A full-time office administrator and mother successfully earns her degree after five long years.
After registering for a Bachelor of Arts degree in law in 2018, Ethel Thale did not anticipate that her life will drastically change, making it difficult for her to pursue her studies.
While studying, Thale became a wife and a mother — thereafter, she had to deal with the realities of juggling parenthood and being a wife while studying part-time.
However, her new titles did not diminish her hunger to pursue her dream of “fighting for the vulnerable”, which she believes her law degree will allow her to do.
She said time management was the greatest challenge for her, and also her greatest lesson.
Speaking to Wits Vuvuzela after being conferred, she said: “finally”, after graduating on record time despite all the challenges she faced. She added that: “As a part time student, it is easy to give up because you are already employed, so to someone else, it would be like what is the point?”
Ethel Thale (centre) with her mother Nomsa Sebopha and her husband Kagiso Thale outside the Wits University great hall. Ethel graduated BA with a law major, after 5 years as a part-time student. Photo: Ayanda Mgwenya.
Thale told Wits Vuvuzela that she constantly had to remind herself to finish what she started and remember what her goal was — which helped her when she was full of self-doubt, and she was beginning to lose momentum.
She explained that she is proud of herself for not giving up and thanked her husband and mother for being patient and assisting her when she could not do certain things. She also thanked her employer, Nedbank, who funded her studies – and created a working environment that allowed her to study.
She said now she will focus on ushering in her second baby, then after, she will register for her postgraduate degree in law. Her plan is to work in legal compliance.
Thale graduated in early April, and she said after completing her first degree, she feels empowered to pursue her second degree because she knows better now, especially when it comes to managing time.
FEATURED IMAGE: Ethel Thale is awarded her bachelor of arts with law degree at Wits University in April 2023. Photo: Ayanda Mgwenya.
The financial aid scheme missed its own deadline, March 31, to resolve all appeals.
As many as 450 Wits students remain unclear about the status of their NSFAS funding appeals.
This was revealed after an April 17 meeting that the SRC had called to deal with an increasing number of students who are being evicted by private residences because it is not clear if they will be funded, according to treasurer general, Kabelo Phungwayo.
The meeting, which took place in the SRC boardroom at the Wits Matrix, was attended by more than 80 students who spilled into the hallway for lack of space.
A second-year bachelor of health sciences student, Neo*, told Wits Vuvuzela that she was facing eviction from her accommodation. She said she was funded by NSFAS for a year-and-a-half, until she was academically excluded.
This year she had travelled from the Eastern Cape to attend a Wits Readmission Committee hearing on January 17, and could not afford to go back home. Her mother, who is the sole wage earner in the family, and is supporting five children, then took on the burden of paying for her accommodation, hoping that NSFAS would take over.
“My mother had to take out loans [for my accommodation]. She cannot always send money, so sometimes I eat once a day, and I still have to cross-night and study,” said Neo, who, like many students, does not have a book allowance or stipend to get essentials.
Phungwayo said that during the fee protests in February, the SRC had met with NSFAS and brought up the issue of students who were sleeping in libraries and toilets, because of the financial uncertainty created by the slow pace with which NSFAS was communicating the statuses of their appeals. NSFAS had then promised to resolve all appeals by the end of March and established an appeals tribunal to fast-track the processing of the 70 000 appeals they had received nationally for 2023. This did not happen, according to Phungwayo.
He added that since 2020, students have had to use a centralised portal to lodge appeals, and the SRC recommends that appeals be relocated to individual universities, to avoid this kind of breakdown in progress.
Samora Mbomba, the regional coordinator of the South African Students Congress who has been working with the SRC on the matter, says that the problem is that once on the NSFAS portal, “students were asked to upload certain documents, but when they go to upload those documents, the portal says no documents required.”
She says she has recently been in contact with the National Assembly chairperson of the portfolio committee on higher education, science and innovation, Nompendulo Mkhatshwa, a former SRC president, who had requested the names and identity numbers of the affected students. Mbomba says she believes that things will move a bit quicker now.
The SRC announced on its Twitter page that any students who had missed the April 17 meeting were welcome to come to the office every day between 3pm and 7pm, so they could be added to the list.
Wits Vuvuzela contacted the Wits NSfas office on April 18, and was told to write an email to the office of the Wits CFO. Executive secretary to the CFO, Marelize van Niekerk then forwarded the email to the financial aid and scholarships office manager, Charlene Timmerman, who did not respond. Wits Vuvuzela followed up with further emails to Timmerman on April 20 and 24 but has yet to receive a response.
*Name changed to protect the identity of the student
FEATURED IMAGE: Wits students who have yet to receive outcomes of NSfas their funding appeals, met in the SRC boardroom on April 17. Photo: Morongoa Masebe
Imagining a future when South Africans are part of creating global technologies that take on board local contexts.
In 2017 I took a course called Utopian Studies offered by the department of political studies at Wits University. Utopian Studies allows us to construct a coherent imagined future, and to consider all philosophical, ethical and theoretical possibilities, to determine an ideal towards which we can strive because when we do not have a collectively imagined ideal, it becomes harder to know what we are working towards.
This made me think about what an ideal South African state should be. Should it be one where everyone is happy, or one where everyone has money?
At the time that I did this course, the university was coming into a self-awareness of the way that institutions have a culture that is historically white, and was seeking ways to transform itself into a space that was accessible to all the people in it.
So, in this context, the coordinator of my Utopian Studies course, Julian Brown, began to deconstruct the ways in which media genres that offered projections of humanity in the future (mostly sci-fi films and books) were often predicting “a vision of a [white] future where assimilation, not diversity, is the goal”.
It speaks to the extent to which a diversity of voices and ideas exist within the spaces where the media content is produced.
This provides a lens to understand the need for a diversity of voices where artificial intelligence (AI, the programming of machines to mimic human intelligence) development is concerned, to place a diversity of developers in the spaces where AI is trained. Because we run the risk of recreating much of the socio-political dynamics we have today, in our more technologically advanced future. Unlike with search engines and social media platforms, AI requires us to develop the technologies that make a South African AI possible.
In November 2022, OpenAI, a US technology research lab, launched ChatGPT, an AI computer programme that can interact in a chat-based conversation with humans. The programme is trained on data from across the internet and is able to mimic human cognitive processes in its conversational responses to a prompt.
This means that unlike regular search engines such as Google, ChatGPT uses deep learning techniques to build context and give more in-depth answers in a way that a human would. This is an incredible developmental milestone for AI technology considering that until now, most AI programmes could do little more than just following an instruction.
Now, because AI technology is dependent on being pre-trained by human beings, it makes sense that it possesses, to a certain degree, subjective, biased and sometimes even prejudiced data.
For this reason, the arrival of AI technology as advanced as ChatGPT creates a serious impetus for South Africa to invest more intentionally in the development of our own AI technology. Not necessarily to compete with OpenAI, but because we know that the knowledge and information generated by foreign AI may not be sensitive to our cultural contexts and may continue to perpetuate a false sense of cultural and moral universality that makes us the ‘other’.
The AI Institute of South Africa (AIISA) launched an AI hub at the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria on March 24, 2023, in collaboration with the University of Johannesburg. Reporting on their website, the two institutions promised that through their hubs, they would “generate knowledge and applications that will position South Africa as a competitive player in the global AI space”.
The hubs provide us with an opportunity to create futures of our own imagination. This has the potential to create global technologies that take into consideration local and contextual issues.
FEATURED IMAGE: Morongoa Masebe, Wits Vuvuzela student journalist. Photo: File
Since her announcement as the Democratic Alliance’s mayoral candidate for Johannesburg, Helen Zille has dominated national headlines. In this bonus episode of We Should Be Writing podcast, hosts Lulah Mapiye and Bonolo Mokonoto dissect a media meet-and-greet with the mayoral hopeful. From her extensive political résumé to her controversial public utterance, we examine why the Democratic Alliance has chosen Hellen Zille as their candidate for the 2027 local mayoral elections. Additionally, […]
