Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa will host a composite seminar with Professor Robert Mattes, Sarah Lockwood, and Dr. Robert Nyenhuis. Professor Mattes will present work exploring the patron-client relationship between MPs and constituents. Ms. Lockwood will discuss protest brokers in South African cities. And Dr. Nyenhuis will speak about his research on populism in Latin America.

Politics in Ghana:
The 2016 elections and their aftermath

UCT, 3-4 August 2017

The new Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa, together with the Department of Political Studies at UCT, is holding a workshop on Politics in Ghana. This small, focused workshop will examine the December 2016 elections, the political context, and the implications of the election and change of government for policy-making and implementation.

The workshop will be held on August 3rd and 4th in the Centre for Social Science Research Seminar Room, Leslie Social Science Building room 4.29, Upper Campus.

Contact IDCPPA@uct.ac.za for more details.

On Tuesday 11 July at 10 am the Institute will be hosting a coffee and cake discussion with Chris Saunders and Jeremy Seekings. Chris and Jeremy will reflect on what they learned about the state of African Studies across Europe at the European African Studies Conference held in late June.

Chris Saunders is an Emeritus Professor with a special interest in the recent political history of the SADC countries.

Jeremy Seekings is Professor of Political Studies and Sociology and Interim Director of the new Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa.

On Tuesday 13 June at 10 am the Institute will be hosting a coffee and cake discussion with Ndangwa Noyoo, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Development, UCT. Ndangwa will speak about his work on innovative strategies for development in Southern and West Africa.

Ndangwa’s interest is in scholarly work that can liberate Africans from chronic poverty, hunger and destitution, as well as work that challenges tyranny in Africa and spurs people to action against dictatorships and autocratic regimes. His two current projects are on indigenous social security systems in Southern and West Africa, and social welfare and social work in Southern Africa. Both projects will culminate in books.

Ndangwa Noyoo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Development at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Previously, he worked for the University of Johannesburg and for the South African Government as a Senior Social Policy Specialist/Chief Director in the National Department of Social Development. Prior to this, he was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Work at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has published widely in the areas of social policy, social development and related fields, especially, in the context of Africa and Southern Africa.

Please join us in the CSSR Seminar Room, Room 4.29 Level 4 Leslie Social Science Building.

The administration of the 2016 local government elections in South Africa has been celebrated as yet another important contributor to the delivery of free and fair elections. Yet competitive elections, an essential component of any democratic system, require more than smooth running administrative systems. Competitive elections require conditions that create a climate of tolerance, free political campaigning, and open public debate. An election without freedom to campaign is doomed to be stunted and inefficient as the right to freedom of expression is one of a web of mutually supporting rights the Constitution affords to citizens. This paper presents an analysis of narrative reports on instances of violations of the Electoral Code of Conduct, including intimidation and violence, gathered by Civil Society violence monitors and election observers from 1 March until 31 September 2016. The analysis reveals that whilst the vast majority of South Africans can vote and express their opinions without fear of retribution, there are underlying tensions militating against constitutionally protected political rights. When viewed  in conjunction with the Afrobarometer survey data (2016) on perceptions of political space in South Africa, in the context of Diamond and Morlino’s minimum requirements for democracy, it becomes clear that pre-election campaign space is fragile and not given, and will therefore need to be nurtured in future elections.

Presenter biography: Nkosikhulule Xhawulengweni Nyembezi is a PhD Candidate in Public Law, a policy analyst, a researcher, and a human rights activist. His research interests are in the areas of Electoral Democracy and Good Governance, Socio-Economic Rights, Anti-Corruption Institutional Frameworks, and Early Childhood Development.

He has been involved in the coordination of civil society election-monitoring programmes in the national, provincial and local government since 1994, and serves as the Co-Chairperson of the National Co-ordinating Forum – a platform that brings together civil society formations and the Independent Electoral Commission. He also served as a community representative in the Development Chamber of the National Economic Development and Labour Council.
 

This paper compares two questionnaire surveys conducted in the Karoo to investigate the claim that in human-wildlife conflicts farmers systematically inflate predation reports to score political points. Although predation rates and updated predation values for the Karoo are presented, the main contribution is not “a” number but rather an analysis of what affects the magnitude of predation self-reports. The two surveys produced quite different figures, which were due to methodological choices rather than anything farmers said. With the methods standardized, the figures converged to within 3% of each other, which either means that farmers never lied at the height of the Karoo’s gin trap wars or that they are still lying about their losses despite the trust we think we have in Koup. In this work, an important decision is whether to assign all, some or no perinatal losses to predation. In the Karoo, it is concluded that counting none towards predation is most prudent as lambs are born on the open range and few producers’ document ewe conception with ultrasound scanning. Determining the lamb inventory at tagging for the first time inflates predation rates because it divided by a smaller number while dividing lamb losses by an overall inventory (as we, unfortunately, must in this country due to data deficiencies) reduces losses because it divided by a larger number. Standardised methods are therefore essential and begs the question of how we explanation spatial and temporal variations in these standardized data. Some preliminary modelling will be presented.

The administration of the 2016 local government elections in South Africa has been celebrated as yet another important contributor to the delivery of free and fair elections. Yet competitive elections, an essential component of any democratic system, require more than smooth running administrative systems. Competitive elections require conditions that create a climate of tolerance, free political campaigning, and open public debate. An election without freedom to campaign is doomed to be stunted and inefficient as the right to freedom of expression is one of a web of mutually supporting rights the Constitution affords to citizens. This paper presents an analysis of narrative reports on instances of violations of the Electoral Code of Conduct, including intimidation and violence, gathered by Civil Society violence monitors and election observers from 1 March until 31 September 2016. The analysis reveals that whilst the vast majority of South Africans can vote and express their opinions without fear of retribution, there are underlying tensions militating against constitutionally protected political rights. When viewed in conjunction with the Afrobarometer survey data (2016) on perceptions of political space in South Africa, in the context of Diamond and Morlino’s minimum requirements for democracy, it becomes clear that pre-election campaign space is fragile and not given, and will, therefore, need to be nurtured in future elections.

Presenter biography: Nkosikhulule Xhawulengweni Nyembezi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Public Law, a policy analyst, a researcher, and a human rights activist. His research interests are in the areas of Electoral Democracy and Good Governance, Socio-Economic Rights, Anti-Corruption Institutional Frameworks, and Early Childhood Development.
He has been involved in the coordination of civil society election-monitoring programmes in the national, provincial and local government since 1994, and serves as the Co-Chairperson of the National Co-ordinating Forum – a platform that brings together civil society formations and the Independent Electoral Commission. He also served as a community representative in the Development Chamber of the National Economic Development and Labour Council.

This paper explores the removal of several thousand non-Zambian Africans from the mining industry following Zambian independence in 1964. This process has been curiously overlooked among the multitude of detailed studies on the mining industry and the policy of ‘Zambianization’, a policy usually regarded as being about the removal of the industrial colour bar on the mines. Yet the replacement of ‘alien Africans’ with Zambian nationals was a key objective of the Zambian Government. This sits uneasily with two aspects of the existing literature. The first is the assumption, in both academic literature and popular understanding, that Zambia is a place largely devoid of ethnic and nationalist tensions. The second is the emphasis on the development of a robust sense of class consciousness among the Copperbelt’s African mineworkers. Understanding why and how non-Zambians were removed from the mining industry also speaks to wider themes about the creation of citizenship and national identity. For one, this policy presupposed that the state and mining companies could reliably distinguish between the recently created categories of Zambian, Malawian, and Tanzanian, though this was not always the case. Moreover, demands that economic opportunities within national boundaries should be restricted to those regarded as legitimate members of that nation remain commonplace, and not only in Africa.

Presenter biography: Duncan Money is a historian of Central and Southern Africa with a particular interest in the mining industry. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the International Studies Group, University of the Free State and was awarded his DPhil in 2016 from the University of Oxford for his thesis on a social history of European migrants on the Zambian Copperbelt. His current research focuses on preparing his doctoral dissertation as a monograph and beginning a project on a comparative history of mining regions in southern Africa.