Skills and Vacancies: DA outlines problems and proposes solutions

Introduction

South Africa is currently in the grips of a sustained and substantial skills crisis.

Today the Democratic Alliance presents a document which outlines the consequences of this crisis – the lack of capacity which now undermines service delivery – looks at the problems facing those institutions which are designed to educate, train and equip South Africans and proposes a series of measures and solutions to address the situation, strengthen the country’s key educational institutions and help re-capacitate the public service.

The problem

Essentially, the problem is two fold:

On the one hand, as a consequence of policies including but not limited to affirmative action, the public services has a shortage of skills. The substantial number of vacancies in government departments – 40 000 vacancies at national level - coupled with the lack of proper expertise and experience means that service delivery, financial management and government’s programme of action are undermined.

The end result is that ordinary people either do not receive the services promised to them, many of which they have constitutional right to, or those services are not of the required standard.

The problem is nothing new and was identified by both President Mbeki and Finance Minister Trevor Manuel in their State of the Nation Address and Budget speech respectively, but it is now of such proportions that even members of the ANC itself have called for a moratorium to be placed on affirmative action.

On the other hand, those key institutions designed to equip South Africans with the requisite skills and training to be able to find a job and compete in a globalised economy, are failing.

These key institutions include: primary and secondary schools; tertiary education institutions; Further Education and Training Colleges; Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) as well as those private bodies that train artisans.

Due to a combination of bad management – particularly in the case of the SETAs – inadequate funding or as a result of affirmative action, which has been responsible for removing an entire pool of experience and institutional knowledge from these institutions, they are failing to provide the necessary quality or quantity of skilled graduates.

The DA’s document looks at both these elements of the problem in more detail.

The DA solutions

The DA believes that a great deal of the problem has to do with the way in which government conceptualises the country’s skills crisis.

Certainly there is a recognition that the government is simply unable to deliver properly because it lacks the capacity to turn policy into a reality. There has, in turn, been an effort to capacitate and strengthen existing educational institutions and to create new bodies – such as the SETAs - in an attempt to address the situation.

At face value, the launch of the Joint Initiative for Priority and Skills Acquisition (Jipsa) in March 2005 also represents an attempt to address the situation – although, on closer inspection, a great many of the initiatives that fall under Jipsa exist already and have simply been lumped together under the banner of a common initiative.

Nevertheless, there is a stubborn refusal by the country’s national leadership to admit that, at the very core of South Africa’s skills crisis is the policy of affirmative action. Its tenets run against the principles of merit and quality and place race, rather than individual ability as the key criterion for selection, both inside and outside government.

This then constitutes the DA’s first substantial proposal:

• While the imbalances of the past must be redressed, affirmative action has to be seriously reviewed because it remains a major hindrance to the resolution of the skills shortage. This policy cannot and must not continue for an indefinite period. There is now such a shortage of skills that all we need to do to bring about an appropriate diversity is to ensure that black people are properly educated and skilled and they will, on merit, take their place in every area of our economy.

In relation to education and training, while government is to be commended for taking the right initiatives, in broad terms, it has failed to take the appropriate action when those initiatives have failed. The SETAs are not working. This constitutes the DA’s second proposal:

• The Sector Education and Training Authorities must be completely scrapped and replaced with an employer-driven technical training and artisan apprenticeship system.

Finally, if the problem is to be addressed properly; it needs to be understood properly. The DA’s third substantial proposal is:

• Government, possibly through Statistics South Africa, should develop a database of the state’s skills needs so that it can have an adequate grasp of exactly what skills it requires and where.

(A copy of the paper is attached below.)

MEDIA ENQUIRIES:
MARK LOWE MP – 082 555 2929
KAREL MINNIE MP – 083 293 6377
MARIKE GROENEWALD – 082 952 0522

Download supporting documents (SkillsVacancies_Project_2006.doc)