Date: 25/03/2010
Source: The Democratic Alliance
Title: DA: Boinamo: Speech by DA Member of Parliament in the Higher Education and Training budget vote, Parliament



Honourable Speaker, Honourable Members.

"It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared".

The fact of the matter is, SETAs have failed the Youth of this country who find themselves trapped in them, their precious time has been wasted, they have been grossly frustrated and billions of rands in State funds have gone down the drain.

This is evidenced by a huge number of young people who have received training on various SETAs, and yet the majority of them cannot get placements.

The fact that they remain unemployable despite qualifications they have attained, is indicative of the fact that they have received irrelevant training which does not appeal to the labour market of this country.

The SETAs have been in place for a number of years, grossly underperforming, and yet nobody seems to be caring about the fact that they do not produce required outcomes.

One clever man who could learn from his mistakes once said, "While I was busy here and there, the Golden Opportunity escaped".

The continuous employment of the SETAs for the purposes of the provisioning of critical and scarce skills in this country, coupled with the ongoing pretence that they produce desired outcomes, when in fact they do not, need to be rethought, if the Department of Higher Education is serious about resuscitating our ailing economy, and brighten the future of the Youth who go through such trainings.

I concur with Minister Pravin Gordhan who in his budget speech on the 17th of February 2010 said, "People want hope, and want government to lead action on jobs and services, and quality education.

We need courage and humility to do things correctly and effectively.

Successful social development is not only dependent on government".

Government should allocate more money to skills development, so that when real economic growth occurs, there should be a big enough pool of highly skilled labour force.

The prospect of prosperity is the struggle worth fighting.

It is a sad fact that with all the best resources we have in this country, we are counted amongst the worst in terms of quality performance.

About this, D.B.S.A has indicated that in the entire SADC Countries, we spend much more of our budget in education, nonetheless, the quality we get is very poor.

However, we need to take cognizance of the fact that it is not money alone that can produce quality, for many poor countries in Africa far worst than our case, produce better education than us, one glaring example is Mozambique, the poorest of the poor countries.

There is ample evidence to the effect that governance continues to plague the sector. The Auditor General has issued disclaimers against the SETA, because supporting documents and further explanations on how the funds were utilised could not be provided as required in terms of Section 55 (1) (a) of the PFMA.

The Sector problem is further aggravated by the Department's reluctance to allocate adequate grant per trainee. For example, the Department's grant for MERSETA is R25 000,00, whereas the total cost per trainee is R200 000,00, and the industry has to pay R175 000,00.

This is the reason for the Industries reluctance to train for government.

Apprenticeship should be an alternative to SETAs. It is therefore imperative to enter into partnership with big trainers such as Eskom, Telkom, Nissan and BMW so that they can provide both training and guidance on what sort of workforce should be trained.

Honourable Minister, relocate SETAs to the Industry where they will be better directed to train the youth in the relevant and marketable skills for the betterment of our economy.
South African skills development can come to fruition if apprenticeship is returned and Trade Schools work in close collaboration with industry.

The DA recommends that the SETA money should be allocated to the expansion of the FET Colleges.