UWC Scholar Publishing Support (University of the Western Cape)
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THE ABUSE AND MISUSE OF PROSECUTORIAL DISCRETION IN HIGH-PROFILE CORRUPTION CASES IN NIGERIA: A CALL FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT
Get PDFThis article focuses on the place of prosecutorial discretion in the Nigerian context and asks whether and to what extent prosecutorial discretion in high-profile corruption cases involving public officials ought to be guided and constrained by the principles of impartiality, accountability and transparency. In Nigeria, the Attorney General of the Federation (and each state) has the discretion to institute, take over, and discontinue criminal prosecution against any person subject to the constitutional caution to “have regard to the public interest, the interest of justice and the need to prevent abuse of legal process” in its exercise. Despite this constitutional caution, the courts have held that the exercise of such discretion is immune from judicial review. Lately, cases involving the political class and public servants accused of extensive theft of public funds and corrupt practices have been plea-bargained with ludicrous sentences being handed down by Nigerian courts. Considering the widely held belief of political interference, bias and prejudice in these prosecutorial decisions and the damage done thereby to the rule of law, a critical reflection surrounding prosecutorial discretion in Nigeria is imperative. This article draws on doctrinal as well as comparative legal methods to argue that the available devices to constrain prosecutorial discretion in Nigeria do not go far enough to guarantee fairness and accountability and ought to be reformed. The South African model despite its limitations is associated with transparency and accountability and provides an alternative avenue for reform of prosecutorial discretion in Nigeria
Statues and Storms: Leading through Change
Get PDFNot thirty, but twenty years after democracy, South Africa’s oldest and most prestigious university was wracked by tumultuous upheavals sustained over two long years between 2015 and 2017. Although contestation and challenge were not new to the university, the nature and degree of student protest, directed at the university itself, were. A few years later, Max Price’s successor, Mamokgethi Phakeng, experienced different storms that relegated the events of 2015-7 firmly to the past. The book is nonetheless still relevant, as the calls with which those years were associated, for ‘free, quality, decolonial education,’ have endured
Participatory selection and ranking of farm-level sustainability indicators: Evidence from the horticulture production system of Eritrea
Get PDFMeasuring agricultural sustainability requires operational definitions and customised indicators, which should ideally be tailored to each country’s context and reflect the full participation of key stakeholders. BEREKET HAILE, ANDREW DOUGILL and ABEL RAMOELO report on their study in which farmers, extension workers and experts collectively drew up a comprehensive list of indicators from relevant literature that can be used to inform researchers worldwide in selecting pragmatic indicators for assessing agricultural sustainability
Corruption v Democracy - part one: Capturing the South African State
No full textDoes corruption undermine democracy? Does democracy constrain corruption? Is democracy a necessary condition for successfully combatting corruption?
These questions were initially posed from the intensely practical perspective of a non-governmental organisation (NGO) dedicated to combatting corruption. And so, reformulated from that perspective I ask: is it necessary to actively promote democracy in order to combat corruption? Or conversely, does the current global decline in the quality of national democracies compromise the fight against corruption
Holding a mirror up to Academic Development through the HELTASA (un)conferencing methodology
Get PDFWe, Academic Development (AD) practitioners, question whether AD\u27s objective in South Africa (SA) as a \u27liberatory educational and social movement\u27 to enhance educational quality for all students, is effectively pursued. AD practitioners often work on the fringes of the academy, fighting for relevance and legitimacy within an increasingly performative and managerialist academic culture. Despite innovative AD initiatives AD work is criticised for being unresponsive, unreflexive, conformist, and lacking theoretical, scholarly, and critical engagement. We use critical pedagogical praxis, particularly the constructs of critique, reflexivity, power, and self-reflection, to interrogate the continuous tension between AD intention and practice. Through (un)conference methodology, this auto-ethnographic account of individual and collective engagements, using the "holding the mirror up" metaphor, critically questioned the tension and misalignments between the AD mandate and practices. Although in a SA higher education context, this research could be beneficial to HE contexts globally, given the ubiquity of AD work
Last night
Get PDFStanza Introduction: Last night I danced, I cannot dance. Or rather I can but I am terrible at it
Technical Support at the Writing Center
Get PDFBackground:
I am a writing instructor at a local university, where undergraduate students make appointments with me to help with their paper writing. The writing center is a kind of drab smart room that isn’t very smart. The lights are designed to detect motion, but we’re all sitting and staring in front of the computer. The lights turn off in the middle of a discussion. It is rare for a wave of my arm to alert them to flicker back on. The students come to the writing center from various classes. Engineering, literature, public health, art history, science labs, nursing. Some students have drafts, some have outlines, some need guidance to begin. Many of them are overwhelmed, unsure where to start. Others seem guarded or there is an air of defensiveness as they intone the reason why they have made an appointment. When I began my position four months ago, one of my first appointments was with a student from a STEM program. He had an enthusiastic, radio voice, which jolted me from my sedentary slumber on an early Friday morning. He booked an appointment for two hours, on citational formatting. If we had time after the lesson, he would move on to work on small sentence-level edits. Two hours that merely focused on citation seemed excessive, but I followed the student’s goals
‘Echoes From Africa’: Abdullah Ibrahim’s Black Sonic Geography
Get PDFThis article aims to listen, read and move with the South African musician Abdullah Ibrahim by focusing on various works in his corpus that see him weave together a sonic aesthetic and identify sound, space and time as fundamentally intertwined with and constituted by the experiences of racial violence and anti-blackness in a modern colonial world. Part of our critical pursuit is to highlight Abdullah Ibrahim as a theorist of black geography invested in the everyday sounds ringing through the ghettoes, townships and reserves created as debased and inexhaustible reservoirs for cheap labour by colonial-apartheid regimes. We will also examine how some of Abdullah Ibrahim’s music interrogates the status of the black subject through the modalities of a black Islamic sonic aesthetic. This is one of the factors which qualifies it as a layered site of mythical and experimental histories and enables us to identify his body of work as deeply connected with the articulations of loss, suffering, the cadence of change, and hope
Oral/Aural: Pastness and Sound as Medium and Method
Get PDFIn archival footage uploaded online of a concert at the University of the Western Cape in 1988 musician Robbie Jansen declared that the next composition to be performed was named ‘Freedom Where Have You Been’.1 Before counting the band in, Jansen offered a short discourse on the meaning of the phrase hoya chibongo. Hearing the Afrikaans hoorie (meaning listen here) in the expression hoya, Jansen proceeded to split up the word chibongo to accentuate chi- as aurally reminiscent of the suffix -tjie that is used in Afrikaans to mark the diminutive. bongo, in this context as Jansen remarked, is the drum, leading Jansen to exclaim that the phrase hoya chibongo means to ‘listen to the (small) drum’, the drum that is, according to Jansen, ‘the truth’. In Jansen’s exact words, ‘the drum speaks the truth and the drum has always been our language before these funny words that we are speaking now’