We The People Series || Voter Registration: Professor Steven Friedman (COMMENT)

Anwar Jhetam

Anwar Jhetam is the Civic Leadership Programmes Manager of the ASRI Future Leaders Program (FLP). He graduated with a an undergraduate qualification in logistics management from the University of Johannesburg and then proceeded to complete six years of undergraduate and postgraduate training in the classical Islamic sciences, including the derivation of law, history, philosophy, and the methodology of knowledge. Anwar has served in various roles in student leadership and continues to serve and volunteer with several community organisations. Anwar is an avid reader and has a keen interest in politics, governance, as well as human and community development.

LUKHANYO VANI

I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics and International Relations from the University of the Witwatersrand., Johannesburg. I am currently doing my LLB at Wits. I believe that I have a moral duty to help people in need. It is partly because of this reason that I find myself always moved to human rights activism. I founded and led a registered non-profit organisation called Khayalenkanysio (‘House of light’), a community project which started as an outreach programme; we collected sanitary towels, and clothes for the disadvantaged people of Soweto. I am member of Students for Law and Social Justice (SLJS). I used to be a lead tutor on tutorials which we offered in SLJS at previously disadvantaged schools around Johannesburg. I am presently the Grievances Officer of the Law Students Council (LSC). I also occasionally captain for WCCO on the Masidlene programme.

Tshiamo Lerumo

Tshiamo believes in bringing fresh perspectives, creativity and innovation to every new challenge. He is a digital native and a proponent of digital marketing technologies. He is a graduate at Wits University.

Sabeehah Motala

Sabeehah Motala is the Director of Strategy at the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute. She oversees the Future Leaders Programme at ASRI. She is an avid soccer player, and enjoys cycling, reading, and gardening.

Luthando

Luthando is currently a Research Associate at ASRI and a Masters Candidate in Development Studies at Wits University. Luthando’s research focuses on the experiences and understandings of “Black Tax” for young Black professionals in South Africa. Luthando has an undergraduate double major degree in International Studies & Development Studies from Monash South Africa and an Honours Degree in Development Studies from Wits University. Luthando is passionate about human development, matters pertaining to the youth, the well-being of women’s environment as a whole and the protection of human rights. The empowerment of individuals through community engagement, the provision of knowledge and the implementation of rules and policies which will guide and lead in the right direction are of importance to her. She expresses her activism as a Co-Director at the MatibeMalinga Foundation which provides support to women and children in indigent communities across Gauteng.

Imraan Buccus

Imraan Buccus is a Senior Research Associate at ASRI. Over the next year he will be writing a series of opinion pieces that will appear fortnightly in the national media; with the intent of compiling his contributions into a book at year-end. Imraan is the academic director of a university study abroad program on political transformation and concurrently a Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at UKZN. Imraan is also editor of Al Qalam. He is a newspaper columnist and is often called upon by television and radio stations to offer political analysis. Imraan is widely published, in academic journals and book chapters, in the area of participatory democracy, poverty and civil society. Buccus is the former editor of Critical Dialogue, a journal of Public Participation in review. He has presented extensively at academic conferences around the world. His last paper entitled, ‘ Democratic transitions and liberation movements in power: a closer look at the ANC’ was presented at the African Studies conference in San Diego, California in December. Buccus was a Ford Foundation PhD Research Fellow at the Centre for International Development Issues, at Radboud University, Nijmegen in The Netherlands. He was Open Society Foundation Media Fellow twice in recent years, and in 2009 he appeared on the prestigious Mail & Guardian list of South Africa’s 200 Leading Young South Africans. Imraan has experience in the civil society sector, having served in research and policy NGOs for many years. During this time, he was involved in a number of international research projects and co-authored the National Framework on Public Participation for the South African government. During his time at the Centre for Public Participation, he led an initiative to bring policy making spaces closer to ordinary people and also led a project to assess the state of participatory democracy in Namibia. He has wide ranging experience working with various donor agencies including the Ford Foundation, NiZA, EU, Kellogg Foundation and the Open Society Foundation. In the early 2000’s Buccus worked as academic coordinator of the Workers College, a progressive experiential education college for workers from the trade union movement, where he developed a passion for experiential education and its personal and academic developmental potential.

Ebrahim Fakir

Awarded the Ruth First Fellowship for 2014 at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg – Ebrahim Fakir until recently headed the Political Parties and Parliamentary Programme at EISA [2010-2016]. He was formerly Senior Researcher and Analyst at the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg (2003-2009), he worked at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA) [1998-2003] at both IDASA’s Pretoria and Cape Town offices and he also worked at the first democratic Parliament of the Republic of South Africa (1996-1998) in the Legilsation amd Oversight Division. Before that, he was junior lecturer in English Literature at the then University of Durban-Westville (1994-1996) and continues to teach as a sessional lecturer in contemporary political economy at the Sustainability Institute at Stellenbosch University. He writes in the popular press as well as academic and policy journals on politics, development, and the state. He is used as a commentator and facilitator by the domestic and international media, business and other organisations. He read for a degree in English Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand; Johannesburg where he was elected on to the Students Representative Council. He was visiting fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex (2005/2006) and was a Draper Hills Summer Fellow at the Centre for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, for 2011.

Angelo Fick

Angelo Fick is the Director of Research at ASRI. Before joining ASRI, he spent nearly half a decade as a resident current affairs and news analyst in the broadcast sector in South Africa. For two decades he taught across a variety of disciplines in the Humanities and Applied Sciences in universities in South Africa and Europe. His research is informed by critical ‘race’ theory, feminism, colonial discourse theory, and post-structuralism. He has written widely on post-millennial post-apartheid South Africa’s political economy, and remains interested in broader issues of justice, freedom, and equality. Most recently he taught courses on colonial discourse theory and postcolonial culture in the Department of Visual Culture at the University of Pretoria. He has supervised graduate work on the representation of women politicians in South African media, the figuration of subjectivity in contemporary critical theory, and most recently, an analysis of the relationship between national sovereignty and supra-national organisations in the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. In May 2019 he was one of the primary analysts of the South African general elections for South Africa’s public broadcaster, the SABC. His work has appeared in the Mail & Guardian, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and English in Africa.