September

The month of September is dedicated towards the celebration and affirmation of our heritage as a nation. This is meant to cement and consolidate national unity and social cohesion. We thus close heritage month by contributing to the on-going conversation about African humanity. In our context, what drives the qualitative value of our humanness is the human experience of ubuntu, where we place human flourishing and well-being at the core of our actions. This is about the totality of human prosperity.

The future is built in the present, the past influences the present, but, the relationship between the past, present, and the future is buttressed by the principle of non-linearity.  The social world does not operate based on linearity due to its dynamic nature with varied intervening factors.

On Tuesday, 10 September 2019, the University embarked on a march against Gender Based Violence (GBV) and xenophobia. Staff, students and the Chairperson of our University council attended the march. It was a show of unity amongst members of the university community against these social scourges. The VC delivered a statement of commitment to heighten the fight against GBV and xenophobia to the marchers.

We are currently faced with the rise of disregard of evidenced knowledge and critical thinking competencies in the public discourse, which are being easily replaced by common sense opinions, slogans, emotions, and impulsive intuition. Added to this challenge is conducting life at the intensity of the hashtag, wherein the contest amongst people is not on qualitative arguments, but rather on who was the first one to come out with ‘breaking news’, and who played with the vocabulary of crisis accurately in order to spike reactions. No time is given to the durable processing of incidents properly and the proper exchange and testing of valuable ideas. The currency of such an environment is the selling of conflict at the fingertip of the internet, targeted mainly on manipulating mainstream media and monopolosing public life. These are the characteristics of the post-truth era.