Elections as Drivers of Political Instability in Africa: A Case Study of Lesotho
- Authors: Moorosi, Mantsoaki
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Elections Political parties -- Lesotho
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MSoc (Political Science)
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/16462 , vital:40722
- Description: The study sets out to investigate elections as drivers to political instability in Africa, using Lesotho as a case study from 2012 to 2017. It employs primary and secondary sources of data. The period is of interest for two reasons. Firstly, the continuing instability post three successive free and fair elections, and secondly, the advent of Coalition Governments. The structure adheres to two theoretical frameworks namely, a) Huntington’s two turn-over test and, b) Karl’s Fallacy of Electoralism. In order to investigate how elections could or could not be drivers to political instability, the researcher looked at the different forms of political instability in Lesotho. These include attempted coup d’état, assassinations and violation of territorial sovereignty. The later form being peculiar to the period under study as the other forms had occurred at some stage through the political history of this country. It further asserts uncertainty of hung Parliament and politicised institutions as attributes to the recurrence of political instability. It concludes that Lesotho is a deviant case from the two turn over test. The scope of the study supports the fallacy of electoralism. Several recommendations have been presented. These include that Government of Lesotho should amend the Constitution on the functions and powers of the King, Politicians should implement the promises they made to the electorates during campaigns, and regulate or abolish floor crossing in Parliament amongst others.
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An exploratory study of control and oversight measures for ethical conduct in supply chain management : the case of Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality
- Authors: Zindi, Beauty
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: Municipal government -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape Public administration -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape Municipal services -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , Public Administration
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/10415 , vital:35459
- Description: Unethical conduct takes root and largely flourishes in environments devoid of compliance with SCM laws, regulations and sound corporate governance values and principles. Ethical conduct is a prerequisite of good governance and sound municipal financial management. Unethical conduct in SCM leads to a loss of public trust and confidence in the management of public affairs. Despite the existence of control and oversight structures and processes for monitoring compliance with ethical standards, norms and regulations in SCM, procurement and contract management processes, BCMM still flouts SCM regulations. This leads to non-compliance with precincts of SCM policy regulations, the MFMA, as well as the Municipal Systems Act (MSA). Lack of adequate and effective control and oversight measures further exacerbates the problem, leading to poor management of procurement systems as well as inconsistencies in the disposal and delivery of services. Effective control and oversight often results in the reduction of waste, eradication of corruption and improvement of municipal financial performance, as well as improved ethical conduct, integrity, transparency and accountability. Qualitative approach was used to gather data using interviews and secondary sources in the form of official documents to explore the extent to which control and oversight measures for ethical conduct in Supply Chain Management are effective in Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality. The data is to be analysed using content analysis and filtering techniques. Challenges that are affecting the effective management of Supply Chain in Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality were brought forth and recommendations to improve Supply Chain Management in Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality are examined in this study.
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Psycho social challenges faced by children who are victims of rape in the victim support centre : a case study of Kwanobuhle area, Eastern Cape
- Authors: Kakaza, Vuyokazi Bellinda
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: Rape victims Abused children
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , Social Science
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/15298 , vital:40341
- Description: The motivation for this study originated from the problem of children who are victims of rape in the victim support centers. The researcher became aware that most of the children needs more support services for counseling and after care services. The goal of the research was to explore the psychosocial challenges faced by children who are victims of Rape in the victim support Centre. The aim of the study was to determine the psychosocial effects (effects. challenges, support services they receive from professionals) as victims of rape in a victim support center. It was a case study of KwaNobuhle Area, Eastern Cape. The purpose was to identify gaps as there are minimal services rendered to children as rape victims in the victim support Centre. In order to meet the objectives of the study, interviews were conducted to 20 victims of rape (both boys and girls) as well as 6 different professionals working with rape cases from the arrival of the child from the opening until the finalization of the case. Data were analyzed according to the qualitative data - analysis procedures. The researcher utilized the phenomenological research design. The research domain where the interviews took place was at the KwaNobuhle Area under the Department of Social Development jurisdiction. In this study, 20 Xhosa speaking children of different ages, gender, educational standards, and socio-economic backgrounds as well as those who suffered different types of rape, as defined by the Sexual Related Matters Act 32 of 2007; they were all interviewed through the use of a semi-structured interview schedule. The participants were purposively selected as they were all at the victim support center. It has been found that some services are not provided within and are other professionals lack knowledge on how to work effectively with children as victims of rape To add on, the theoretical framework that was used in this study is the victim empowerment theory. This was used as a way of empowering the children who are victims of rape in the Victim Support Centres. The study found out that children who are victims of rape in the Victim Support Centres face psychosocial challenges for instance emotional, educational and behavioural challenges. Furthermore, the study also found out that there are few pschologists in the Victim Support Centres. Therefore, the study recommend that more psychologists should be employed at the Department of health and be placed in Victim Support Centres. More, so, there should be constant supervision and guidance on the care givers within the institution on how to effectively deal with the children who are victims of rape in VSC to avoid psychosocial challenges.
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Synthesis, characterization and in vitro antiplasmodial evaluation of 4-& 8-aminoquinoline based-hybrid compounds
- Authors: Nqoro, Xhamla
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: Plasmodium falciparum
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MSc
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/14649 , vital:40026
- Description: Malaria is a deadly disease and its drug resistance has been reported to be a challenge globally. The death toll caused by malaria has increased rapidly in different regions of the world. Quinoline scaffold molecules are combined with other classes of antimalarials to tackle drug resistance. The combination of quinoline scaffolds with other antimalarial compounds and metals-based drugs have been reported to be a potential approach to overcome drug resistance common in the currently used antimalarials. 4-Aminoquinoline was hybridized with selected organic molecules and metal-based compounds to form a class of hybrid compounds containing either an amide bond or ester bond as a linker between the parent molecules. 4-Aminoquinoline derivatives are known compounds and they were prepared via known synthetic routes and characterized. The hybrid compounds were characterized and the FTIR results confirmed the successful linkage of 4-aminoquinoline derivatives to selected organic scaffolds to form hybrid compounds. NMR results confirmed the successful formation of hybrid compounds. MS showed signals of the hybrid molecules confirming the successful isolation of the hybrid compounds. In vitro antiplasmodial assay was performed against asexual parasite and chloroquine was used as a reference drug. The percentage inhibition effects of the hybrid compounds were in a range of 96-102% at 5 µM and 36-96% at 1 µM suggesting that the percentage inhibition effect of the hybrid compounds was influenced by the drug concentration. Hybridization of either 4-aminosalicylic scaffold or ferrocene butanoic acid with 4- aminoquinoline derivatives is a potential synthetic route that can result in potent antimalarials. However, more research is needed to fully understand the structure-activity relationship of these hybrid compounds.
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Teacher' views and experiences on learners' drug and substances abuse : a case of two secondary schools in King William's Town education district
- Authors: Malisi, Nyaniso Victor
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: Drug abuse--South Africa--Eastern Cape Substance abuse--South Africa--Eastern Cape High school students--Substance use
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , Education
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/11630 , vital:39091
- Description: Drug and substance abuse amongst secondary school children is a universal phenomenon and it has increased at an unprecedented rate over the past decade and still rising. In South Africa, drug and substance abuse has continued to ruin the youth and subsequently education despite various measures taken to stop it. This study aimed at investigating teachers’ views and experiences on drug and substance abuse by learners. Teachers have a responsibility to ensure that learners do not involve themselves in the use of drugs and substances at school. A case study research was conducted to investigate the views of eight teachers in two selected rural secondary schools in the King William’s Town Education District. Qualitative research guided the research process and the interpretivist paradigm served as bases for data collection. Face-to- face semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data. It emerged from the data that alcohol and substance abuse by learners have a negative effect on their academic work as learners abusing drugs could not concentrate on their studies and bunk classes. The data also showed that learners become violent and most of the time important time that could have been spent teaching is lost dealing with alcohol and substance abuse users. The findings also indicated that there was a lack of parental and community support to effectively deal with drugs in schools. From the findings it can be concluded that there are serious social and academic problems that are caused by drug and substance abuse in the rural schools. It can also be concluded that teachers and school managers had no clear and coherent strategies to deal with drug and substance abuse in schools. In view of the above, I recommend that a comprehensive model should be adopted to fight dug and substance abuse by learners.
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An analysis of the efficiency of ontology and symbolic learning algorithms in indigenous knowledge representation
- Authors: Dzimba, Jesman
- Date: 2016
- Subjects: Ontology Computer algorithms
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MSc
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/11939 , vital:39120
- Description: It is without a doubt that machine learning has been the area of focus in early days of artificial intelligence, but the early neural networks approach suffered some shortcomings and this led to a temporary decline in research capacity. New symbolic learning techniques have emerged since then which have yielded promising results and have led to a revival in research in machine learning. This has seen many researchers focusing on these techniques and experimenting with them by comparing their performances for different applications. With that in mind, the research thus decided to make an analysis of the symbolic approach against other approaches such as the neural network (connectionist) to evaluate the power of the former approach. This was done by first generating an ontology that acted as a representation of some collected indigenous knowledge. It is from this ontology that a dataset was generated. The dataset was made ambiguous to see the learning power of classifiers in such data. Two experiments were done, one using WEKA and the other using Orange as tools. The reason why the two experiments were used is because there was not a single tool which contained all the required learning algorithms. The research wanted to make use of ID3 and CN2 symbolic algorithm. However, WEKA had ID3 and not CN2 while Orange had CN2 and not ID3. The most important attributes from the ontology regarding the indigenous knowledge were the name of the plant, the province it is found and the disease the plant treats. Therefore the dataset had two features which were disease and province and one label which was the name of the plant. The learning algorithm was to use the two features to generate rules used to predict the label. However, there was ambiguity on the dataset. The challenge was that two different labels would contain the same features, thus leading to wrongful classification. This was the core of the research. Even though the learning model concluded this situation as wrongful classification, in real time, a system using the same learning model would provide desired and correct results. The only flow which was there is that the learning model simply used one label to predict under and ignore the other label with similar features. This was identified as a flow for both symbolic and non-symbolic algorithms. There is no way of giving suggestions in the case a user wants a different plant but with similar features. Therefore for classification using an ambiguous dataset, both these approaches proved to have the fore mentions flow. The research then decided to use recall to analyze the power of these approaches. It was discovered that ID3 has better recall than Multilayer perceptron and Naïve Bayes algorithms when using a training set. ID3 managed to recall clearly and effectively three of its classes by a probability of 1 while Bayes Net had only one class with recall probability of 1. To further investigate the issue of recall, cross validation was used to contrast the competence of recall of the three algorithms to strengthen the assertion that indeed ID3 has a better recall as compared to the other two algorithms. Three stages of cross-validation were done, one stage using 10 fold, the other 20 fold, and the last using 50 fold. For all the different stages of crossvalidation, Bayes Net proved to perform better in terms of recall than the other two algorithms. In cross-validation, MLP could recall approximately above 88% of the instances available in contrast to when using training set where the algorithm recall only two out of 18 instances. In overall the symbolic approach proved to be a commendable approach for use over the nonsymbolic approach. The study of machine learning involves the building of learning algorithms, improving upon learning algorithms or making comparisons of machine learning algorithms. The research raised awareness on some improvements that need to be done on not only symbolic algorithms but non-symbolic ones as well. Some improvements include improving on or coming up with algorithms that suggest alternative predictions in cases of ambiguity instead of doing wrongful classification and not reflect on other possibilities.
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An evaluation on the impact of Forte FM's HIV/AIDS campaign programmes on listeners: a case study of Golf Course and Ntselamanzi residents, Alice
- Authors: Jeke, Christopher
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: AIDS (Disease) in mass media , Mass media in health education--South Africa , Health promotion--South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , Communication
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10353/17417 , vital:40966
- Description: HIV/AIDS has rapidly spread globally since its inception more than three decades ago and almost every sort of communication media have been utilised to disseminate information helpful to reduce its spread. This research is based on a case study of Forte FM’s HIV/AIDS campaign programmes in the reduction of the spread of HIV/AIDS in Golf Course and Ntselamanzi areas in Alice, Eastern Cape. To explore and evaluate the effectiveness of Forte FM’s HIV/AIDS programmes, the researcher employed a descriptive qualitative research paradigm whereby convenience and purposive non-probability sampling methods were used to draw samples of participants for focus groups and in-depth interviews. Bearing in mind the total population of Golf Course and Ntselamanzi residential areas, the researcher perceived it applicable to establish two focus groups in each area consisting of at least eight participants in each focus group, making a total of four focus groups for both areas. Additionally, the radio programmes manager was also interviewed for her views. The collected data were analysed thematically to infer the meaning and present the findings. The findings revealed that the station disseminates influential information towards socio-behavioural change in the reduction of the spread of HIV/AIDS in Golf Course and Ntselamanzi. The research participants expressed that the station’s programmes on HIV/AIDS awareness are easily understood and influence their behaviour as they enlighten and educate them about the dangers of HIV/AIDS and how to reduce its spread. Another critical finding of this study as highlighted by the participants is the use of local language in these programmes which listeners view as a contributing element towards the reduction of the spread of this epidemic disease. The findings also showed that the station’s radio programmes have been effective for the fact that the station depends more on two-way participatory communication whereby listeners are involved and participate in the development and running of these programmes.
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