The study deals with the management of discipline in a post corporal punishment environment in South Africa through a case study of selected primary schools in informal settlements in the North West Province. The following research questions were formulated:  What is the current thinking and practice of discipline in the primary schools in the informal settlements in the North West Province?  Which disciplinary measures and procedures are currently used in the selected primary schools?  How effective are the current management strategies of discipline used in the selected primary schools?  How can recommendations assist educators in selected primary schools to deal more effectively with disciplinary challenges? A literature review on the management of school discipline provided a conceptual framework for the empirical inquiry and indicated a lack of empirical studies on the management of discipline in primary schools in informal settlement in the North West Province. This matter is dealt with mostly frequently at high school level. An empirical study using qualitative research methods explored the management of discipline in twenty sampled primary schools in informal settlements in the North West Province, selected through purposive sampling. Data were gathered by in-depth interviews and focus groups with educators, principals and School Governing Body chairpersons. Data were categorized into themes. Findings showed that some educators still view corporal punishment as the most appropriate strategy to deal with ill-disciplined behaviour in schools; hence corporal punishment is still rife in some of the sampled schools. However, other participants agree that corporal punishment should not be accommodated as stipulated by the South African Constitution and other legal frameworks, instead effective alternative strategies should be deployed to handle ill-disciplined behaviour. Inhuman and outdated approaches should be avoided. Diverse ways of dealing with discipline which are goal oriented and foster good relations between the learner and the educator should be implemented. Sound relations in turn lead to the production of learners with the potential to become good citizens. Based on the literature and empirical inquiry, recommendations were made which advocate educator training on handling discipline in primary schools and the design of effective strategies to maintain sound discipline. / Educational Leadership and Management / D. Ed. (Education Management)

Urbanisation in South African cities is a worrying phenomenon. Cities such as the City of Johannesburg are faced with a severe housing backlog. This situation could be attributed to many issues such as lack of suitable land for housing, and the existence of informal settlements. This study has been undertaken to investigate whether the interventions implemented by City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality to eradicate informal settlements are effective in addressing challenges faced by informal settlement dwellers. In South Africa, informal settlement upgrading process is acknowledged as an effective means of eradicating informal settlements. In this regard, interventions to eradicate informal settlements require extensive research in order to have proposals for future policy interventions. This study has been also undertaken to make some recommendations that might resolve the challenges of informal settlements in the City of Johannesburg. / Public Administration & Management / M.P.A.

This is a study of the creation and evolution of state forestry within colonial Kenya in social, economic, and political terms. Spanning Kenya’s entire colonial period, it offers a chronological account of how forestry came to Kenya and grew to the extent of controlling almost two million hectares of land in the country, approximately 20 per cent of the most fertile and most populated upland (above 1,500 metres) region of central Kenya . The position of forestry within a colonial state apparatus that paradoxically sought to both ‘protect’ Africans from modernisation while exploiting them to establish Kenya as a ‘white man’s country’ is underexplored in the country’s historiography. This thesis therefore clarifies this role through an examination of the relationship between the Forest Department and its African workers, Kenya’s white settlers, and the colonial government. In essence, how each of these was engaged in a pursuit for their own idealised ‘good forest’. Kenya was the site of a strong conservationist argument for the establishment of forestry that typecast the country’s indigenous population as rapidly destroying the forests. This argument was bolstered against critics of the financial extravagance of forestry by the need to maintain and develop the forests of Kenya for the express purpose of supporting the Uganda railway. It was this argument that led the colony’s Forest Department along a path through the contradictions of colonial rule. The European settlers of Kenya are shown as being more than just a mere thorn in the side of the Forest Department, as their political power represented a very real threat to the department’s hegemony over the forests. Moreover, Kenya’s Forest Department deeply mistrusted private enterprise and constantly sought to control and limit the unsustainable exploitation of the forests. The department was seriously underfunded and understaffed until the second colonial occupation of the 1950s, a situation that resulted in a general ad hoc approach to forest policy. The department espoused the rhetoric of sustainable exploitation, but had no way of knowing whether the felling it authorised was actually sustainable, which was reflected in the underdevelopment of the sawmilling industry in Kenya. The agroforestry system, shamba, (previously unexplored in Kenya’s colonial historiography) is shown as being at the heart of forestry in Kenya and extremely significant as perhaps the most successful deployment of agroforestry by the British in colonial Africa. Shamba provided numerous opportunities to farm and receive education to landless Kikuyu in the colony, but also displayed very strong paternalistic aspects of control, with consequential African protest, as the Forest Department sought to create for itself a loyal and permanent forest workforce. Shamba was the keystone of forestry development in the 1950s, and its expansion cemented the position of forestry in Kenya as a top-down, state-centric agent of economic and social development.

Urbanisation in South African cities is a worrying phenomenon. Cities such as the City of Johannesburg are faced with a severe housing backlog. This situation could be attributed to many issues such as lack of suitable land for housing, and the existence of informal settlements. This study has been undertaken to investigate whether the interventions implemented by City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality to eradicate informal settlements are effective in addressing challenges faced by informal settlement dwellers. In South Africa, informal settlement upgrading process is acknowledged as an effective means of eradicating informal settlements. In this regard, interventions to eradicate informal settlements require extensive research in order to have proposals for future policy interventions. This study has been also undertaken to make some recommendations that might resolve the challenges of informal settlements in the City of Johannesburg. / Public Administration and Management / M.A. (Public Administration)