For Bolsonaro, the choice Brazilians have to make is rather simple: it’s either “prosperity, freedom, family and God” – in other words him, or “the path of Venezuela”. In other words Fernando Haddad’s Workers’ Party.
In the first round of elections, Bolsonaro’s party secured 46% of the total vote. Haddad’s Workers’ party secured 29%. Haddad is routinely the victim of his opponent’s foul mouth. Bolsonaro is a slavery-denialist, who claims that the Portuguese never set foot in Africa and that Africans themselves “delivered” slaves to Brazil.
Needless to say his views on Africa are narrowly informed by the prism of Brazil’s uneasy, strained and unresolved racial question. As a result, his government can be expected to scale back Brazil’s engagements with the continent.
The end of Lula’s Africa moment?
Bolsonaro is expected to turn threats by the current administration to close Brazilian embassies in Africa into policies. Cutbacks on scholarships for African students are also expected.
At home he’s expected to put further restrictions on immigration and to withdraw into national priorities. These include Brazil’s economic doldrums, its fractured society, the high levels of crimes and more crucially the economic recession.
The only area where a Bolsonaro government policy might intersect with previous policy could be the military cooperation and the trade in military equipment.
If little is known about Bolsonaro’s views on foreign policy in relation to Africa, his running mate, General Hamilton Mourão, has been very clear. During a recent speech he criticised Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff’s South-South diplomacy claiming that it had resulted in costly association with “dirtbag scum” countries (African) that did not yield any “returns.
Africa was the centrepiece of Lula da Silva’s geopolitical aspirations for Brazilian status in an expanded and reformed multilateralism. In eight years of his presidency he visited 27 African countries over 12 trips.
But Brazil’s Africa moment had already began to fade under Rousseff. The election of Bolsonaro is likely to signal the beginning of the end of Africa-Brazil relations as we know them. It could even mean the end of the five country grouping known as BRICS as he has promised to review Brazil’s participation in the coalition.
Brazil’s relations with Africa have been particularly strong with the Lusophone countries of Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and Sao Tome and Principe. Angola in particular became a springboard in Brazil’s expansion into the South Atlantic beyond the Lusophone world.
Lula da Silva sought to institutionalise the new Global South framework in the form of a biannual Africa South America Summit and also through the India, Brazil South Africa Dialogue Forum. He doubled Brazil’s diplomatic presence in Africa between 2000 and 2010. By 2010 there were 39 embassies. Over the same period, 18 African embassies opened in Brasilia.
These various initiatives fed a momentum in Brazil’s rise to global prominence. Brazil was for instance able to get José Graziano da Silva elected Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation with the strong support of African countries.
Beyond punctual strategies, Brazil’s engagement with Africa served to enhance its global standing and to buttress Brazil’s ambition to become a leading voice of the Global South.
Economic strategies
Brazil’s economic strategies took an expansionist pattern similar to that of other emerging powers. They targeted resources-rich and fast growing economies. Main export destinations were Egypt and Nigeria. Imports come mainly from Algeria and Nigeria.
Between 2000 and 2013, trade between Brazil and Africa expanded from $USD4.3 to USD$28.5 billion. But it dropped by USD$12.4 billion in 2016 following economic recession and political upheaval in Brazil.
Brazil’s economic engagement with Africa is not without its problems. For instance, the infrastructure giant Odebrecht is at the heart of Operação Lava-Jato (Operation Car War) which exposed the largest corruption scandal in the history of modern democracy. It involved over 200 leaders across the political and business sectors and over USD$2 billion.
Under Bolsonaro, economic ties can be expected to take a different turn. Institutions such as the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation can be expected to grow in prominence in Africa as he makes a big push for agro-business expansion. This will come with its own set of problems, notably pollution caused by fertilisers and attendant health risks. That, however, is unlikely to deter him.
Cost of accessing academic research is way too high
- Leti Kleyn and Denise Rosemary Nicholson
In the last week of October each year, libraries and open access activists around the world celebrate Open Access Week.
It’s a week dedicated to increasing access to knowledge resources hosted by libraries, such as online journals and academic books.
Open access is very beneficial to society because research and knowledge is shared widely at no cost to the user. Ordinarily, a great deal of research and information is locked behind paywalls, where it’s only accessible at a high fee. Open Access gives users access to material under an open licence. This means that copyright permission need not be obtained each time material is used or reused.
Globally, the scholarly publishing system is in dire need of financial and legislative change. To address this issue, the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich has produced a White Paper that aims to completely reform the business model of academic journals. The paper proposes that individual countries change the underlying legal and financial structures that challenge the high subscription fees levied by publishers.
Could a country like South Africa manage the changes as advocated in the White Paper? Getting new financial models going will be difficult because of the complexity of the industry’s internal workings and a shortage of data on actual expenditure. However, the country is making headway on the legal framework front.
What’s missing
There’s been a marked shift over the past five decades in how academic publishers do business. Initially, every subscriber paid the same price. Then some price discrimination was introduced: libraries pay more than individuals; and consumers are asked to pay a unique price based on how much they can afford.
But the system isn’t transparent because publishers require institutions to sign non-disclosure agreements about payment. This is done to protect business models and pricing structures. It means there’s no transparency and we simply don’t know how much publicly funded universities are paying to commercial publishing houses.
To get a snapshot of what’s being paid in South Africa one of us did a quick survey to establish what the estimated expenditure for resources and copyright would be for South African public universities. We asked libraries to provide this information for 2018.
Fifteen institutions responded to a request for estimated expenditure in 2018 relating to e-resources, book budgets and copyright fees.
It emerged that 15 of the country’s 26 higher education libraries will pay just over R1 billion (USD$69 million) in 2018 towards electronic and printed resources. This amount increases by 5% per year on average with the exchange rate of these international resources adding to the expense. In addition, 14 of the 15 mentioned institutions will pay about R31 million (USD$1.8 million) to the Dramatic, Artistic and Literary Rights Organisation for copyright licences on prescribed works.
The fact that knowledge resources expenditure for research and teaching purposes in the South African higher education sector is runs into the billions should be an issue of major concern. But the fact that there’s little collated information available makes it difficult for the tertiary sector to lobby for national licences, fee reductions, and sector reform.
Since an estimated 80% of the collections in academic libraries are purchased from international publishers, the majority of money flows out of the country to publishers in developed countries. Moreover a great deal of research produced locally is published internationally and forms part of the cohort of knowledge that is given to international publishers for free. These publishers legally become the copyright holders through publishing agreements and sell back information to libraries and institutions.
Getting new financial models going will be difficult. This is because there’s no national initiative tracking payments that universities and research councils make to national and international publishers for books, electronic resources, interlibrary loans, copyright fees, and other costs.
This is a problem because journal publishers raise about 75% of their revenue from library subscriptions. And the academic knowledge contained in those journals is estimated to be worth billions of dollars.
This knowledge is controlled by five monopoly publishers, despite the fact that the research itself is mostly funded by governments, and paid for by the taxpayer.
Legislative shifts
The Copyright Amendment Bill offers some hope for change. The current Act is restrictive and allows only for limited exceptions.
Should the bill pass, it will be the first time in four decades that South Africa has taken steps to update its copyright law. This will align legislation to the digital era with improvements relating to limitations, exceptions, and fair use.
The new law will facilitate access to academic knowledge in the educational and library sectors through fair use provisions. It also introduces a generous number of educational exceptions to the exclusive rights of authors and creators.
These legal flexibilities will help university libraries service delivery, disseminate information, and preserve their collections. The bill has received overwhelming support from the library, archival, and higher education sectors both nationally and internationally.
This is important because South Africa is party to various international intellectual property agreements that require the same standards to be applied in member countries.
The Amendment Bill, if passed, will allow educators to improve their range of teaching resources. And, finally, it’s hoped that access and resource-sharing will improve. This can happen through a more balanced copyright law, the creation of new open access works, and lower subscription fees. This will happen if national site-licences are negotiated, and fair use is enforced.
Universities need to find ways to assist students who are passive in seeking help.
University campus counselling facilities are faced with a sharp increase in students seeking assistance. This is a positive sign – many students are seeking help. However, our concern must be with those students who are passive in seeking help. Those who may find themselves in a desperate position, where they see no way out and opt to end their lives. How do we reach them?
In recent weeks, as has been the pattern in recent years, it has been deeply distressing and saddening that students at a number of universities took the decision to end their lives. This has led to universities in South Africa increasingly having to confront student suicides, and to focus their energies on the mental wellness of students and staff.
According to the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), suicide is the second leading cause of death among university students, after accidents. Studies further suggest that as many as 20% of university students have suicidal thoughts at some point during their university career. Studies suggest that student suicides and mental health challenges are on the increase globally.
Having had to deal with student suicides in my own university, one cannot help but wonder what leads to a seemingly “together” student making the decision to end their life. What are the triggers? How do we identify students at risk, and put the necessary support systems in place, and walk the journey towards a better place with students? What kinds of campus-wide interventions are required, and how do we take these interventions to scale, to ensure that no student in a student population of 37,500 students is left behind?
When we lose a young life, it is often easy for the media, politicians, commentators, and others to heap the blame on teachers, universities, families, partners, friends and others who “should have done more”. The reality is that dealing with mental illness and suicide is much more complex and requires multiple interventions at various levels in society.
It is widely accepted that the context and environmental factors play a key role in the mental well-being of young people. Our South African reality is tough, and students are faced with a myriad of challenges. These include poverty and inequality, high levels of violence and crime, changes in support structures or the loss of social support systems, heightened awareness of sexual identity and orientation, and of course, the high academic demands in a very competitive environment.
Students who have never failed in their lives, must deal with failure while carrying the hopes of a family or a community. Student years are also a period of great change, and require significant adjustment to a new environment, and to new ways of being. For many students, the time away from home and being at university, means that they may be offered the opportunity to confront past pains. These include abuse, neglect, and unresolved traumatic experiences.
How does a student confront all these changes in their lives, and deal with the complexities of modern society, under the glaring eye of social media? Social media plays an important role in the lives of youth today. The worlds of Instagram, Facebook and other such platforms often portray an illusionary picture of prosperity and happiness.
Online friendships and communities are built on the successes portrayed, the number of likes one obtains on posted pictures or status updates and how trendy they are perceived to be. In this digital reality, no one seems to be struggling, and certainly no one is battling with depression and other forms of mental illness. It is a world of judgement, a world that feeds stigma. The image portrayed online is often very different from the reality of the struggles that everyday life may bring.Students may often not reach out for help as they feel that they may be a burden to others or may be perceived to be weak/needy.
Addressing this issue will require careful consideration of the factors that inform a student’s decision to commit suicide and lots of empathy. These considerations must include factors at university level, those presented by the world beyond, and the interplay between these factors. Traditionally, universities have focused their energies and scarce resources on the academic project.
University support structures have also often relied on providing basic interventions, depending strongly on referral support systems beyond the university like families, the church, NGOs, and the public and private healthcare systems. These often depend on how resourceful students are and the networks that they have within or beyond the university. The reality is that not many students have these networks, or access to resources. Where facilities are available, these are often oversubscribed or come at a great cost.
University campus counselling facilities are faced with a sharp increase in students seeking assistance. This is a positive sign – many students are seeking help. However, our concern must be with those students who are passive in seeking help, those who may find themselves in a desperate position, where they see no way out and opt to end their lives. How do we reach them? Increasing the capacity of campus counselling services may be part of the response, but not the only response. Universities must grapple with what it means to create inclusive, caring institutional environments where the well-being of each member of the campus community, is of utmost importance.
This requires a new approach or perspective that champions reaching out for help. A university-wide approach is needed that must include all stakeholders, including students and experts, who must join the conversation and actively commit to being part of the community-wide solution. Strategies must consider the broader context, and must also include helping students develop their coping skills, learning how to build resilience and emotional intelligence. For universities, this may require a new way of being.
Beyond the university, we must all commit to building a more caring society. Government, business, civil society, families and friends must join hands in realising that this is essential if we are to build strong communities. I really do believe that if we do not commit to working together towards addressing the mental well-being of students, and putting an end to student suicide, our collective futures may be compromised.
Jerome September is the Dean of Student Affairs at the University of the Witwatersrand. This article was firs published in the Daily Maverick.
ANC will go to the polls with only one major asset: its president Ramaphosa
- Roger Southall
It is common cause that the performance of South Africa’s government, led by the African National Congress (ANC), has been worse than abysmal.
Under former President Jacob Zuma, ANC functionaries pillaged numerous institutions of state. They enabled state owned institutions to be looted, mismanaged the provision of basic services and presided over an alarming downward spiral of the economy.
All in all, the ANC has completely forfeited its right to be reelected in 2019. It knows it, and is running very scared. But the odds are that it will still win, even though with its smallest majority yet.
What the party does have going for it is its president Cyril Ramaphosa. He is the ANC’s one big pull. And much to the chagrin of the Zuma faction, the party is going to have to build its election campaign around him – precisely because he is far more popular than the party. Indeed, South Africa can expect the 2019 election to bring the most presidential-style campaign yet.
The irony is that Ramaphosa will privately welcome a smaller rather than a larger ANC majority. A thumping reduction in the ANC’s vote will serve as a popular rebuff of the Zuma faction, and erode its base in the party. An ANC which knows that it may have lost its majority had it not been for Ramaphosa’s personal popularity will be an ANC in which he will at last be able to assert his authority.
A troubled party
Ramaphosa sits atop a party which has long been in a state of internal factional turmoil. He defeated his rival for the presidency, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, at the ANC’s five yearly congress with an excruciatingly narrow vote. He lacks control over the party’s national executive (its highest decision-making body between conferences) where Zuma’s supporters remain strong. And, he is facing a robust fight back campaign by Zuma’s acolytes in provinces around the country.
Zuma himself, like Banquo’s ghost, remains an ambiguous and dangerous presence. He professes innocence of all crimes as well as continuing loyalty to the party. But, behind the scenes he’s seemingly still pulling the strings of his puppets.
With the party in a state of continuing internal war, the scramble for positions on both its national and provincial electoral lists will be overt, in some places violent, and overall, very probably, embarrassing.
Nonetheless, come the election campaign, it is more than a little likely that its competing factions will forge something of a truce, and preach a new-found unity. The ANC may be divided over policies, positions and spoils, but one thing it is united about is the necessity of retaining power. It will prove ruthless in doing so. One of the few things it knows how to do well is to run an election campaign, and how to induce or scare its popular constituency into voting for it.
Even so, it is uncomfortably aware that its base is eroding. The loyalty of its traditional supporters is declining; it is failing to attract support among “born-frees” (those born after Mandela’s release in 1990); its narrative of having liberated the country from apartheid is wearing tired and thin; and the different commissions of inquiry are going to uncover more and more dirt as the campaign goes on.
So, what is the party going to be doing to win back the vote of the disillusioned?
The campaign
ANC elections head Fikile Mbalula recently acknowledged that the party has allowed itself to become mired in “the sins of incumbency”, to have become distanced from its base, arrogant and unaccountable. Under Ramaphosa, therefore, it will be making fulsome promises of renewal. The ANC will claim that the establishment of the various commissions of inquiry signal a determined assault on corruption, and indicate that the party’s bad apples will be thrown out.
Meanwhile, in all humility, the ANC is promising to renew its bonds with the people. This will involve a country wide process of consultation with what Mbalula has referred to as “strategic sectors of society” in a bid to “broaden and deepen participation” the drawing up of a “People’s Manifesto”.
Amid all this, the party will be promising to build on Ramaphosa’s various reform initiatives to return the economy to growth.
The ANC’s major problem is that none of this is going to be particularly convincing. The gospel of the party’s commitment to virtue and renewal is going to be a hard sell to a corruption-weary electorate.
Its base divided and increasingly cynical, the ANC knows that it is going to have to look for support beyond its normal boundaries. It knows all too well that it is likely to lose important ground to the radical Economic Freedom Fighters. It knows that it may have a hard time in getting the voters out in KwaZulu-Natal, where support for Zuma remains strong. It knows that many of its traditional supporters may be tempted to record their disgust with the party by staying at home.
Given all this, the ANC knows that it will have to play to Ramaphosa as its one major asset. A Ramaphosa-centred strategy is likely to work because there is no credible alternative as a party of government to the ANC.
The main opposition Democratic Alliance will again go unchallenged in the Western Cape, and may do surprisingly well in provincial elections in provinces such as Gauteng and Eastern Cape, based upon its “better-than-the-ANC” record in local government. But at the same time it may well suffer at national level because its conservative constituency fear the prospect of the ANC losing its majority and being forced into a coalition with Julius Malema and the EFF. In short, some will hold their noses, and vote for Ramaphosa and the ANC.
Why the demise of specialist reporters is a loss for any democracy
- Glenda Daniels
The newspaper industry in many countries is in the doldrums.Retrenchments have become the norm with experienced beat reporters among the first to go.
An ongoing global journalism survey, The New Beats, explores, among other things the steady decline of beat journalism. The Conversation Africa’s Natasha Joseph spoke to Dr Glenda Daniels, who is heading the South African leg of the research, about why beat reporting matters and why it’s at risk.
What is a “beat” journalist, and what’s their value as reporters?
A beat journalist specialises in a particular field. They have covered a particular “beat” or area and know it inside out. Beats include areas like politics, business, environment, education, science, labour, local government, courts and health.
When people read a beat reporter’s byline (their name on the story) they expect expert and factual news and analysis. It’s the opposite of generalist reporting.
What’s the state of beat journalism globally?
Beat journalism worldwide is disappearing. There are several reasons for this, among them the corporate and commercial pressures of going digital and competition from social media. Media companies retrench experienced reporters first to cut their salary bills – and beat reporters tend to be among the more senior staff.
I attended a symposium on the New Beats project in Australia earlier this year which highlighted a decrease in beat reporting across countries ranging from Finland, Brazil, Indonesia, US, Netherlands, and Canada.
This has consequences. In a discussion paper at the symposium based on his research, Professor Matthew Ricketson from Deakin University showed that without “boots on the ground” – beat reporters covering, for example, court or rural issues – indigenous people’s issues are disappearing from media coverage.
For the most part in Australia, news about indigenous groups comes from activists’ tweets or from research conducted by academics, rather than from the mainstream media.
How does South Africa stack up?
South Africa appears to be following a pattern established in the western, developed world. There have been several waves of retrenchments. Experienced professional journalism staff are down to a minimum. Certain specialist sections or pages have been cut altogether – a books page, for instance, is increasingly rare.
And certain beats have been abandoned, for example labour reporters haven’t been replaced. This beat is covered by politics desks. The lack of magistrate court reporters and local government reporters – which used to be important beats – means there’s a lot going on, on the ground, which the public misses out on.
What do journalists think of this trend?
Some of the South African respondents in the Job Losses/New Beats survey had scathing things to say about what happens when specialisation or “beat” reporting is lost.
One said:
Journalism has become increasingly undervalued as a profession. Too many bad writers and too few beat specialists, which means that people in power are getting away with murder.
Another said:
I don’t read newspapers anymore, but I find some excellent pieces on online publications. Generally, (media is) under-resourced, underfunded and a lot of (the) time lacks specialised writers. …The specialised photographer was made redundant years ago…
Another spoke of the tensions between media investors who want commercial success, and journalistic ethics:
The level of under investment, resultant juniorisation and low quality outputs do a disservice not just to investors and those who practice (journalism), but to democracy at large.
Juniorisation refers to the practice of newsrooms hiring inexperienced journalists who have not, usually, gone through traditional training in a cadet school.
I was very struck by this response. Democracy demands that we have access to information, freedom of information, freedom of expression, factual and reliable information. Instead, the current transition to digital media is throwing up a lot of unreliable information that must be waded through before we get to the facts; misinformation and propaganda; hate speech, and bigotry.
It’s a messy, sometimes bloody transition – and beat journalism is among the victims.
What does this all mean for audiences?
There’s been a decline in in-depth news coverage of any particular field and a corresponding rise in superficial array of news on a variety of topics. Infotainment gets passed off as “news”. Celeb gossip and sexy pictures sometimes fill pages. Media companies hire young generalists or all-rounders who can do 24/7 reporting, uploading of video, blogging, tweeting and brand or celebrity journalism – where the reporter is part of the story.
It appears that journalism is chasing technology and social media appears to lead journalism. That’s especially dangerous in this era where “fake news” –which includes misinformation and disinformation – has become a common complaint – and, as research shows, travels fast. Readers are often left asking whether they can trust what they’ve read, or if they’ve been fed misinformation or propaganda.
So what’s the solution?
The best case scenario or ideal situation for journalism to serve democracy is to restore journalist beats. It’s crucial for newsrooms to start going back to basics. For instance, training programmes need to be re-instituted; most newsrooms have scrapped these, as my colleagues and I have outlined in several “State of the Newsroom” reports conducted in South Africa in recent years.
Another approach is to cut executives’ and managers’ salaries, and to pay senior journalists to mentor younger reporters on specialised beats. In this way, good journalism can be saved.
*The full results of the international New Beats survey, including those from South Africa, are due out in 2019.
