Three Men’s Res house committee positions have remained unfilled since the resignation of its members earlier this semester.
On August 17 Wits Vuvuzela reported that the Men’s Res house committee members had renounced their positions because of the frustrations the committee faced with university management. They said they were also experiencing academic pressure as they were neglecting their studies to serve on the committee.
Chairperson of Men’s Res house committee, Sanele Nene, said they had planned to hold elections for the positions in two to three weeks but this was pointless because it was almost the end of the term and exams were also approaching.
Thulane Mtsweni, a postgraduate law student, said having an incomplete house committee had not made a difference because Men’s Res was without a house committee during its suspension earlier this year.
The entire Men’s Res house committee was evicted and suspended and charged with misconduct after they disrupted a university function.
Mtsweni said it would be pointless to have elections this late in the year just to fill three positions. “People are busy and no one will be interested because elections for next year’s house committee are around the corner.”
Chairperson of the All Residence Council, Justice Nkomo, agreed with not filling the empty positions. “Honestly, it’s too late and the elections for next year’s house committee are around the corner.”
THE MEN’S Res house committee claims it does not have enough funds to subsidise the raiders for the All Res picnic.
Men’s Res house committee chairperson, Sanele Nene, said the house committee subsidised students for the All Res picnic.
“We could not raise enough funds to subsidise students to the extent that we would like,” Nene said.
Rob Sharman of Campus Housing and Residence Life said: “As the Men’s Res house committee receives one of the largest annual grants of any residence, I am not sure why they should have a shortfall.
“I have asked for a full analysis of their expenditure to date, and am happy to meet with the house committee to discuss their concerns,” Sharman said.
Nene said the reason they could not fully subsidise raiders was because of the suspension and the cancelled party.
Nene said that throughout the year Men’s Res was expected to schedule events and that the profits from these events are used to subsidise the cost of the picnic. He said they also subsidise the jackets sold to raiders.
Earlier this year the Men’s Res house committee was suspended for misconduct during orientation. Three house committee members resigned because of “frustrations” from management and the cancellation of a scheduled party.
Chairperson of the All Residence Council, Justice Nkomo, said they had a meeting on Monday September 17 with the Men’s Res house committee and “we told them that we expect Men’s Res to be there [at the picnic] and we want them to subsidise students because the amount was too much”.
He said they expected Men’s Res to fill at least 22 seats in the transport used to get to the picnic venue.
Nene said no one at Men’s Res was boycotting the All Res picnic. He said that because of the price, raiders were just not interested in going to the picnic.
“Gone are those days we used to pay R100 and get 24 drinks!” says an e-mail circulating among raiders at Men’s Res. “Wits management is trying by all means to cancel this important event and I think they are succeeding.”
Nkomo said: “management has always been very unfair when it comes to Men’s Res”.
“The issue here is that Men’s Res is trying to sabotage management and management is trying to sabotage Men’s Res.
“They don’t have the same attitude towards the other residences.”
“I am not sure where these allegations stem from”, said Sharman.
The All Res picnic is on Saturday and costs R130.
Published in Last Print Edition of WitsVuvuzela for 2012.
South Point management has moved to clarify conditions in some of its Braamfontein buildings that have featured in recent Wits Vuvuzela reports.
On Friday July 27, 2012 Wits Vuvuzela published a story stating Diamond House had empty first aid kits. Ndumiso Davidson, chief operating officer, said South Point disputed this issue. He said the keys to the kit are kept with the building manager who is contacted in case of an emergency.
“The day before the article the first aid boxes were inspected as part of a formal building inspection process and were found to be fully compliant, this is stated in building inspection reports,” said Davidson.
However the Wits Vuvuzela reporter says he saw the first aid kits “empty”.
Davidson also said the headline “Still no hot water at Norvic” from Wits Vuvuzela’s previous edition [Friday August 31 2012] was misleading.
He said the headline made it seem as though students did not have water from the beginning of the year. He said students did not have hot water on two occasions.
The first was during the installation of heat pumps and the second was when South Point decided to revert to the old system because the heat pumps were not meeting the building’s capacity, which took 18 hours to fix.
He said most students paid their rent on time “but South Point spends a considerable amount of time chasing money from students who have no intention to pay and want to find excuses for non-payment”.
Davidson said: “If we don’t receive our rental on time we will not be able to pay for electricity, water and the lift company to fix the broken lifts.”
Diamond House students had also complained about hot water problems. They said some floors in their building did not have hot water while other floors had hot water. Davison said this was due to two pressure valves that bust on the boiler and water could not be pumped all the way to the top floors.
“This is an unforeseen and unplanned occurrence. This was fixed permanently within a week,” said Davidson.
Davidson said they try to work on a two to three day turnaround time but sometimes they rely on external service providers and this can cause a delay.
Davidson said: “It’s important to note the security, water and electricity have red status at South Point. This means that they have the highest priority from our maintenance team and therefore the shortest possible response times and often the Chief Operating Officer and/or CEO is engaged with resolving the issues as soon as is humanly possible.”
Norvic students claim management has gone deaf to their complaints about a lack of hot water. Image by: Zinhle Tshabalala
WITSIES staying at South Point (Norvic) say they are being ripped off because they hardly ever have hot water.
BA student Anna Tladi said there was no hot water at all on the morning of Wednesday August 29. She said they complained about the problem to the building manager, but he told them to report the matter to the security guard and write the complaint in the log book.
Tladi said the security guard told them not to write the complaint down because someone else had already noted it. At other times, she said he told them the problem was in the process of being fixed.
The building manager, who would only give his name as Trust, disputed this. He said students did not tell him about the lack of hot water. “How are we supposed to know about this problem if they don’t tell us?”
“I stay here at the Norvic building and I have my own geyser upstairs and the water is hot 24/7. So how am I supposed to know that students don’t have hot water?”
The security guard claimed students only started writing in the log book after they threatened to go on strike and take their complaint to the head office at South Point Central. He told them they would need proof that they had complained and nothing had been done, he said.
The building manager said only one student had complained about the water. He and the security guard showed Wits Vuvuzela the log book, where two written complaints had been entered during the past two months.
One complaint read: “The problem is that when we wake up before 7am there is no hot water. It only begins to heat up later. This is unacceptable because it’s winter.”
According to Tladi the students had a meeting about the problem and asked: “How many times must we write in the book in order for the problem to be fixed?”
When she had class at 8am, she woke at 1am to bath with hot water. “Between 1am and 4am the water is hot, but from 5am it’s lukewarm, but after 6am the water is cold.”
Kabelo Makgala, projects and facilities manager said he was aware of the problem. However, he said the students were exaggerating the issue. The problem was a common household issue.
He said the geysers at South Point carried about 4000 to 8000 litres of water, which took up to three hours to heat up. He explained that, if 300 students showered at the same time, the hot water would be depleted. A heat pump had been installed to assist the geyser to heat up the water all day.
Earlier this year Wits Vuvuzela reported that students at Diamond House were complaining about the lack of hot water or no water at all. Last year there was a water shortage at three South Point buildings in Braamfontein.
Published in Wits Vuvuzela 22th edition, 31 August 2012
LESS than 20% of Witsies generally vote in the SRC elections – and this week’s election is not expected to draw more than 23%, according to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC).
This week, students were asked to vote for their 15 representatives on campus. The 23 candidates were from the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA), Democratic Alliance Students’ Organisation (Daso) or were standing as independents.
Zolile Yalwa, IEC observer of electoral management, said students were ignorant when it came to voting in the SRC elections. “Wits students don’t take voting seriously and they just don’t care.”
First year law student Sipho July said he did not vote in the elections because he did not know the SRC. July claimed he only met a few members of the Progressive Youth Alliance (PYA) when they were campaigning.
“It’s sad really because we’re only contacted when we’re needed for votes.”
Yalwa said the fact that students claimed not to know the SRC meant they were not concerned about the university. “These people [the SRC] will determine the policies that are going to govern your existence at Wits University.”
Out-going deputy president of the SRC, Tshepo Lethea, said the percentage of voting students had not reached 20% in a number of years. He blamed university management for not encouraging students to vote.
The university spent “serious money” on Wits90 celebrations and not enough on voting, he said.
PYA candidate Sibulele Mgudlwa said: “Student turn-out is really bad. Students are just not interested or they have better things to do.”
Mgudlwa said he felt the candidates had to do the job of the IEC in trying to draw voters. “The IEC has failed to attract and entice students to vote”.
Last year the IEC gave away MP3s and iPods to lucky student voters. But this year they were giving away T-shirts.
Yalwa commented: “To vote is to exercise your right. There is no need for incentives for students to vote … actually that would be buying people to vote.”
Lethea said “students must be responsible and vote because it gives the structure [SRC] legitimacy.”
“When you fight for students who were raped or students who cannot see and they need ramps, the university says how many people are you representing really? Just two, just four.”
Published in Wits Vuvuzela 21st Edition, 24th August 2012.
THE All Res Committee (ARC) has criticised the resignation of three Men’s Res house committee members.
Sanele Nene, chairperson of the Men’s Res house committee, said the three resigned because of the frustrations the committee faced with university management. They were also experiencing academic pressure as they were neglecting their studies to serve on the committee.
“How could we continue with house comm if we face academic exclusion?” said treasurer Mxolisi Makhombothi, one of three who resigned.
The other members who resigned are the secretary Bheki Khoza and maintenance and liaison officer Smangaliso Ngubane.
ARC chairperson Justice Nkomo said he understood the frustrations students had with Campus Housing and Residence Life management because they experience the same problems.
Nkomo said: “We know their frustrations but we don’t condone any form of quitting from the house committee. We encourage students to fight for what they want and not quit.”
Makhombothi said when they were elected as part of the house committee they did not foresee the kinds of struggles they would face with management.
According to Nene the final straw was the aggravation they had with management regarding the “programmes they were trying to implement”.
Nene explained a recent quarrel they had with management where a planned braai was cancelled without specified reasons.
“We had organised a similar braai last block and we were commended for it, so now it came as a shock as to why they wouldn’t allow this again.”
Nene said students think other students in leadership positions have power but “to management you are nothing and that is sad to see because student governorship should be something that is advocated by the university”.
“The treatment of our house comm has been really poor,” he said.
Nene said the entire committee was prepared to resign but, because they knew the house would become unmanageable, they had to put aside their personal issues.
Rob Sharman, head of Campus Housing and Residence Life, said he was not aware of any resignations.
The Men’s Res house committee was suspended earlier this year.
Published in Wits Vuvuzela 20th Edition, 17 August 2012
WITS students claim they are being exploited because fees increase annually but academic and support staff are not being paid accordingly.
SRC president Tebogo Thothela said students were supporting the academic staff strike out of principle. He said, it made no sense that for the last three years student fees and the upfront fee had increased, yet that money was not being used to pay Wits employees.
“Where is this money going to?”Thothela asked.
“The university is fattening their reserves”, said Mukovhe Morris Masutha, former SRC president. “Every year the fees increased we were told that the money was going to pay academic staff, but they are not being paid.”
Khanyisa Chauke, 3rd year engineering, said the staff should get what they are protesting for because they deserve to be paid fairly. She said the money in the reserves should be used to pay the staff, because students already pay high fees compared to other institutions and therefore the money should be put to good use.
Thothela said most importantly their support for the strike was to ensure that no one suggests that student fees should increase in order to pay for academic salaries.
“We are here to tell lecturers that we are supporting you but it must never be at the expense of our fellow students”.
He said it was also in the worker’s best interest to keep the fees and upfront fees low because staff members also have children who attend the university.
follow @witsvuvuzela on Twitter for more strike action.
A Wits computer science student travelled to an unknown location to test his skills in a premier cyber-spy challenge in the United Kingdom.
Computer science Master’s student Dean Wookey was the first Witsie to qualify for the challenge.
He said once they got to the UK they were transported to “a working airbase/ film studio”.
He said the year was 2150 and they were each part of four big companies and had to solve different challenges.
In the first challenge they were given e-tags to put on their wrist, which were colour coded and it had the name of that particular team. He said the challenge was to try and change the names of the other teams to their own team name and they got points for that.
They had to compete against each other and complete a series of 26 challenges. Wookey said they took part in “unlocking” challenges which required hacking into web applications.
The challenges took them two days to complete “the first day I slept at three o’clock in the morning”.
“Some of them were really hard and some were fairly easy,” he said.
The main purpose of the event was more of a team building exercise and the company does it per year as a motivating tool for their staff, said Wookey. “At the end of each day we had to write down 10 things we had learned and 10 things we had taught.”
Hack-fu is an event hosted by MWR Infosecurity and held annually at a secret location in the United Kingdom. Wookey said it was team based and they were split into four teams consisting of students, MWR staff and people from the security industry.
According to their website, Hack-fu is filled with solving puzzles, hacking and cryptography challenges. It allows participants to get exposure to some of the world’s best security researchers.
Wookey said different people from the company contributed towards the challenges and everyone learned a lot, it was about the sharing of information, he said they learned from each other how to do different things.
Thirty South African students entered the competition overall. Wookey was one of four students chosen. The other students were from Rhodes University and Stellenbosch University.
Shashilan Singh, school administrator for computer sciences, said he was approached by the organisers of the competition to “recruit capable students”. He encouraged Wookey, as one of the top computer science students, to take part.
The school of computer science has been participating in the competition for the last three years.
Witsies proved that past behaviour does not predict future performance when they broke their losing streak at Wemmer Pan against Union last Saturday.
Wits won 29-19 on their opponents’ home ground. They had not won a game at Wemmer Pan in three years.
Inside centre Greg Blom was the first to put points on the board with a try under the posts, which flyhalf Kyle Peyper easily converted, earning Wits 7 points.
The game looked bleak for Union as Jaco de Wet, flyhalf, missed a penalty from inside the 22.
Thirty minutes into the match, Union was trying to intimidate Wits with their pack, while Wits was trying to play wide. Witsies held against pressure from Union for 10 minutes in the Wits 22. Then Union missed another penalty and a mistake by scrumhalf David Turnball gave Union a 5m scrum.
Shortly before halftime, outside centre Kenneth du Plessis scored a try for Wits and Peyper converted, extending Wits’ lead to 14 points.
The second half was just as impressive. Hooker Pier Cooper crossed the line and Peyper converted, widening the gap to 21- 0.
Eventually Union cross the line and scored. Wits scored a bonus point try, but Peyper missed the conversion, leaving the score at 26-7 for Wits.
After a very strong scrum, Union scored their second try and converted in the left corner. A few minutes before the match ended, Union scored an unconverted try from the kick-off and raised their score to 19. Peyper won the game for Wits with a drop goal, which put Wits at 29 to 19.
Andy Royle, Wits rugby coach, said: “We hadn’t won there for about three years. I came originally from Union so it was a very personal one for me. I was very happy about it.
“The spirits of the team are very high. We are over-achieving at the moment, but we are not getting ahead of ourselves.”
A STUDENT was injured in a hit-and-run accident on Yale road recently and Campus Control said it is looking into installing a CCTV camera at the robot-controlled crossing point.
Twelve years ago the university closed Yale Road after an accident killed a student and injured several others. At the time the university was concerned for the safety of the students crossing the road.
Last month, an engineering student was involved in a hit-and-run accident on Yale Road on her way to the library. Manika Moodliar, 1st year engineering, was struck by a car while crossing the road on the morning of April 17.
Moodliar said the accident happened near the traffic light crossing point at Amic Deck bus stop.
Her mother, Vasanta Samuel-Moodliar, said Manika saw the car approaching her very slowly. “The driver had Manika in plain sight and had clear vision of the road, yet he proceeded to knock her down and then drive away.”
There were other students also crossing at the time of the accident. She said a fellow student assisted her at the scene and took her to Campus Health for medical assistance. She was treated and sent to Milpark Hospital. She was not seriously injured, said Samuel-Moodliar.
Samuel-Moodliar said they had opened an accident report case at the Hillbrow police station and would like witnesses to help in determining the identity of the driver by going to Campus Control if they have any information.
Michael Mahada, Campus Control investigations manager said they had no record of this accident as it was not officially reported. An accident was previously reported at the same crossing point at midnight in August last year.
Campus Control has warned students against swiping non-students onto campus saying the practice endangers lives.
“A matter that is becoming a challenge is the misuse of access cards by students. This practice puts the lives of people on campus at risk,” said Michael Mahada, investigations manager at Campus Control.
He said it was an offence to use someone’s card or permit unauthorised access to campus and this would result in charges against the card owner.
Witsies admit that students make it difficult to keep the campus safe. “Students also make Campus Control’s job difficult by swiping non-students on to the campus,” said Thulane Mtsweni, post graduate LLB.
A lack of security is the reason students say they do not feel safe on campus according to a recent Vuvuzela vox pop video
Some students said Campus Control was invisible on campus.
“You walk around on campus for five minutes and you don’t see security around other than at the entrances, but generally you don’t see them on campus,” said Solomon Magampa, 1st year BSc mining engineering.
Mtsweni said he had issues with Campus Control because “at night they are nowhere to be found, so if something were to happen to you, you would have to go to CB1 and by that time the perp might have already gotten away”.
Mahada said security officers patrolled campus 24 hours a day. He said they also had security officers who patrolled in uniforms, civilian clothing as well as the reaction unit and dog handlers to safeguard the campus.
In addition they provided an escort service to students on all campuses and were available to walk students to university residences off-campus including those not serviced by the university bus service.
Call 011 717 4444 or 011 717 6666 to arrange an escort service. Witsies are encouraged to make use of the escort services in particular after hours and weekends.
Worried about not looking gay enough, or scared you’re serving fake bisexual? In the second episode of our limited-series focused on life and living as a twenty something, the Community Guidelines team analyzes the idea of community from a queer lens, and delving into what it means to have a “queer community” in a country […]
