Business Day
*‘Little to show’ for Seta funds — Nzimande* *Linda Ensor, Business Day, Johannesburg, 7 March 2012*Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande yesterday took his fight with the sector education and training authorities (Setas) to Parliament, saying there was "little" to show for the R37,5bn ploughed into them since 2000.
Mr Nzimande and the Setas have been in conflict since he was appointed higher education and training minister.
He says the Setas are not giving the government value for money, with the boards and management members enriching themselves.
But the Setas say he is usurping their powers and overstepping his authority.
The R37,5bn spent comes as the economy is struggling to achieve higher rates of growth, in no small part due to the dire shortage of skilled workers.
Mr Nzimande, who is trying to transform the Seta system, criticised "parasites" who had fleeced the system to make themselves "filthy rich".
He told the portfolio committee on economic development that part of the reason for the resistance by the Setas to his attempted reforms was because "this thing has become a money maker".
The R37,5bn sunk into the Setas over the past 11 years was money "going down the drain with no accounting", Mr Nzimande said. At the same time that all this wastage was taking place, there was a "ticking time bomb" of youth unemployment, he said.
Another major problem of the Seta system was the poor quality of the training provided.
The state aims to produce 10000 artisans annually by 2015, and Mr Nzimande said the indications were that the target would be surpassed. In total, 30000 trainees would be registered by 2011-12 to pursue artisan trades.
The government was also determined that state-owned enterprises would become sites of intensive training, as was the case in the apartheid era, when the principal mandate of state companies such as Sasol , Iscor, Eskom and the railways was to train artisans.
Mr Nzimande said this system unfortunately disappeared along with the increased emphasis on the commercialisation of state-owned enterprises, one of the biggest casualties of which was skills development. Most state-owned enterprises did not focus their budgets adequately on this, he said. "We need to reinstate this mandate (skills development) of state-owned enterprises."
Local companies — unlike their foreign counterparts, which understood training to be part of their core mandate and used their own money for this — were not offering training, though they complained about the lack of output from universities.
Mr Nzimande said the state should provide more learnerships and that no government tender should be issued without a commitment to provide training on the project.
He said his department would this month start on a major skills audit with the Human Sciences Research Council and other research bodies to collect data on the skills, qualifications and experience of the population, which would take many years to complete. The database would help to identify skills shortages.
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